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Two observations:

web vs. app data seems to be missing something. According to that graph, about 15% of startups are building either an app or a website. Where are the remaining 85% doing? That sounds strange.

I can't underscore enough the "crystal ball" effect of receiving all those pitches. By hearing every idea out there, you get a free crash course in the future. While founders don't like to hear it, a similar idea has already been pitched 10 times. So investors focus on how you are different from those 10 similar ideas. And often, investors will have "amazing" insights for you, just by repeating what those 10 other founders have told them already. It's like being prescient without being especially smart. A very strange feeling.



Also notable: app likely to match for web, but not vice-versa.

If you build an app, you say you're building an app. If you're building a web site, you might say web app.

It'd be interesting to know if this was taken into account.


Same with the artificial intelligence graph. "Deep" seems to be the most popular category of AI, even more popular than "artificial intelligence," up until 2014. Considering deep learning is a subset of machine learning (which only starts appearing in the graph in 2012), I'm confused what "deep" is supposed to represent. Is there another meaning to "deep" in an AI context?


I think it originally just meant "deep neural nets" ie. neural nets with more than one hidden layer. Now it's code for "I'm making magic AI, please fund me".


> Now it's code for "I'm making magic AI, please fund me".

Isn't that just AI? The term has never meant anything but "the future".


Well, no, AI has always meant "making computers do something that, right now, only humans can do." Of course, the term only applies to work-in-progress, because once it's working, it's not AI by definition.


Got a citation for that? Or is that just your definition? As soon as we understand a problem there are better terms that are actually meaningful.


It's a variation of a famous John McCarthy quote: "“As soon as it works, no one calls it AI any more.”

http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/138907-john-mccarthy/ful...

It's not meant to be a serious definition but IMO the phenomena is very real.


The version I'm familiar with: "today's AI is tomorrow's computer science"


That resonates with me; thank you.

I still think it's a bullshit marketing term.


I was wondering the same thing for SaaS Mentions. Has got to be above 3%.


Why SaaS and not the more ubiquitous "Cloud"?


Because SaaS is a business model and Cloud is a marketing term for those who don't know about servers


It's because it's keyword analysis based. For example, you might call your product a "platform", and not use the words "website" or "app", in which case you wouldn't appear on the graph.




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