In 2005, years before Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa came on the scene, two startups—ScanSoft and Nuance Communications—merged to pursue a burgeoning opportunity in speech recognition. The new company developed powerful speech-processing software and grew rapidly for almost a decade—an average of 27% per year in sales. Then suddenly, around 2014, it stopped growing. Revenues in 2019 were roughly the same as revenues in 2013. Nuance had run into strong headwinds, as large computer firms that were once its partners became its competitors.
Nuance’s story is far from unique. In all major industries and technology domains, startups are facing unprecedented obstacles. New companies are still springing up to exploit innovative opportunities. And these companies can now tap into an extraordinary flood of venture capital. Yet all is not healthy in the startup economy. Innovative startups are growing much more slowly than comparable companies did in the past. Read More
Daily Archives: February 18, 2022
China’s Race Towards AI Research Dominance
Since taking its first steps teaching computers board game strategies in the 1950s, research on artificial intelligence has come a long way. In the 21st century in particular, machine learning and its promise for real-time improvements of algorithms through experience and providing access to more data has become the single biggest research focus in the field. As our chart based on data provided by the OECD.AI project shows, China is well on its way to surpassing traditional artificial intelligence research powerhouses in the upcoming years.
While the U.S. still leads the world with about 150.000 research papers on AI published in 2021, the People’s Republic’s output isn’t that far off thanks to an astronomical increase over the last two decades. The Eastern Asian country passed the number of AI research papers published in every single one of the 27 EU countries combined in 2008 and as of now sits in second place with roughly 138.000 papers pushed to publication in 2021. Overall, it increased its research output by 3,350 percent over the last two decades. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 