Algorithmia raises $10.5M Series A round led by Google’s new AI fund | Hacker News Reader

Algorithmia raises $10.5M Series A round led by Google’s new AI fund

techcrunch.com

83 pointsjanober20 comments

  MACHINE TRANSLATION Bounty $100

OK.

Having bounties at all is above average for a seed-stage startup with 13 people.

Most people that are successful here are surely doing it for personal joy and satisfaction, not the money.

I don't think these are bounties offered by the company. They look user driven. Many are hilariously undervalued with very poor specifications making them pretty much worthless (i.e. the example above).

The foundations of social sites, even pseudo-anonymous ones, are built on signaling and skinner boxing with imaginary currency[1]. The prestige from being awarded something, anything, from challenging competition at a community with strong participants is not without value. Quantopian successfully does something similar with HFT, although part of their shtick is accessible data and tooling.

[1] Example: "/u/joebob has a lot of karma/likes/retweets, he must have generated a lot of content deemed valuable by this community to earn that.../u/joebob is actually Joseph Smith, who got a got a great job/exit/customer after becoming internet famous in this forum...I, too, will benefit if I collect a lot of that sweet, sweet karma...I don't think I'll derive as much benefit as /u/joesmith, but getting upvoted for articulating my thoughts is really fun."

This is very much inline with the news that Google (Cloud) acquired Kaggle, that shows Google's interest in developing ML/AI products and deploy them and also offer AI as a Service for those who don't have AI background!

Yep! I'm really excited to see the future of AI on the cloud. I have a feeling it will have the same effect as AWS had to the cloud computing market: make it possible for smaller companies/teams to quickly spin up AI based products and provide better services to consumers.

Have to admit I love the name. Congrats to the team. Hopefully they can employ the money wisely.

The logo is great too!

Reminds me of http://www.wolfram.com/language

Funny you said that because as soon as I read the article on Algorithmia, I started to see ads for Woldfram, including getting their free eBook on ML.

So is it like Tensorflow-as-a-servce?

Not to rain on Algo's parade, but check this out if you're looking for tensor as a service - https://www.floydhub.com

I am not affiliated with those guys in any way, but I just really liked their idea.

Yep, Generic and ML algorithms as a service in the form of APIs, say you have an app and wants image classification in it. Why take the pain of building your own model and then porting it to your app? Simply use this API!

Yep, Generic and ML algorithms as a service in the form of APIs, say you have an app and it wants image classification in it. Why take the pain of building your own model and then porting it to your app? Simply use this API!

AWS already has an image recognition API.

Ah at first I thought this meant google had a fund whose investment choices were being completely controlled by an AI. That would have made for a much more interesting story, oh well.

There was a story on NumerAI just yesterday. Not acquired by Google yet, but basically the same thing.

"Algorithmia" sounds like a congenital AI disease.

Or to have a heart attack via algorithm

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