The AI Boom: is it Legit, or Just Hype?

Last summer, NYU Tandon and ff Venture Capital announced the launch of their jointly run artificial intelligence incubator, AI NexusLab. The incubator is currently accepting applications for its next program, which begins in July. The deadline to apply is May 3.The incubator’s inaugural class of five startups took to the stage this week at NYU as part of the AI Summit. You can read about them here. Funding for AI has swelled in the past few years: $14.9 billion since 2012. The momentum has continued into this year, with the first quarter of 2017 bringing in the most funding for AI since CB Insights began tracking it.Several speakers at the summit suggested that there are a few caveats to all the hype. Among them was NYU professor Gary Marcus, who pointed to some shortcomings of artificial intelligence, namely, that it is reliant on data from the past, but largely unable to make inferences about the future.Building on this, keynote speaker Yann LeCun, NYU professor and Facebook’s director of AI research was more optimistic. He outlined an approach known as adversarial training, in which one AI system makes a range of predictions and another trains it to distinguish plausible predictions from implausible ones. The Holy Grail for AI, he said, is known as "unsupervised learning," in which computers can make predictions based on an understanding of the world, but he admitted that this is still some years away.