“Is data the new oil?” asked proponents of big data back in 2012 in Forbes magazine. Amazon’s Neil Lawrence has a slightly different analogy: Data, he says, is coal. Not coal today, though, but coal in the early days of the 18th century, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine. So why is data coal? “Deep learning requires very large quantities of data in order to build up a statistical picture,” says Imperial College’s Murray Shanahan.

Source: The Guardian September 27, 2016 10:18 UTC