It's a very exciting time. I'm incredibly excited to see what goes on here. I previously explored an online education start-up idea and I'm really looking forward to seeing Ng and Koller change the world. I'm also very exciting to see machine learning on the radar. For me one of the biggest challenges is often making AI intuitive. As machine learning becomes more mainstream it will be on people's design radar and that will make it less hard to turn great algorithms into great products.
Partially, although in my experience over the past 4 years doing this stuff 1 hour cleaning the input data gets you thrice the output of 1 hour tuning the algos. Some algorithms are more sensitive than others, but in general, garbage in, garbage out.
I think in many cases you're correct. My point wasn't about the performance of the AI algorithms themselves though. In my experience most of the problems where I want to use AI the algorithm itself performs adequately. Getting the interaction with the algorithm sensible for a non-technical user is hard. If AI becomes prevalent enough that UI/UX people start thinking about it, I suspect it will be much easier to solve that problem, which to me is the bigger business problem with AI.
