Roughly speaking, yes, I’d grant some % error, and I assume most would be cofounders, or one of the first researchers or engineers.
Back then people literally made 1-niche image recognition startups that work.
I mean, even now there are so many niches for ML where a team of rather mediocre thinkers (compared to, say, the guys at deep mind) can get millions in seed funding with basically 0 revenue and very agressive burn, by just proving very abstractly they can solve one problem or another nobody else is solving.
I’m not sure what the deluge of investment and contracts was like in 2008, but basically everyone publishing stuff about convolutions on GPUs is a millionaire now.
It’s obviously east to “understand that it was the right direction”… With the benefit of hindsight. Much like now everyone “understands” transformers are the future of NLP.
But in general the field of “AI” has very few real visionaries that by luck or skill bring about progress, and even being able to spot said visionaries and get on the bandwagon early enough is a way to get influential and wealthy beyond belief.
I don’t claim I’m among those visionaries, nor that I found a correct band wagon. But some people obviously do, since the same guys are implicated in an awful lot of industry shifting orgs and research projects.
I’m not saying you should only listen to those guys, but for laying out a groundwork, forming mental models on the subject, and distilling facts from media fiction, those are the people you should listen to.
Roughly speaking, yes, I’d grant some % error, and I assume most would be cofounders, or one of the first researchers or engineers.
Back then people literally made 1-niche image recognition startups that work.
I mean, even now there are so many niches for ML where a team of rather mediocre thinkers (compared to, say, the guys at deep mind) can get millions in seed funding with basically 0 revenue and very agressive burn, by just proving very abstractly they can solve one problem or another nobody else is solving.
I’m not sure what the deluge of investment and contracts was like in 2008, but basically everyone publishing stuff about convolutions on GPUs is a millionaire now.
It’s obviously east to “understand that it was the right direction”… With the benefit of hindsight. Much like now everyone “understands” transformers are the future of NLP.
But in general the field of “AI” has very few real visionaries that by luck or skill bring about progress, and even being able to spot said visionaries and get on the bandwagon early enough is a way to get influential and wealthy beyond belief.
I don’t claim I’m among those visionaries, nor that I found a correct band wagon. But some people obviously do, since the same guys are implicated in an awful lot of industry shifting orgs and research projects.
I’m not saying you should only listen to those guys, but for laying out a groundwork, forming mental models on the subject, and distilling facts from media fiction, those are the people you should listen to.