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Re:Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great h... by shoo on Monday February 24, 2020 @08:41PM (#22410262)
For an example of a genuine software company vaguely in this ecosystem, consider companies that build the tools that some AI/ML/optimisation systems use as building blocks. Eg optimisation algorithms.

If you need to solve gnarly industrial scale mixed integer combinatorial optimisation problems in the guts of your ML / optimisation engine, the commercial MIP solvers (gurobi , CPLEX ) or non-MIP based alternative combinatorial optimisation systems (localsolver ) can often give more optimal results in exponentially less running time than free open source alternatives.

1% more optimal solutions might translate into 1% more net profit for the entire org if you've gone whole hog and are trying to systematically profit optimise the entire business, so depending on the scale of the org it might be an easy business case to invest a few million dollars to set this system in place.

Annual server licenses for this commerical MIP solver software was 0(100k) / yr per server & the companies that build these products bake a lot of clever tricks from academia into these products that you can exploit by paying the license fee. ( my knowledge of pricing is out of date by about 7 years ) .

Re:Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great h... by MrK93 on Monday February 24, 2020 @09:57PM (#22410556)
I'm all for linear optimization and other optimization techniques. It's refreshing to see other people talk about Gurobi, CPLEX, etc... Having done research in the field of scheduling and now getting contacted by companies, it's demoralizing to see that everybody usually speaks about machine learning while many problems can be solved in a more precise way with other techniques.