Opinion | Machine learning reveals computers as bad students

Artificial intelligence (AI) is deeply linked with machine learning (ML). In fact, almost all of AI today is simply ML—in other words, an attempt to get a computer to make itself more efficient at its task without the need for human intervention. As an investor in deep-tech and science companies, I have had the occasion to see several startups that claim to use AI/ML.

Neither AI nor ML are “deep-tech”. The applicability of ML is limited, at least today, primarily to the field of data science, where one is actually only trying to ask simple questions of a data set.

Most of these questions revolve around whether there is a pattern to the data that is present in the data set, and seek to answer fairly simple questions, such as, “Is this customer likely to buy product X if they have already bought product Y?” or “Does this medical scan contain evidence of cancer?”