How Google, Amazon, and Facebook would look if they had started in the age of AI

In the past few years, artificial intelligence has come into its own, and lots of companies are grafting it onto their core businesses, marrying AI with search, ecommerce, social networking, cybersecurity — you name it. But what if those businesses had started out in an age of AI and had integrated it into their products from the very beginning?

Peter Relan addressed this speculative question for us at our MobileBeat 2017 conference this week. Relan is a well-known entrepreneur who started the YouWeb incubator, which spawned startups such as mobile gaming companies OpenFeint and CrowdStar. Now he’s CEO of Got It and an investor in the popular gaming chat app Discord.

Relan’s Got It is a new kind of search engine, and it uses AI to locate human experts who can answer your questions in a personalized way. He thinks this will yield better results, and it’s an example of the kind of business that is better because it was born in the AI boom.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

VentureBeat: What if Google, Amazon, and Facebook had started with AI algorithms a long time ago, before they got hip to this subject more recently? Peter, why don’t you talk about that for us?

Peter Relan: The last speaker mentioned briefly that AI had gone through a popular phase in the ‘80s. I was in college at the time. The AI hype that started in the 80s continued into the ‘90s a bit, but by the 2000s we were much more focused on web 2.0, social commerce, and so on. You had this slew of companies, major tech giants, starting in that era without AI in their core spectrum.

VB: They were born in the AI bust.

Relan: Exactly, if we can imagine such a thing. I found it very curious, looking back over the last 35 years. Today, if you’re a startup like the ones in my portfolio, involving AI wouldn’t even be a question in your strategy. You would start with AI as a key part of what you do. So I chose a few companies to look at very closely and consider what they would be like if they’d started with AI as something core to what they do.

I can start by talking about Facebook. A lot of people here know this, but it’s a very broad, white-page company. Facebook’s content is generated by its community of users. If Facebook had started with AI, the number one problem it would solve is, how does content surface? We all remember this from the gaming craze in 2007 and 2008, when Facebook opened up its API. The number one complaint users had was spam. We all got FarmVille requests filling up our news feeds.

VB: Too many sheep flying back and forth.

Relan: You had all this irrelevant content, and the core strategy of Facebook in the early days was simply to let the community sort it out, until it reached a breaking point where there was so much spam from FarmVille on Facebook — I remember meeting Mark Zuckerberg in 2010, and at this point he literally said, “I hate this.” It had completely destroyed the network. It’s interesting, because games are actually one of the most important applications on any new platform — consider the iPhone — but there’s obviously a risk of letting that get out of control.

Fast forward to today, what’s the bad content today? The bad content 10 years ago was game spam. Today it’s fake news. It’s on 10 times the scale that existed 10 years ago. FarmVille had 200 million users. Facebook has 2 billion users now. So how do you stop fake news — which we all agree is bad content — from maybe even throwing an election? We have a huge problem there.

You would think that Facebook’s natural instincts would be to stop fake news with — well, what was I just saying? Let the community handle it. But in 2016 they acknowledged that they had built AI machinery into the system. They’re using that to identify fake news in combination with the community. Which is a huge admission and a huge point for Facebook, which so deeply believes that the user community will take care of bad content.