Ideas to monetize new artifical intelligence

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79232

by marcus • 19 years ago

27 102 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've developed a new machine learning algorithm that understands the relationship between its inputs better and outperforms existing algorithms on almost every test I've done, and I'm looking for new ideas as to how to monetize it. Already working on trading commodities with it, which is progressing but still hasn't reached the point where its a money making scheme. Also working on some CAD (computer assisted diagnosis) applications.

Any ideas?

pixcavator5• 19 years ago

How about _proving_ that the algorithm works first. Prove it on something simple and verifiable like symbolic addition http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75439. Here I go again with my own agenda, sorry...

marcus28• 19 years ago

This is a classic example of the saying "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" To a guy with a spam filter, everything looks like mail to be filtered. (it was a cool & very interesting experiment non the less )

Symbolic addition is exactly the wrong kind of problem for this algorithm as the symbols don't have any relationships with each other which is exactly the insight this algorithm adds, and which almost every other dataset has.

I've proven that the algorithm works to my complete satisfaction. I've tested it almost every dataset in UCI machine learning repository and it outperforms the best published results on almost all of them. I've tested it on the data from the KDD 2006 cup a contest in the KDD conference whose goal was to identify Pulmonary Embolism based on data generated from CT scans and it out scored the cup winners by a 50% margin.

I know the algorithm works, I am just not sure how to monetize it...

pixcavator5• 19 years ago

>Symbolic addition is exactly the wrong kind of problem for this algorithm as the symbols don't have any relationships with each other...

That was my thinkng exactly. I am glad it is confirmed by an expert...

sammyo• 19 years ago

Oil futures?

Retric• 19 years ago

Patent and publish it. CAD is not limited by the algorithm so much as a lack new problems. However, if you can generate a little buzz you can become a consultant / start a consultant company.

PS: Many machine learning systems can trade off accuracy for efficiency so you might look into increasing efficiency vs. accuracy for some existing application.

marcus28• 19 years ago

Thought about patenting it, but the entire idea of a patent is the ability to enforce a monopoly. I will never be able to inspect the insides of any commercial AI in the field, so as to allege an infringement on my patent.

ivankirigin5• 19 years ago

Do not do this. Patents are not good protection, and a good enough algorithm is much better kept a secret.

tx• 19 years ago

This is what's wrong with our patent system. Imagine if all those great minds who came up with theorems you had to learn in 4-6 years of college decided to patent them.

Math should not be patentable. It's a crime.

marcus28• 19 years ago

Actually most of them have been dead for a long time so it wouldn't really matter, but I agree with you some things should not be patentable.

On the other hand imagine a world without patents and you'd probably get a world fill with trade secrets and that is even worse, at least a patent guarantees that the idea will pass to the public domain after a certain period. Would the world benefit if technology was segmented and kept secret like the coca-cola formula?

But seriously that is a great discussion for different thread.

rms2• 19 years ago

At least patents are only 20 years, copyright is forever.

bkmrkr2• 19 years ago

Yeh, do you have aim or any other way to contact you?

bkmrkr2• 19 years ago

You could also email me at bkmrkr at yahoo.com

yubrew3• 19 years ago

I am a tech commercialization consultant for some of the crazy stuff that comes out of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Scientists and engineers make all this cool stuff, but they don't really know what to do with it, and how to package and sell it. That's where I come in.

E-mail me and maybe we can figure out what it would be good for. I'm thinking you should patent the technology, show proof of concept comparison tests, and shop application specific licenses around.

jbf2• 19 years ago

Netflix challenge? No recurring revenue, but, hey, a million dollars. You'll have to disclose the algorithm to accept the prize.

marcus28• 19 years ago

Thats the problem disclosing the algorithm is something I'd rather avoid. I don't mind sharing it with a company for a licensing fee as long as I don't have to public domain it.

jbf2• 19 years ago

I just glanced at the rules. I didn't see anything about disclosing outside of Netflix, but you do have to license winning algorithms to them. The license appears to grant them the right to make & sell products based on the algorithm.

Kaizyn• 19 years ago

Then don't disclose the algorithm or collect the $1 million. If your algorithm really is good, demonstrate it by 'winning the prize', but rather than claiming the money and turning your algorithm over to Netflix sell it to someone.

