💡AI & the word

The ascendance of natural language processing

In 2012, Alex Krishevsky’s AlexNet set a new benchmark for machine vision in the now-defunct ImageNet competition. A consequence of this technical breakthrough was a realisation that for certain types of tasks, machine vision and speech recognition, such neural networks could get us to “good enough performance.” It industrialised speech and image recognition.

The next few years will be about natural language. Here is how it might play out.

Worth a thousand

A boom in machine vision capabilities triggered the AI wave of startup formation, venture capital investment, corporate spending and newspaper headlines.

The amount of VC funding in AI pure-plays increased 10-fold between 2010 and 2014 to $300 million a year. By 2018, an estimated $23 billion was invested by VC firms into AI startups (although the definition had become broader, individual funding rounds regularly exceed $250 million).

This technical trigger sat on a set of infrastructure that enabled it to spark, but also to spread.…