Is Artificial Intelligence an “Industry?”

This morning I found myself reading an article in the DealBook Newsletter of The New York Times. This was one of those times when the “sub-headline” was more important to me than the headline. There were only two sentences; but it was the first that drew my attention: “Investors including BlackRock have committed an eye-popping amount to lend to the artificial intelligence industry.” This reminded me that artificial intelligence has come a very long way since the undergraduate and graduate yeas I spent at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A “laboratory” is, of course, a venue for research. My own research efforts yielded theses for both my senior year and my doctoral studies. It never occurred to me that artificial intelligence would be an industry. The “founding fathers” focused attention on trying to figure out what mental processes are and how they work. Their approach was to try to build software models to simulate those processes and then explore how those models behaved. This was all inspired by the “Turing test,” Alan Turing’s proposal that software could be called “intelligent” if one could not distinguish its behaviors from those of a human being.

Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of Black Rock (photograph by Karsten Moran for The New York Times)

To be fair, there are many situations in which those behaviors would be able to benefit industry. However, industry depends on a more important benefit: Investment. This is why the Times showed the above photograph of Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of Black Rock. The caption for the photograph explains that his business is “lining up money to finance the artificial intelligence boom;” and the Times seems to associate that with industry. Unfortunately, calling artificial intelligence itself an “industry” is not just a matter of putting the cart (research) before the horse (product). It seems to suggest than there is no difference between cart and horse!

Mind you, I still appreciate the Times as a news source; but the very name “DealBook” strikes me as a red flag that “hype” is likely to prevail over substance!