Spot on. Question is if the entire 'AI' discussion is fair or also hyped by marketing departments. Is AlphaGo really AI, or is it an algorithm focussed on finding the best move to win at the game of GO. When in game 4, people were talking about 'it making a mistake', was it really a mistake. Did it choose the wrong move or did it simply make the move that the algorithm had put forth.
I think they're hinting that the techniques used in AlphaGO are a promising path towards general AI. AlphaGo has NNs trained on Go boards, but champion go players will also have parts of their brain dedicated to their Go intuition that don't transfer to investment banking or playing golf. However the techniques of reinforcement learning can be used to tackle other problems... so we hope.
Also this reminded me of a comment I read last week: "Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that"
Pretty amazing. The mathmetical structure in islamic art is really inspiring. Curious to see what types of applications these materials could be used for. Any thoughts?
It seems history is repeating itself. This VR hype is going to be killed by lack of business innovation. We've seen this exact scenario with 3D printers. Awesome tech, but with a pricetag that has kept those devices from going mainstream. With VR, the guys are delivering innovative tech, but with the oldschool business model, trying to make money on the hardware. Sony would lead the game if they would lose money, offering a simple to use VR headset for $99 -$199, dominating the market and then make money on games and apps.
What sort of VR headset do you expect for $99? At that price, you get Cardboard and Gear, at best, and those have underwhelmed the market and people who have tried them & Vive/Rift/PS.
The question is: why not lose money on the hardware, to accelerate distribution and put an awesome device in people's hands and then make money on software. So my suggestion would be to sell the $399 devixe for $99. Not push out something crappy
Currently they are the cheapest, and it's easier to reduce prices than to increase them, so maybe they are saving that for later, especially when they learn more about game sales and the business ?
I totally agree that a different business model with low-priced devices might be needed for consumer gamer VR to take off any time soon.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw adoption of expensive VR/AR devices for industrial/enterprise applications in a much bigger way long before consumer stuff takes off. In a lot of ways gaming us a bad place to introduce VR - immersion doesn't necessarily make for a "better" gaming experience once the novelty fades, motion and speed and high quality graphics are hard to deal with, and buyers are fairly price-sensitive. 3D printing is doing relatively well in industrial usage, despite the consumer hype having faded.
The last couple of years, everytime someone would ask the cliché 'is there a bubble?' Question to a VC, they all waved it away. The questions were legit because of the insane valuations that have been thrown around. How often in History have companies like MagicLeap for example, got to billion+ valuation before ever launching a product. Evernote is a legit business, yes but same story. Blown up by investors. The bubble is cracking.
It's almost entirely irrelevant to the rest of the economy. That is not an exaggeration.
During the dotcom bubble crash, Cisco all by itself destroyed more market cap from top to bottom than the entire unicorn bubble is worth combined (and that's before inflation adjusting for 15 years).
This current tiny mess? It's hardly even a single line sideshow to the rest of the US or global economy, what's going on in China, the commodity markets, negative interest rates in Europe or Japan, etc. A ~1% value drop in just the US residential housing market is worth as much as every unicorn combined.
I don't understand why magic leap has so much investment with nothing to show. Just in general I don't see how it could be worth that much. It's cool in a nerd way but doesn't seem to have real value. Like how is this going to make a meaningful impact on the world?
Their product comes out in 11 days. I guess the bull case is people buy the thing. They are being secretive but here's Scoble and others being upbeat in their promo vid https://youtu.be/XxwrXacMe6Y?t=25s
Didn't know they're coming out with something so soon. I guess we can all judge then. lol
I guess still to me virtual reality glasses seems like a very cool gimmick. If its a general purpose consumer product its success would be really dependent on a "killer app" and affordability. I guess we'll see... thats a lot of money invested.
