Dive Brief:

• A new startup is paying subject matter experts (SMEs) in a broad number of areas to answer questions or perform certain tasks in order to collect the information companies need to train their new artificial intelligence systems, Bloomberg reports. After all, "There's an arms race in training data" for AI, Mighty AI Chief Executive Officer Matt Bencke told Bloomberg.
• Seattle-based Mighty AI leverages more than 100,000 SMEs in 155 countries to provide data or perform tasks. Intel, Google Ventures and Accenture Venture are all new investors, and Intel and Accenture are also partnering with the company.
• "What we like about Mighty AI is that for a lot of our customers the first step is annotating data — they need that before they can build on top of our chips and software for AI," said Ken Elefant, Intel Capital managing director for software and security. 

Dive Insight:

You can’t launch an AI system if you don’t have the data to "train" it first. But if you don’t have the data, how do you get it?

Some companies try to collect and label data themselves, which is extremely time-consuming, while others might try crowdsourcing software to accomplish the task, according to Bencke. But Mighty AI’s "Training Data as a Service" can also help companies get the data they need.

Such approaches may soon take off as the race to deploy AI gathers speed. Advanced systems are useless unless they are trained and prepared to deal with data in specific verticles.  Tractica recently projected AI will be a $37 billion industry by 2025.