Is AI right now useful as a way to provide value for small projects or startups? Any examples of that?
I'm going to make the simplifying assumption of saying that "machine learning" is a subset of AI for our purposes, and that "machine learning" includes "simple" techniques like linear regression, logistic regression, k-means clustering, etc. I don't think any of that is terribly controversial, although I know a few people would quibble over it. Anyway...
Given that, I'd say the example is absolutely "yes". AI can help startups and small projects. There's actually a really nice example that Andrew Ng talks about in his Machine Learning course on Coursera. In that example, a t-shirt manufacturer is trying to figure out how to size their shirts. So they go out and take a bunch of height/weight measurements of prospective customers, and then use k-means to segment the data into clusters. Let's say they do 5 clusters, corresponding to extra small, small, medium, large, and extra large. Now they can look at the measurements in each cluster and figure out how to size their shirts.
More generally, anywhere that you have data, and you want to extract insights from that data, you likely have an application for some level of machine learning / AI. Of course it won't always (or even often, perhaps) be the case that you need a deep neural network, or anything like the cutting edge in academic research. But, then again, you might. :-)
that get added to existing products by large companies with access to large datasets and computing power.
Do you have an AWS account? If so, you have access to large datasets and computing power as well. Look at all the data that's "out there" in terms of Open Data, LinkedData, etc... As an exercise, browse around data.gov sometime, and look at things like the datasets the UN makes available, and the world bank data, etc., and see if you can think of a way to combine a few of those datasets and extract some meaningful insight from a combination nobody else has looked at before.
If you come up with something, it's not terribly hard/expensive to spin up a cluster using EC2 and run some analysis.
I'm going to make the simplifying assumption of saying that "machine learning" is a subset of AI for our purposes, and that "machine learning" includes "simple" techniques like linear regression, logistic regression, k-means clustering, etc. I don't think any of that is terribly controversial, although I know a few people would quibble over it. Anyway...
Given that, I'd say the example is absolutely "yes". AI can help startups and small projects. There's actually a really nice example that Andrew Ng talks about in his Machine Learning course on Coursera. In that example, a t-shirt manufacturer is trying to figure out how to size their shirts. So they go out and take a bunch of height/weight measurements of prospective customers, and then use k-means to segment the data into clusters. Let's say they do 5 clusters, corresponding to extra small, small, medium, large, and extra large. Now they can look at the measurements in each cluster and figure out how to size their shirts.
More generally, anywhere that you have data, and you want to extract insights from that data, you likely have an application for some level of machine learning / AI. Of course it won't always (or even often, perhaps) be the case that you need a deep neural network, or anything like the cutting edge in academic research. But, then again, you might. :-)
that get added to existing products by large companies with access to large datasets and computing power.
Do you have an AWS account? If so, you have access to large datasets and computing power as well. Look at all the data that's "out there" in terms of Open Data, LinkedData, etc... As an exercise, browse around data.gov sometime, and look at things like the datasets the UN makes available, and the world bank data, etc., and see if you can think of a way to combine a few of those datasets and extract some meaningful insight from a combination nobody else has looked at before.
If you come up with something, it's not terribly hard/expensive to spin up a cluster using EC2 and run some analysis.