Machine Learning

Sneak peek at early decisions at HAI

/ Jonathan Hendler / Leave a comment

Recently launched a site with some basic vision behind HAI.

http://hai.io

But the tech stack is where the rubber meets the road. I’ve been coding about two months now. At the very beginning I went through a fair amount of thinking and ended up selecting a language for the backend based on a number of factors. From languages I knew, C++, Go, PHP, Python, Java/Scala, and Node.js were on the table. Python and Java were the two top contenders, but I ended up going with Python. 

So far I’ve been really happy with Python for both flexibility of the language, the available libraries for both web and machine learning, and the developer community. Ruby / Rails has an amazing community and great web stack, but given my own lack of familiarity and less work being done in machine learning, it didn’t make my list.

Then I started evaluating open source projects that would be the platform. There are 132 on the list below (looked at least 4x that many). It’s been amazing getting up to speed on the projects that are open source. Although Google, IBM, Amazon and others are clearly going to lead in the machine learning space for the foreseeable future, the open source community is catching up.

Open source is a moving target, and there’s no one size fits all when you are piecing together something new. So, I’ve been using the awesome ZeroMQ library to connect services between libraries, languages.

Finally, thanks to everyone who has provided feedback so far. Can’t wait to get what I’m working on out into the world.

Oh. HAI.

/ Jonathan Hendler / Leave a comment

HAI is the new company I’m working on. Human Assisted Intelligence. HAI will help computers learn about people. I’m so excited to be starting a new venture.

The future is happening right now. How far in the future will a product be relevant if you start developing it today?

Computer software / hardware outperforms humans in many specialized tasks today, and will likely surpass humans in categories reserved for our most revered public figures (scientists, politicians, performers) within 10-40 years. After the Singularity, quoting the WikiPedia main article -“Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the technological singularity is seen as an occurrence beyond which events cannot be predicted.”  Where will humans fit into this future? A question for science fiction, perhaps.

Before the Singularity, what will help us engage effectively with a world increasing its complexity, knowledge, and economic dynamics exponentially? If super computer intelligent systems are used only by the most powerful institutions, what kind of intelligent service represents the individual?

I think these are the most interesting, important challenges around AI. Today, I’m building a team and product prototypes. If you’re interested in collaborating, feel free reach out.