You're really wasting your time with the stock market though. Technical analysis is just silly.

aston• 19 years ago

Here's a start: http://www.netflixprize.com

If you've got awesome prediction technology, that's an easy $50k, and maybe an easy $1 million.

kkim• 19 years ago

If it doesn't make money trading, then it isn't better than existing algorithms, because that's what you're competing against.

marcus28• 19 years ago

There are probably some AIs making money out there but they try to beat the market by examining a variety of commodities at once and discovering their interdependencies faster and better than humans can. I have far more hubris, I'm trying to make it work with pure technical analysis on a single commodity. Which is a bit harder.

fauigerzigerk• 19 years ago

You could try to find a good pilot customer who has valuable data and is willing to work with you to adapt the algorithm to their particular problem. What you want as an outcome is a story like this: "Math Whizzes Turbocharge An Online Retailer's Sales" (http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=2...)

marcus28• 19 years ago

Working with a medical company to improve the results of their CAD software. After it works (hopefully :) ) that can be a great way to drive the next client.

jkush2• 19 years ago

I'd love to have a virtual clone of myself, i.e. something that has learned to think like me. I would treat it as a virtual assistant. I'd like it to prioritize and schedule my work. Tell me when it's time to call it quits or when I need to be doing something else.

Essentially, it'd be the virtual embodiment of my conscience.

Going along those lines, let's say you're a brilliant CEO or hacker. You could license copies of your wisdom to others who need guidance.

neilc5• 19 years ago

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=40064

Talks about some similar ideas -- applying ML techniques to make information workers more productive. Cool stuff.

johnrob• 19 years ago

Build a public web API to use your technology for a fee. Make it dead simple to incorporate AI into any application.

marcus28• 19 years ago

Thats an awesome idea. Integration is pretty simple, as you can use it almost as a drop in replacement for a backprop neural network.

zyroth5• 19 years ago

Uhm? The latency as a public api will render it useless for most applications.

henning2• 19 years ago

It's tempting to be a tool vendor, but unfortunately there are many established tool people. You don't even know the names, most likely, of all the little neural network toolkit companies that flopped in the early-mid 90s.

It's better to use a new technology to create a complete solution for people.

marcus28• 19 years ago

The problem with building a complete solution is that it usually requires a lot of investment and domain specific knowledge. Having a better algorithm offsets a lot of it but I am not sure I could write a better CAD (computer assisted diagnosis) software on my own in a reasonable time frame that will outperform the market leaders even if using their data I can improve their results by 50%.

There is just too much science involved in feature selection etc...

ivankirigin5• 19 years ago

Investing. Look to Machine Insight in Cambridge, and the work they've done. They're trying to train an AI system to be Warren Buffet in a box. You don't hear much about this trend, because people are making way too much money to talk about it openly.

I'll put it this way: if you can consistently beat the market by a few percentage points, you can be a billionaire.

pixcavator5• 19 years ago

>...people are making way too much money to talk about it openly.

Or maybe people are _wasting_ way too much money to talk about it openly.

ivankirigin5• 19 years ago

Do you have any information at all to base your comment on?

zyroth5• 19 years ago

I don't believe you.

marcus28• 19 years ago

Challenge me. Select a dataset send me the training data and I'll send you my results so you can verify it...

I don't mind being tested.

jwp2• 19 years ago

What's your score on the Netflix Prize quiz?

cstejerean• 19 years ago

I'd like to see the result of your algorithm on the Netflix challenge as well.

lucindo• 19 years ago

You can tell us your results with KDD data sets: http://kdd.ics.uci.edu/

zyroth5• 19 years ago

There are a lot of different fields in ML. I don't believe that you have an algorithm that beats all algorithms out there , even if those are specialized on a specific setting.

jsb• 19 years ago

I would use it in productivity software.

The users would input their to do list and the AI would suggest the best next task for them to complete. You could have the user input some information about their lifestyle - married? family? when do they work? etc - and the AI would take into consideration these factors when determining the next best task.

euccastro• 19 years ago

Very knowledge intensive, isn't it? Sounds as hard as passing the Turing test, to me.

paul• 19 years ago

Ad targeting.

marcus28• 19 years ago

Very interesting idea, do you have any idea where I can get a dataset for it? I'd rather test it before I start pouring time & money to building an ad network first

Hexayurt• 19 years ago

License it to game dev companies to provide better opponent AI.

marcus28• 19 years ago

I have no idea how game AIs work, I thought most of it was totally scripted to just appear intelligent. I'll need to research the field a bit.

