Forbes AI 50, Hyperautomation, and ML-Based Lending - This Week in AI

Welcome to our This Week in AI roundup. Our goal with this roundup is provide an overview of the week's most important news, papers, and industry developments.

This week we have stories about the Forbes AI 50 list, hyperautomation, a new ML framework from Facebook, and Shopify's ML-based lending.

Forbes AI 50

This week Forbes released their annual AI 50, which features the top 50 AI companies to watch in 2021.Businesses must be privately owned and use machine learning to be accepted.

With 37 of the 50 companies hailing from the Bay Area, Silicon Valley remains the epicentre of AI startups. As one of the judges, Andrew Ng, notes in the article, a major problem to be solved is customizing data for companies:

“There are plenty of open source models that you can download that work just fine for a problem, but what really needs to be customized is the data.

I'm finding that for multiple companies, by starting to help enterprises efficiently get the data they need to feed into an open source model, that's the key to unlocking the value for that business.”

Read the full story below:

Growth in Low-Code, RPA, and AI Driving ‘Hyperautomation’

Hyperautomation is the idea that anything that can be automated in an organization should be automated.

Gartner predicts that by 2022, the demand for hyperautomation-enabling technologies will be valued at $596 billion. Robotic process automation (RPA), low-code application platforms (LCAP), artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual assistants will all be in high demand in the coming years.

Hyperautomation is one of Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2021. By 2024, organizations will be able to save 30% on operating costs by combining hyperautonomy and redesigned operational processes.

According to Gartner:

Hyperautomation has shifted from an option to a condition of survival.

Read the full report:

Facebook Launches ML Framework in C++

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) has open-sourced a machine learning (ML) library written in C++: Flashlight.

Flashlight is a library that enables researchers to customize the internals of deep and machine learning systems to best fit their needs. Because of its minimalist nature and lack of language bindings, FAIR claims that rebuilding the entire library takes just seconds.

Read the full release:

AI Regulations Are Coming

In the US and EU, new rules would soon affect how businesses use artificial intelligence (AI). Companies must perform AI risk analyses and record how these risks were mitigated. An article from HBR suggests that companies should take immediate steps to ensure that their programmes comply with current and future laws.

Despite these new proposals, divergent definitions of artificial intelligence are one of the indicators that global attempts to control AI are still in their early stages.

Read the full story:

Shopify Using Machine Learning for Lending

Shopify announced that it has lent $2 billion in tens of thousands of small businesses. The interesting pat is that the company uses a machine model to automatically qualify merchants based on sales history and store results.

Our model allows us to predict merchants’ minimum sales with 90% accuracy while helping us make more proactive, pre-qualified offers as quickly as possible.

Read the full story:

That's it for this edition of This Week in AI, if you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.