Beyond Elon Musk, artificial intelligence startups are having a moment

Normally when a business signs up a new client, it's a cause for celebration on both sides. That hasn't always been the case for John Jersin and his artificial intelligence startup Connectifier.
On multiple occasions right after finally convincing hiring managers to use his high-tech recruiting tool, Jersin has received the same bewildering question from new customers: Will this end up eliminating my job, or, you know, destroying my entire industry?
Such is the nature of working in the artificial intelligence field today. "They understand that this technology is powerful enough that they need to take advantage of it, but they are a little bit concerned about the impact it may have on their industry in the long-term," says Jersin, CEO of Connectifier and a former Google product manager.
It's an unusual love/hate (or love/fear) dynamic that has come to define much of the new, fast-growing market for startups that rely on artificial intelligence technology.
After decades of not being taken seriously, artificial intelligence is enjoying a renaissance thanks to better data and computing capacity as well as all the attention showered on products like IBM's dashing Watson, Facebook's personal assistant M and large AI acquisitions from Google and Apple. Hundreds of millions of dollars are now being invested in AI startups. Yet, the more prominent artificial intelligence becomes, the more it renews old fears about machines taking our jobs and maybe even our lives.
Elon Musk is even jumping in, joining forces to fund an effort to keep humanity safe from the evil forces of AI.
Elon Musk has warned that artificial intelligence could be "more dangerous than nukes." Stephen Hawking has echoed that fear, modestly predicting that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."
The current batch of startups branding themselves as artificial intelligence must simultaneously diffuse these concerns from peers while working to prove just how much this advanced technology can change the world — hopefully without causing an apocalypse.
The renaissance of artificial intelligence
There is, at least for now, a vast disconnect between all the fearful predictions about artificial intelligence and what businesses are actually working to build.
Those startups that have launched and raised funding in the past couple years promise to crunch data and use algorithms to automate and improve hiring decisions (Connectifier) or recommend treatment options to doctors (Enlitic). Several companies like x.ai and Clara Labs promise to use artificial intelligence to build a personal assistant who can schedule appointments for you, inching closer to what businesses like Facebook, Google and Apple are working on internally to solve your problems faster and faster.
The personal assistants, more than the niche business applications, come closest to resembling the sci-fi depiction of a machine acting like a human. That's by design: almost all companies working on these products have decided to make their virtual assistants more human rather than less to engage with users.
"The very first choice you have to make if you go create any one of these is if you want to humanize it. That's very black and white," says Dennis Mortensen, CEO of x.ai, which has raised $11 million in funding to date and named its personal assistant Amy to be more human. "Siri, Cortana, Amy are all bet on the idea that we should try to humanize this. Google Now is not."
That prerogative leads to some unusual product debates. For example, according to Mortensen: "Can Amy remind people about a meeting at 3 am? Does that take away from her humanity, or just suggest that she’s a shitty human?"
Babak Hodjat is looking to bring AI into an even more central part of our lives: shopping.
Hodjat is the founder and chief scientist (a popular title at AI startups) for Sentient Technologies, which is by far the most well-funded of the current crop of artificial intelligence startups with nearly $150 million from private investors, the bulk of which came late last year. This month, Sentient debuted a new visual search tool for shoe shopping "powered by artificial intelligence," which learns your tastes and makes targeted suggestions like a personal shopping assistant.
"In the next few years, every time you shop online you are going to be taking it for granted that there is an AI assistant helping you out in the shopping verses the onus being on you to search and discover what you're looking for," Hodjat says. At some point, he believes this assistant may even be able to create renderings of new products designed specially for you that don't yet exist.
"And this is just shopping," Hodjat continues. "Take that to healthcare: a very personalized medical and healthcare regiment for individuals based on their daily activities, their vitals, their Fitbit or Apple Watches. I think AI will be there helping us make decisions in the future pervasively."
Artificial intelligence, by any other name
The initial surge in AI startups began in earnest two to three years ago, but this year countless companies have latched on to the term in an effort to appear trendier.
"AI is a very broad term, kind of like what on-demand was a year ago," says Marvin Liao, an investing partner at 500 startups, who says he noticed an uptick in these companies four-to-six months ago. "Every company was an on-demand company; now every startup has some AI. There's a bit of a flock of sheep mentality."
Of the companies that claim to be artificial intelligence-driven, Liao estimates that less than 10% really fit the bill. Most others are simply using some machine learning algorithms or big data and twist it to, as another investor put it, "fit into the category du jour."
Regardless, artificial intelligence startups have found increasing success raking in cash from private investors, thanks in no small part to companies like Sentient Technologies.
While the desperation to apply the artificial intelligence label may be suspect, it is heartening to people like Kris Hammond who have been working with the technology for years.
Hammond founded the University of Chicago's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and currently serves as the chief scientist (that title again) at Narrative Science, which launched in 2010 made a name for itself in recent years using artificial intelligence to automatically write news stories. In the beginning, however, Narrative Science chose not to identify itself as an artificial intelligence service.
"All that people could think of with AI systems were things that didn't work. There was not a clear, clean success story," Hammond says. As he points out, even when IBM's Watson made its star turn on Jeopardy, it was referred to as a "cognitive system" rather than AI. "They too knew AI was a term that was in disrepute."
So he and his peers are more than happy to have the term overused now and even mentioned alongside fears of the end times.
"Living in a world where people think AI isn’t possible because we can’t figure it out isn’t a fun world to live in," Hammond says. "Living in a world where people are afraid of it, I’m happy to have those conversations, those are easier conversations."