No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money -- Samuel Johnson
OMG! The Wall Street Journal says AI is coming for our jobs! 🙀 🙀 🙀 Uh-huh. Let’s unpack this. The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily, including job cuts at Google, Duolingo, and UPS in recent weeks. Google is hiring more people for AI development and cutting in other areas. AI isn’t replacing […]
Planning for the Spring garden begins in September. The local garden markets replenish their stocks of Spring bulbs, and the mail-order vendors send catalogs. Order early before the best items sell out. Last year, I planted hundreds of early crocuses, figuring they would bloom around my son’s birthday. Well, bloom they did – and not […]
Last week, I wrote about the whales-and-minnows pattern in 2023 AI venture funding. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is the same content in a chart. Repeating the key points: Ten startups landed half of all the middle and late-stage AI venture funding: Its tempting to believe that VCs only invested in […]
In 2021, venture funding for AI startups peaked at a little more than $70 billion. Overall funding declined in 2022, and again in 2023. AI is one of the most attractive sectors for VCs, but AI startups raised only about $48 billion in 2023. That’s a 31% decline from the peak. The aggregate numbers mask […]
Nobody believes that every AI project succeeds. Just ask MD Anderson. Anderson blew $60 million on a Watson project before pulling the plug. That project was a clown show. A report published by University of Texas auditors found that project leadership: Did not use proper contracting and procurement procedures Failed to follow IT Governance processes […]
Break rules. You may think I don’t know the difference between good and well, and this blog will be a train wreck. Or you think the headline is a joke, and this blog will be fun to read. Either way, you’re still reading, and that proves my point. Conventional style and predictable prose will bore […]
A little over a year ago, on February 17, 2017, the Houston Chronicle reported that the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center had halted an AI project for cancer diagnostics. The story revealed that MD Anderson spent $62 million over four years to build a system called the Oncology Expert Advisor (OEA), based on IBM Watson. […]
Adapted from a post originally published on the Cloudera VISION Blog. If your organization collects data about citizens of the European Union (EU), you probably already know about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR defines and strengthens data protection for consumers and harmonizes data security rules within the EU. The European Parliament approved the […]
At the 2016 Spark Summit, Gartner Research Director Nick Heudecker asked: Is Spark the Future of Data Analysis? It’s an interesting question, and it requires a little parsing. Nobody believes that Spark alone is the future of data analysis, even its most ardent proponents. A better way to frame the question: Does Spark have a role […]
This is the fourth installment in a four-part review of 2016 in machine learning and deep learning. — Part One covered Top Trends in the field, including concerns about bias, interpretability, deep learning’s explosive growth, the democratization of supercomputing, and the emergence of cloud machine learning platforms. — Part Two surveyed significant developments in Open Source machine learning…