IDG Contributor Network: Machine intelligence: Build your own vs. as-a-service

Fans of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” may recall the plotline earlier this season in which Erlich Bachman secures $200,000 in VC funding for See Food, a camera app that recognizes various kinds of food and instantly surfaces useful information, such as nutritional data.Bachman is 5% technologist and 95% charlatan, give or take, so naturally there’s a hitch: See Food doesn’t exist. The funding is the result of a misunderstanding that Bachman quickly compounded into a lie. A