AI rush - here's what it looks like from the inside

There are so many exciting, scary, and new things to be found in this essay on AI (HT to Seth Godin for linking to this today) - which seems to have been originally published as an internal piece for Google.

You'll find your own ways to interpret this. Here are a few things I'm thinking about:

• It's much easier and more affordable to make a change in AI than most people thought, even a few months ago
• The big players, and the wannabe get-rich-quick propositions, are just as well positioned as one person in one afternoon with one good laptop, and the clued-in ones seem to know it
• Open source is running circles around proprietary solutions right now, and paid-for offerings are very soon not going to be able to catch up on quality or speed

The endgame for this might be that the only big, proprietary, financially successful players that remain in the AI game are the ones who know how to work with the communities who use and improve their models. If you're trying to closely guard your precious secrets to make more profits, you're likely to fail both at the guarding and the profiting part.

Even if only a small fraction of the views from the essay is valid / reasonable, it still paints a gold-rush-like picture. And all this, before anyone even considers the landscape and the actual ecosystems you're rushing over - the rights of those whose data is used for training purposes - the right to be excluded from the process - and before the legal folks with their frameworks even appear on the horizon (and make no mistake, they're coming).

Like I said, new, scary, and exciting.