This post explores the potential and the hype around artificial intelligence and what you need to know before proceeding to incorporate into your business strategy

1. Potential and Confusion Around Artificial Intelligence
Although artificial intelligence is expected to be the next big thing, it is clearly underutilized at
the moment. Artificial intelligence has become the most hyped sector in technology, with
national press reporting on its dramatic potential. Large corporations and investors are trying
to get into the space. Many start-ups take pains to emphasize their utilization of “machine
learning” in their pitches, however trivial.
In the race for AI, companies like Google, Twitter, Intel, Apple and Salesforce are in a rush to
grab artificial intelligence startups. Nearly 140 private companies working to advance artificial
intelligence technologies have been acquired since 2011, with over 40 acquisitions taking place
in 2016 alone. It is now common for well-informed AI researchers to create a company purely
to be acquired, knowing the right buzzwords will attract VCs, and that eventually a corporation
will pay for the team. Top machine learning researchers have become the most prized
commodity. The technology press celebrates companies with no product, contributing no novel
technology, at over-inflated valuations.

2. One recent example of the AI hype took place at the annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence
and neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) held in Barcelona in December 2016. Here is
an amusing incident that was devised and put into action by AI leaders.
Rocket AI is the Next Generation of Applied AI
This story was covered by Medium, and right as the conference was happening, the
www.rocketai.org website was created.
Please note that this is not just AI, but the next generation of AI. The idea of the product is
described below.

3. The Temporally Recurrent Optimal Learning™ approach (abbreviated as “TROL(L)”), which was
not yet known to science, was actively promoted on Twitter by conference participants. Within
several hours, this resulted in five large companies contacting the project’s authors with
investment offers. The value of the “project” was estimated at tens of millions of dollars.
Email RSVPs to the party: 316
People who emailed in their Resume: 46
Large name brand companies who contacted RocketAI about investing: 5
Media: Twitter, Facebook, HackerNews, Reddit, Medium, Quora etc..
Time Planning: <8 hours
Money Spent: $79 on the domain, $417 on alcohol and snacks (+ police fine)
For reference NIPS sponsorship starts at $10K
Estimated value of Rocket AI: in the tens of millions of dollars
The danger of hype is that it diverts attention away from researchers who build the tools and
theories that advance the field or the real companies trying to solve problems with machine
learning optimization. AI is certainly at peak hype and as in the case of #RocketAI, some have
begun to humor it. Unless more people who are doing significant and important work in the
area of AI begin to educate the capital markets, fight for technical integrity, the bubble will
burst and none of the real companies who are doing exciting work in AI will never be known.
We should all continue to educate ourselves on AI and understand the hype from actual results.
There are many exciting things happening in this space and great companies doing meaningful
work should be getting our attention.
Ruth Smith Director of Business Development WPC Healthcare 615-594-9130
rsmith@wpchealthcare.com #Artificialintelligence #AI #machinelearning #rocketai