By Gilles Fontaine
Silicon Valley operates as a huge open space where everyone knows and communicates,where news flows in real time. "I can start a project and recruit a management team in a matter of days," says Ryan Floyd, founder of the Storm Ventures fund, located on Sand Hill Road, the Valley's artery with the most prestigious venture capitalists. If it does not work, I switch to another start-up. "Essential condition for convincing Ryan Floyd and his peers to invest in a start-up: that the target market is not less than $ 10 billion. And to be sure of winning, it is better to inject a dose of artificial intelligence into his project.
Last year, about $ 5 billion was invested in 658 start-ups specializing in this field. At the head of the Orange subsidiary in Silicon Valley, Georges Nahon evokes a radical paradigm shift in the computer world. He talks about the association of big data and deep neural networks, algorithms allowing machines to learn with or without human intervention. "Drones, autonomous cars, robots, are tomorrow's data centers," he explains. “Decisions will have to be made locally, in every connected object and intelligence will have to be distributed."…..This deep learning is the new paradigm of Silicon Valley researchers. "We are still in the state of craftsmanship, but in a few years, a simple light bulb will have its own neural network allowing it to act autonomously," explained Kimberly Powell, director of deep learning department of Nvidia ,at a recent conference organized by the Orange Institute in San Francisco. Nvidia, whose graphic processors are in great demand by the video game industry, very greedy in computing capabilities, is today at the heart of research efforts in the field of artificial intelligence with its ultra-powerful chips. As a result, in one year, the valuation of the company was multiplied by four.