Do you mean innovative as in anchored in some novel machine learning technology, or innovative in product or business model?
You could look at four possibilities of: innovative business vs innovative AI - something with neither is probably what you want to avoid, as in yet-another-whatever, that claims to use "AI" for something that doesn't really change anything. If they business model is cool (which you should be able to have an opinion on as a layperson) then it could still be interesting even if AI is just a nice to have. And if they're doing cool AI stuff, as in research, like OpenAi or something, but the business model is not super clear, that could be cool too. In that case, expect leadership with phds and publication records, and a company track record of publishing or funding research, not just commercialization activities.
I'd also add, maybe controversially, that anyone using "AI" to make some kind of basic prediction (say for personalization, demand planning, medical decisions, really most tabular data) is not going to have a business that lives or dies based on AI. Not saying it's BS, but it's undifferentiated from standard models for those things, so saying they use AI is more marketing.
Look for computer vision, nlp, reinforcement learning, or similar if you want AI to be a differentiator. And be careful with anyone doing "smart search" type stuff, its BS without strong evidence to the contrary.
> I'd also add, maybe controversially, that anyone using "AI" to make some kind of basic prediction (say for personalization, demand planning, medical decisions, really most tabular data) is not going to have a business that lives or dies based on AI.
Unfortunately this rules out the vast majority of business use-cases. ML use-cases on structured data vastly outnumber those of vision/nlp/RL.
Also you seem to be restricting the term "AI" to Neural network-type techniques.
> Also you seem to be restricting the term "AI" to Neural network-type techniques.
I'm curious to know what you are implying with this. Are there commercially relevant startups you know using other "AI"? I'd definitely be interested in a symbolic reasoning startup or some other more obscure AI idea, but I suspect there are vanishingly few so it's unlikely to come up in the OP's job hunt
Not really symbolic reasoning. I'm thinking more along the line of classic ML techniques like Random Forest/GLMs have long been successfully applied to business problems.
You could look at four possibilities of: innovative business vs innovative AI - something with neither is probably what you want to avoid, as in yet-another-whatever, that claims to use "AI" for something that doesn't really change anything. If they business model is cool (which you should be able to have an opinion on as a layperson) then it could still be interesting even if AI is just a nice to have. And if they're doing cool AI stuff, as in research, like OpenAi or something, but the business model is not super clear, that could be cool too. In that case, expect leadership with phds and publication records, and a company track record of publishing or funding research, not just commercialization activities.
I'd also add, maybe controversially, that anyone using "AI" to make some kind of basic prediction (say for personalization, demand planning, medical decisions, really most tabular data) is not going to have a business that lives or dies based on AI. Not saying it's BS, but it's undifferentiated from standard models for those things, so saying they use AI is more marketing.
Look for computer vision, nlp, reinforcement learning, or similar if you want AI to be a differentiator. And be careful with anyone doing "smart search" type stuff, its BS without strong evidence to the contrary.