Perspectives on AI

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MIT’s "The Download" recently reported that China’s artificial intelligence startups scored more funding that America’s last year.

Of $15.2 billion invested globally in 2017 in AI, 48 percent went to China and 38 percent to America. That’s the first time China’s AI startups surpassed those in the U.S. in terms of funding.

But The Download also observes competition continues to be fierce across the board. AI startup investment rose 141 percent in 2017, and 1,100 new AI startups appeared last year.

The R&D and overall AI market may, in fact, be moving too fast.

In a separate report from Science Magazine, an analysis revealed that AI may be grappling with a replication crisis when it comes to research:

AI researchers have found it difficult to reproduce many key results, and that is leading to a new conscientiousness about research methods and publication protocols….The most basic problem is that researchers often don’t share their source code. At the AAAI meeting, Odd Erik Gundersen, a computer scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, reported the results of a survey of 400 algorithms presented in papers at two top AI conferences in the past few years. He found that only 6% of the presenters shared the algorithm’s code. Only a third shared the data they tested their algorithms on, and just half shared "pseudocode"—a limited summary of an algorithm. (In many cases, code is also absent from AI papers published in journals, including Science and Nature.)

Why are researchers holding back?

The article argues researchers believe some code may be a work in progress, or could be owned by a company or held tightly by a researcher eager to stay ahead of the competition.

IBM Research offered some assistance a the recent AAAI meeting, a tool for recreating unpublished source code automatically. Itself a neural network, it scans an AI research paper looking for a chart or diagram describing a neural net, parses those data into layers and connections, and generates the network in new code.

At this week’s Index | San Francisco conference, on Wednesday at 9 AM PST, New York Times journalist and author John Markoff will be hosting a session entitled "Perspectives on AI." You can register to watch the livestream here.

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