curi• 19 years ago

Some is scripted. They do a variety of other things too. For example, path finding gets its own algorithm. And they have algorithms for getting multiple guys to move around in formation. Sometimes there is some type of system with goals (get 1000 wood, get an 80 food army, kill X base, etc) and then it picks things to achieve those goals (build more wood harvesters, build more units, attack). sometimes they use "learning" algorithms where they tweak parameters by running the AI repeatedly and seeing which does better, and they can use games with a human player to do that too (if it wins too badly, have it aim less precisely). And lots of other one-off things.

zach• 19 years ago

Forget it. Modern game AI is 90% specialization to the problem domain and 10% application of algorithms. That's the breakdown of how much work is involved as well as the breakdown of what contributes to a "good" game AI.

When it comes to what middleware game AI developers want, they're far more interested in a framework that helps them organize all the domain specialization rather than improved algorithms. And game middleware is an increasingly well-trodden and difficult market. Again, forget it.

hhm4• 19 years ago

Who are you? Maybe you can't speak a lot about your discovering, but you can at least tell what your name is and how you got to this?

marcus28• 19 years ago

My name is Avi Marcus, I am a 29 year old, semi retired (sold my previous startup ) hacker from Israel. Started programming at 8, started CS in college when I was 13. Flunked out because I was bored at 15. Always been interested in artificial intelligence, but a year and a half ago I read a book on the way the human brain works and suddenly I had a vision of something programmers missed in all of the machine learning algorithms they built, which is a basic part of the human cognitive process, and I suddenly understood how to add it to existing algorithms.

Anything else?

jkush2• 19 years ago

We'll all look like fools if we cry "bullshit" and you happen to be right. But we'd look like even bigger fools if we just took your word for it.

hhm4• 19 years ago

Thank you for your answer. I was curious about it, and I'm sure this info would be useful for anyone interested in contacting you.

robg2• 19 years ago

Going out and winning the Netflix prize and/or KDD and refusing to release your code would bring you the best tests (and biggest paying customers) because of the publicity. I actually can't think of a better and faster way of building a business around machine learning. Beat the best teams in the world as an individual and you won't have to worry about how to make money any more.

oPerrin• 19 years ago

Sounds like you read: "On Intelligence" - if so, cool, if not do so. Then do this:

break CAPTCHA

There are plenty of people who will pay for that, and a successful implementation of Hawkins/George system will be able to do so.

pcowans• 19 years ago

Can you give any specific examples (references to academic papers) you've already tested it on and shown an improvement - no need to give details if you don't feel you can, but it would be interesting to know which tests you've done and against which existing algorithms.

marcus28• 19 years ago

KDD 2006 cup http://www.cs.unm.edu/kdd_cup_2006

My algorithm scored 2.043 19 on tasks 1 & 2 Top 3 places 1: 1.35 1.28 1.27 Top 3 places 2: 13.58 13.56 13.44 Note these scores represent 5 different teams.

greendestiny2• 19 years ago

No doubt the siemens medical solutions people would be interested in talking with you further. The KDD 2006 training and results data have now been released, so its not really a great demonstration.

imsteve• 19 years ago

Nigerian scamming. Oh wait, you want something ethical?:)

mrtron• 19 years ago

Dating site matching?

There are a zillion ways to monetize it. The real question is can you successfully do so. What about selling an appliance similar to google search, but instead is your predictive technology. Make a public api for people to test it, and then sell the hardware option.

chwolfe• 19 years ago

Sports Betting

gnark• 19 years ago

How do you use it to trade commodities? What do you trade?

jdavid• 19 years ago

win the "go" competition.

check out http://evolvedmachines.com

those guys might like to help you out.

also there is http://www.numenta.com/

that might be interested in some good algorithyms

basho• 19 years ago

My team is currently in 5th in the Netflix Prize competition. The main part of the method I'm using is pretty general (nothing specific to movies). If anyone here thinks they might have a use for this kind of thing / wants to collaborate on something, send me an email.

richcollins• 19 years ago

In response to the idea that your search algorithm is better than all others:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_opt...

In response to your question I say that it should be easy to monetize your algorithm if it is truly good at solving some class problems. Just find problems where the solutions are valuable to some group of people and sell the solutions you create.

marcus28• 19 years ago

Never said it was a search algorithm.

That is what I am trying to find in this thread ideas on where the solutions are most valuable and how to pitch them.

Ideas to monetize new artifical intelligence

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