Aaron VanDevender, Chief Scientist at Founders Fund, explains why he considers most current artificial intelligence marketing to be hype and rebranded statistics.
Opinion
VanDevender: Defensive data moats are oversold and mostly noise
“Most of the data sets out there or the defensibility data sets out there I think are oversold. There is this very, it's a very compelling, very tantalizing notion that, oh, I just have so much data, and nobody else has it, and therefore it must be special, but…”
Insight
VanDevender: Smaller datasets force self-driving car companies to build better algorithms
“Even if you have a much, much smaller data set than Google, you can still do a really good job of developing a self-driving car, and in fact, it almost forces you into a better position, because if you have complete knowledge of the entire street grid, you can…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
VanDevender: Autonomous trucks will improve delivery but erode rural wealth distribution
“So if you replace the trucks with self-driving trucks, you end up with a much better goods distribution system, which is positive, but the trucking system is a much worse wealth distribution system.”
Insight
VanDevender: Digital platforms increase the economic value of physical proximity
“The lesson has been that actually those digital technologies have actually made proximity more valuable. If you think about like where, where a lot of that value to people has come from, it's from companies like Lyft, like Postmates, a Craigslist, Amazon Prime…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
VanDevender: Deep learning is just linear algebra at industrial scale
“At the core of it is just this matrix multiplication operations. It's, you know, you're just sort of doing linear algebra at industrial scale. We haven't gotten to the point for most of these things or most of the things that call themselves AI, where you're r…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
VanDevender: Most 'big data' datasets are only megabytes or gigabytes
“Most of the things that are sort of big data are actually not that big. You know, you would like to, you'd like to think of these petabytes and exabytes floating around there and coming up with really amazing insights that could never have been seen. But a lot…”