--- "YKY (Yan King Yin)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm not an academic (left uni a couple years ago) so I can't get academic > funding for this. If I can't start an AI business I'd have to entirely give > up AI as a career. I hope you can understand these circumstances.
Aren't there companies looking for AI researchers? Google? Maybe another approach (the one I took) is to publish something innovative, and people come to you. It won't make you rich, but I have so far gotten 3 small consulting jobs designing and writing data compression software or doing research, all from home, simply because people have seen my work on my website (PAQ compressor, large text benchmark, Hutter prize) or they just saw my posts on comp.compression. I never looked for any of this work. I make enough teaching at a nearby university as an adjunct, with lots of time off. I'm sure I could make more money if I wanted to work long hours in an office, but I don't need to. PAQ introduced a new compression algorithm (context mixing) when PPM algorithms were the best known. PAQ would not have made it to the top of the benchmarks without the ideas and coding and testing efforts of others working on it with no reward except name recognition. That would not have happened if it wasn't free (GPL open source). Even now, I'm sure nobody would pay even $20/copy when there is so much free competition. Other good compressors (Compressia, WinRK) have failed with this business model. I think if you want to make a business out of AI, you are in for a lot of work. First you need something that is truly innovative, that does something that nobody else can do. What will that be? A search engine better than Google? A new operating system that understands natural language? A car that drives itself? A household servant robot? A program that can manage a company? A better spam detector? Text compression? Write down a well defined goal. Do research. What is your competition? How are your ideas better than what's been done? Prove it (with benchmarks), and the opportunities will come. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
