Tag: Intelligence

Starting by examining the opinion of Webit’s Blue Stage audience on their belief in evolution or if God made it all, Michael Schuster, partner at Speedinvest, managed to deliver a pretty helpful and interestingly funny presentation on the topic of the two main intertwined disruptors in business: startups and investors.

Tides turn and seasons change, yesterday’s predator becomes today’s prey. Why are some companies around for tens or a hundred of years already, be it Siemens, IBM, and whatever company acknowledged by everyone as a steady rock in business, while others don’t survive the light of the next day?

Schuster presented the ideal  graph of a startup funding escalation:

А startup is launched with friends, family, getting private and angels’ investments, then going through series of rounds and going up and up until the one point IPO. It would’ve been nice if every startup story goes this way, but most of the times it doesn’t happen as ideal as this. Startups “start”, get whatever help possible, moving from getting seed investments to almost disappearing, going up and down until the moment of breaking through the market or collapsing and disappearing. For a startup, what is essential before the run for scaling, acquisitions and becoming unicorns, is that: you just need to survive. And in order to survive in the world and not become an extinct dinosaur, the law of evolution applies pretty much for startups too: it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. Both statistics and reality show well enough the differences between the european and US markets. The business models applied in the latter don’t always work that well in the european market which is not always taken in enough consideration. Funny enough, investment companies, as an industry that is actually funding disruption hasn’t been disrupted itself  in a long while. A lot of things need to be considered by startups while trying to get the attention of investors and customers. Big, trendy words like AI, customer centric, big data and so on are constantly thrown at the funding companies; startups are chasing investors not quite suited for them and accelerators way before the time for this has come while missing some important points.If you are interested in learning what they are, check the full video of Schuster’s presentation at last year’s Webit here: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZRUcoHxn-c[/embed] Keep up with Webit.Festival 2018 agenda with a series of startup events such as the Founders Games, Startups & Investors Summit, nurturing the connection between thesе two intertwined parties. And more.

About a decade ago the Ray Kurzweil presented to the world his concept of the singularity, and from today’s point of view this utopian idea looks more real than ever. In his famous book The Singularity is Near, the inventor, futurist and Director of Engineering at Google wrote about the moment, when machine intelligence will surpass our own. Now the top entrepreneur and visionary Elon Musk is talking about this moment not as something bad, but as a next step in humankind evolution. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai that over time we will probably see a closer merger of biological and digital intelligence. He explained that humans will need to merge with machines, so that they don’t become useless in an age when AI is widespread among every aspect of our lives. "Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem”, Musk said. And while this kind of problems may seem too distant, the reality is that the are already a part of our lives. Just the last year a automated Tesla car crashed and killed its test driver. This was the first of its kind tragedy and opened series of ethical dilemmas. As the self-driving vehicles are going to be the most near term AI innovation that we are going to see, the regulators will have to answer important questions about the responsibility and ethics in this new kind of transportation. It is a question, first raised by the celebrated science-fiction author Isaac Asimov in his short story Runaround. The futurist revealed an early version of his laws, that states: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm 2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. The computer’s victory over a human Go master this past March reminded us of the coming singularity, while the respected Japanese magazine Shukan Shincho predicted that in 2045 a computer with the combined intellectual power of the entire human race would cost around $100. Although the development of artificial intelligence undoubtedly lead to risks, approaching a moment of singularity can bring unimaginable advances in medicine, economics, government and social spheres, while completely changing the way we live today. We can expect the merger of humans and machines to bring the next step of our civilization’s evolution and to finally make us interplanetary species - one of the biggest ambitions of Musk’s SpaceX. If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the world of artificial intelligence Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During our summits, you can listen to top level speakers such as the Partner in IBM Ventures Christoph Auer-Welsbach and the VP & CTO of VMware for EMEA region Joe Baguley.