Opportunity is knock-knock-knockin' on your door
Here's an item which sounds like it's quite a step forward:the next killer application--something that can read and understand standard English sentences, even of considerable complexity. When I was out of work back in 2001, I coded up their ideas. When I started, I was a little skeptical, but they were paying me to do it, so I didn't care if they were deluding themselves or not. After spending a few months on it part-time, I am no longer so skeptical. By the time I finished coding the prooof of concept, and typed in about 30 sentences to train it, I could see that they had come up with something quite amazing. I find it quite plausible that they have come up with a technique for truly understanding arbitrary natural language. There are a lot of query engines out there right now, but the vast majority of them do not actually understand, or even try to understand, the actual meaning of the query. They look for certain keywords, and the results are often quite amusing when they aren't disappointing. The techniques that my friends have come up with are a quantum leap forward from anything that I have seen in this area. My friends have a business plan; now they need about $7.5 million to get their company profitable. If you are a venture capitalist, you are used to funding operations where that amount of money is the first round of financing. The advantage of this opportunity is that it is all software--no hardware design, no risky ASIC turns, no questions of whether the hardware can be built. If my friends aren't deluding themselves, this has the potential to change the world in the same way that personal computers changed the world.
Not like I'm such an electron herder, but Clayton seems to know his stuff. And these guys sound like they're feckin' brilliant!! Check it out and let me know, eh?
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