Rocket AI: 2016’s Most Notorious AI Launch and the Problem with AI Hype – The Mission
Article by Riva-Melissa Tez lays out the issues of hype with Artificial Intelligence and startups, and includes an account of how a fake startup business became a meme:
… The M&A market for AI in 2015 saw 33 acquisitions, of which the average team size was seven. It’s now common for savvy AI researchers to create a company purely to be acquired, knowing that the right buzzwords will attract VCs, and that eventually a corporation will pay for the team. Top machine learning researchers have become the most coveted of all the Pokémon. The tech press celebrates companies with no product, contributing no novel technology, at over-inflated valuations …
… Turns out anyone can make a multi-million dollar company in 30 minutes … in a spanish mansion found on AirBnB and a website editor. ‘Temporally Recurrent Optimal Learning’ is a combination of buzzwords we put together to spell out TROL(L) that were conjured up over breakfast. If we hadn’t put significant effort into making sure people realized it was a joke, Rocket AI would be in the press right now.
Rocket AI: 2016’s Most Notorious AI Launch and the Problem with AI Hype – The Mission