Simon on: AI

Pretty much every day brings a news story about AI, it is the subject of hundreds of news stories and this media fascination hasn’t gone amiss. AI is being incorporated into a lot of new tech and being used by lots of start-ups. It is being explored by many industries, and is having an impact on medical applications; a properly trained AI can scan medical records and pick up anomalies and patterns that would not be picked up by a human performing the same task - which is a potentially amazing use of AI.

But things are not quite as they seem. AI doesn’t actually have an exact definition and this is being exploited by a number of tech start-ups keen to jump on the band wagon. According to research by venture capital firm MMC Ventures, 40 per cent of the 2,830 purported AI start- ups in Europe don’t actually use any AI in their products. But they are doing this with good reason because the report also states that simply labelling yourself as an AI company attracts an average of 15 percent more funding than another non AI tech start-up.

This is an incredibly exciting time and AI will undoubtedly have a huge impact on how we live in the future, but be wary of those companies purporting to use AI – it may not be quite the news story they claim it to be.