This is an Overheard@X short with Dr. Radhika Dirks, CEO of XLabs. It’s a brief dive into the deep roots of AI. David Hilbert in 1900 gave an address in Paris to the International Congress of Mathematicians that inspired much of the world we live in today. We believe that understanding the roots of the concepts others take for granted …
Mental Model Arbitrage(MMA) is an important fuel for Moonshots here at XLabs. By building in one field with assembled structures from elsewhere we are able to make fantastic leaps. At it’s heart, MMA is about getting very good at making analogies, then using those analogies to transfer knowledge and know how from one place to another. Douglas R. Hofstadter, author …
Artificial Intelligence is the headline on everyone’s lips and it’s a massive opportunity. The popular picture though is that AIs will soon replace most tasks (read ‘our jobs’). But if that’s all you are hearing, you are missing the much bigger opportunity. AI is about much more than the economics of replacing people. It’s about leveraging new kinds of intelligence …
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” — Warren Buffett. Road tested learnings from running Seldn, an AI startup. For the genesis of this series, read this. My dear enterprise, for your artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, look to Warren Buffet circa 1965. Shortly after publishing ‘AI Startups: Be Goldilocks’ several companies have been reaching out to XLabs with a …
The hype — it obfuscates: Landscape’s morphing. What’s possible is hidden And what’s there is amiss.
Every story has a moral you just need to be clever enough to find it. — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland. Road tested learnings from running Seldn, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup. Read about the genesis of this series here. The Goldilocks Offering Not too low; not too high; your product’s value needs to be just right. Enterprise sales are …
‘In a lot of ways, his failures were more wonderful than his successes.’ — G. Hardy on mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (For a brief intro to the Seldn series, read this introduction). Between 2014–2016, I ran an ambitious predictive artificial intelligence (AI) startup Seldn (yes, named after Asimov’s hero). 5 highly distilled key learnings from that adventure follow. These lessons …
The story of an artificial intelligence (AI) startup from Silicon Valley. In early 2014, my cofounder Travis Dirks and I started Seldn — an artificial intelligence (AI) startup based in Palo Alto, Ca. Back then, there were no big waves in AI. Only whispers. My 6 months of globe trotting had just exposed me to some of the most violent …
Want to be setting the next fashion trends? Just look at the Dow Jones! Hemlines appear to be rather correlated to economic cycles – inching higher with booms and draping low during the busts. Presented as a theory in 1926 by George Taylor, the hemline index has often been tested. In its most recent phase (2010), researchers in the Netherlands quantified the correlation: a …
The low-down on what Carl Icahn, an Activist Investor, is trying to do at Apple. ‘Big’ must naturally go with ‘Apple’. With more than 900 million shares trading on NASDAQ, at times with over 50 million per day, calling Apple popular is an understatement. From hedge fund managers and analysts to iPhone owners, diverse investor groups profess an unconditional love …