NASA generates 12.1 terabytes of data every single day. Every. Single. Day. Woah. Because NASA is a public body, every kilobyte of data has to be free to access. On space missions, the generation of data doubles daily. They used to have nearly 60 data centres to handle the data storage but have chopped this to 33 due to a federal requirement to reduce data centre optimisation.
Worldwide, data is being generated at a rate of something fantastic every day. OK, it's 2.5 quintillion bytes. There's a cracking infographic here talking about how much data is created every minute.
Just sounds too much. Quintillion. Million. Billion. Trillion. Quadrillion. Then our friend, quintillion. The amount of data being produced has led to the eruption of startups just to try and make sense of it all.
Last year, it was estimated by Accenture that there was a 20-fold increase in AI startups since 2011 with FinTech, healthcare, transportation and retail/e-commerce being the most popular verticals. According to angel.co, there are 2,200+ AI startups with over half emerging in the last two years.
Banking and healthcare industries are forecast to spend the most on artificial intelligence and cognitive research in the Asia Pacific region. Insurance, government and education were seen to have the highest growth rate. See the story here.
But it's machine learning that's attracting the big money; US$3.5 billion in 2016 alone. ML applications and platforms, according to Venture Scanner, stand to make the biggest market impact.
[The same article source says digital marketing/marketing automation, CRM and data analytics are three areas ripe for ML adoption.]
The machines are here already and beavering away. For example, back in 2015, the Associated Press was using robots to write 3,000 stories every quarter. And, get this, AP could produce 2,000 articles per second if necessary. All without a human being needed.
It's going to be an exciting next few years especially as AI and machine learning becomes more sophisticated.