Throughout history there are many cases of the lone tinkerer who achieves the breakthrough going up against much better funded adversaries.
Take the case of the Wright Brothers who faced two well funded adversaries. Samuel Pierpont Langley had a chair at Harvard, worked at the Smithsonian and had among others funding him $50K from the US War Department. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was an avid aviation enthusiast and an already wealthy man. One of Bell's assistants was Glenn Curtiss who went on to found his own plane company.
Who would bet on two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio? No one, yet they were the first to fly.
The first popular microcomputer would surely come from IBM or HP yet it didn't. Two guys in a Cupertino garage built it and neither of them was a college graduate.
This guy may fail but I am not going to bet against him. In fact I hope they televise the race between the Comma and the Tesla. I'll bring the popcorn.
Tracing the Wright's development process, it's the first example I know of of a directed research and development program. The Wrights formulated a clear goal, identified the problems needing solutions, developed a series of prototypes aimed at proving each solution, did laboratory experiments to resolve others, invented physical theories to resolve still more, carefully documented their progress, etc.
I.e. they did much more than simply throw some ideas and parts together and see what stuck, like every other contemporary experimenter.
I agree, but the Wright's went counter to common thought at the time. Like Peter Thiel's favorite question, what do you believe that few else do?
Ever since I played around with Prolog in the nineties I came to believe, just like digital eventually triumphed over analog, that neural networks will eventually triumph over rule sets based software. I did not know when it will become apparent, but I firmly believe that it is coming.
Take the case of the Wright Brothers who faced two well funded adversaries. Samuel Pierpont Langley had a chair at Harvard, worked at the Smithsonian and had among others funding him $50K from the US War Department. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was an avid aviation enthusiast and an already wealthy man. One of Bell's assistants was Glenn Curtiss who went on to found his own plane company.
Who would bet on two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio? No one, yet they were the first to fly.
The first popular microcomputer would surely come from IBM or HP yet it didn't. Two guys in a Cupertino garage built it and neither of them was a college graduate.
This guy may fail but I am not going to bet against him. In fact I hope they televise the race between the Comma and the Tesla. I'll bring the popcorn.