'I really do not like artificial intelligence, and the more accurate statement now is about the automation of decision making, how we collect data, analyze it with data, and make as much of a decision as possible from the machine.' 'He was on the front side of the whiteboard Write down these technical terms and indicate which layer they belong to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS while explaining to CB # 1 the strengths of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and IBM.
AmrAwadallah is a co-founder of Cloudera and the CTO for this machine-learning and data analytics platform just this year in the US IPO. In July 2000, VivaSmartisan, Amr's first start-up, was acquired by Yahoo and later served as Yahoo! Vice President, Product Engineering. In 2008, he founded Cloudera.
'Our goal is to be able to properly use analytics to solve problems we have not solved today.' 'Amr is positioning itself to do something in the area of artificial intelligence.
Break open with open source
Amr made an open source framework, starting from the Hadoop architecture, slowly extending the other 25 kinds of analytical tools to form a shared data experience platform.
Creating an open source system that offers a shared data experience is one of Amr's perceived advances in automating decision making. "Clients are not technology companies who use technology to solve their business problems, except for companies like BAT, who even There's no motivation or ability to do software programming and what they should think about is how to use the platform to be a better bank, hospital, telco, etc. Amr said.
From Amr's point of view, Cloudera is competing with Microsoft and Amazon, on the one hand, the bottom-most infrastructure Microsoft and Amazon provide, IaaS, and on the PaaS platform, Learning, search and batch processing. In this area, Cloudera faces the competition with giants. 'Amazon will work independently with different teams to suit different needs, but Cloudera hopes to get these services up and running so that users can work on a unified platform Manage and monitor, while meeting government and auditing needs, 'said Amr.
JP Morgan developed a suite of software using the Cloudera platform to review their legal instruments and contracts. Attorneys have high service fees. Machine learning allows the machine to review most of the manuscripts. Only very specific terms are completed by lawyers. Amr said 10 minutes of machine audits saved 14,000 hours of human work time.
Today, the company that once acquired Intel Capital already has a market cap of 2 billion U.S. dollars.
Amr is more likely to see IBM's Watson as a direct adversary. "Watson is a black box where you have to send data to them and you do not know how they are trained. Data is power and Watson will give you a look Like a doctor's system, but as a customer loses the added value of their own value, such as hospitals, manufacturing, you lose control. You will not be locked up by us, and to machine learning, we do something for you to see. For people, and we open source this process is completely visible to customers, they still retain the intellectual property rights, or else it will be an injury to customers, because they will no longer have intellectual property rights, we are not in competition with them . ' He said.
In the new model, if you try to open source, and allow corporate customers to see the whole process of machine learning, then the core competitiveness of this enterprise how to guarantee?
In order to maintain the uniqueness of the business model, Cloudera will further add other proprietary business core modules, such as modules for monitoring, distribution and security, encryption, auditing and data backup is not open source.
So why is not such software popularizing rapidly? Such software is usually developed jointly with the customer, and some people are willing to take the initiative to carry out the third-party development. 'The law firm itself may not be motivated to do such a thing because it would violate the Their interests are what our customers need. "Currently, Cloudera's top three industry clients are from the financial, telecommunications and government sectors, respectively, and governments primarily use them to study cyber-security issues and anti-money laundering issues.
This is where business opportunities lie, and why when powerful tech giants infiltrate industries and bring about changes, there are still new enterprises in the field of artificial intelligence emerging as a challenge to the giant.
Chinese companies catching up
When it comes to competition, China is an inseparable market.
Amr does not deny that, "China is a very important market." In China, there are quite a few companies that work with Cloudera, such as Midea's partnership with Cloudera to bring together more than 10,000 flagship stores, 300 million users and Many partners, suppliers, channel business data, rebuild the IT system, to achieve centralized management, to find the user to find the product to meet user needs, sales at reasonable prices to complete the three core issues.
'They (customers) use our open-source software and do not need to give us money until they find their added value, and they can use this platform to make constant attempts to let the robot make the decision, and once it is really ready for production, Come back to us to commercialize the incident and come back to us when it's time to maintain, operate and optimize, "Amr said.
In fact, open source systems follow different protocols. The starting point for the GPL is open source / free usage of code and open source / free use of reference / modification / derived code, but not modified and derived code as closed source commercial software And sales.Another is the BSD open source agreement, which is a free to use, modify the source code, you can also modify the code as an open source or proprietary software and then release.
Cloudera has chosen BSD's open-source agreement, which is bound to be a long-term path.At present, according to the documents disclosed by Cloudera in the SEC, although the company has revenues of 261 million and 169 million respectively in 2016 and the first half of 2017, it is still at a net Loss state. 'Our goal of cooperation is 8000 companies worldwide annual revenue can be more than 10 billion US dollars,' said Amr.
At this point, Chinese companies are also playing their part in the open source system, such as Huawei. "We do not do such a project, but healthy competition can better promote the market."
As laborers, how should AI's work bring changes to work? This is something everyone is concerned with. Amr just expressed his personal view: 'We may never be able to go out after graduating from school As a lawyer and then for 60 years.For the future, except for 20% of experts who really need it, the remaining 80% probably will not have a job. "So his advice is to be" very fast learning By' .