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Comment by seizethecheese | Hacker News Reader

The companies that have dominated each new wave of computing have not always been the incumbents. Is building an AI more capital-intensive than Operating Systems or PC hardware? It's feasible that if a powerful AI is created that it will be done on a cloud server by a small team of people.

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Your observation is true, your conclusion isn't necessarily. AI is different from other areas of computing in that data matters far more than code does. Current legal practice is that the data is owned by the organization that collected it, which means that to collect data on millions of users to train behavioral models, you need to have millions of users. If you have millions of users, you're probably a pretty big company.

My conclusion is that it's feasible, so by definition not necessarily true. An AI could be bootstrapped by scraping data, or using any number of large datasets out there. This isn't to say that large corporation don't have advantages.

That depends to a large extent on what skill you want your AI to be able to learn.

Many applications from recommender systems, to market analysis to drug discovery probably require large datasets of the sort that can only be collected by a large business.

But if you want to learn control polices for robotic agents that navigate the physical world, driving cars, stocking shelves, etc. then I think the physical world is presenting everyone with approximately the same data set regardless of company size.

Doesn't matter too much. They will invariably get bought out by whoever is waving a large cheque in their face. All the "deep learning" stuff could have easily spun out startups from academia but look at what has happened instead. Its especially rare these days cause all the big powerhouses(Goog/FB/MS/Amazon/Apple) are highly insecure about when they are going to get disrupted overnight. And since they are all sitting on mountains of cash they can afford to throw highly ridiculous amounts at ppl.

There are very few examples where it doesn't happen. I can only think of Torvalds\Linux and Wikipedia.

1) Two of those companies (FB/Goog) could easily have been bought by the megaliths of their time, but their founders' vision and control prevented it. I don't see what is so much different about these times that would prevent a founder from doing the same. Indeed, not so long ago Drew Houston did the same (though it seems the gamble is not so certain to pay off for him)

2. Startup or established company, it doesn't matter so much who does the displacing as much as who is getting displaced: either way, the argument contends that vast swathes of the middle class will be adversely affected.

Good point. I guess the larger pt here is that, it would be nice to see pressure on the megaliths\holdouts to let go of their winner take all inclinations and go more the Torvalds\Jimmy Wales route. So that the advances benefit the many rather than the few.

Much better articulated here by Doug Rushkoff that I ever will be able too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass

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