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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

While deep learning and related technologies are exciting and extremely powerful, they have not yet proven that they will achieve the "final human technology" status that you are proposing. We may be centuries away from that, and at this point trying to speculate is foolish. However, even if they don't live up to those lofty outlandish prospects, they will still prove very valuable and useful.

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What is "proven" to you? I mean, the tech displayed today is basically unmatched by most humans. Curating the best shots in Google Photos, all the integration with Google Home, Lens that can identify almost any object in meat space... the list goes on and on. It is not going to regress somehow... I mean, it is probably exponentially increasing in power by the day.

There is no AI competition against a company that has Tensor Processing Units among the absolutely incomprehensible data store that Google has amassed.... Especially if you are not some world class mathematician or computer scientist. The best you can hope for is to be acquired if you are in the ML/AI space as a stand-alone entity. In most cases they can probably safely ignore the bulk of AI startups.

That's still only computer vision and speech recognition. Google still does piss-poor at answering your questions using snippets.

It seems like picking the best photos, at least, is a pretty forgiving task. It's subjective, and I expect people will accept any set of pretty good shots.

Also, those TPU's are available for rent.

Definitely forgiving, but I think you are missing the point. The fact is, Google owns the whole process from top to bottom.

Nice that TPU's are available for rent, but to what end? If I run something truly innovative on their hardware (TPU), with their software platform(Tensor)...is that actually innovation, will they have the means to just copy it? How do I compete with that?

Would you say the same thing of Go or Chrome? These are tools anyone can use. Building something higher in the stack isn't cheating, it's just reuse. (Snapchat is built on Google Cloud, for example.)

As always you want to be careful about dependencies, but that doesn't mean rewriting everything.

Yes, I would, as there is no way for me to truly compete with Google if I am using their tools. The premise is so flawed that I have trouble even formulating possible counter arguments you may suggest.

I use chrome and little snitch is always telling on it. It calls home so much that I have just given up in order to have a decent experience and gave it full connection rights. I don't know how much of the browser Chrome owns, but I guess it is not insignificant. That is a lot of data that I will never have access to... let alone for my family nor on at Google scale.

Netflix uses AWS and competes with Amazon Prime... I get it. I do think that no one knows the whole story.

Getting back to OP... it has to be damn tiring/frustrating to even contemplate competing in AI/ML space with these big mega corps. I simply would not, that ship has sailed.

That's the age old question - what if Facebook copies what you did, in a week? Like they did with Twitter or Snapchat?

By the time they copy you, you're already big. I don't really see the problem as long as the tech companies don't hoard the information and spread the knowledge - which they are doing with initiatives like OpenAI and many more.

The big question is, what happens when they invent AI that builds its own programs and exponentially accelerates? Who needs startups at all then?

Bull. Instagram is eating Snapchat for lunch right now, for starters. Twitter is going down in flames soon enough as well. There is a massive consolidation taking place in social, and I think with tech in general. We are at a point where automation, AI/ML and resources are the next battle grounds. Sure there will be wins here and there, but like the app stores in 2014... the gold rush looks like it's over.

So in your opinion having accurate visual recognition/identification is the final human technology? We can stop now?

No, you didn't read what I wrote: It [Google AI efforts] are not going to regress somehow... I mean, it is probably exponentially increasing in power by the day.

They not only have custom silicon (TPU), they have the software too. Do you have extraordinary insight|foresight|genius or have you discovered/developed a major breakthrough in AI/ML? If not, good luck competing with these companies. It is a resource problem at this stage, as consolidation happened and there is no going back.

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