Appier & AI with Chih-Han Yu

Chih-Han Yu, the co-founder and CEO of Appier joined us in a conversation to discuss the journey, team and products behind his company, Appier that focused on artificial intelligence with leading investors from Sequoia Capital to SoftBank Group. We discussed his perspectives on AI and its impact to society and where the field is moving in the next one year.

Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with time-stamps included):

• Chih-Han Yu (LinkedIn), Co-founder and CEO of Appier [0:38]
  • How do you start your career? [1:11]
  • In your career journey so far, what are the interesting lessons learnt? [4:45]
• Appier (Crunchbase, Facebook, LinkedIn and @GoAppier) [5:57]
  • Founded by Chih-Han Yu, Joe Su, and Winnie Lee. Started in 2012, currently in series C and raised a total of over US$82M from various investors, most notable: Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Group, Naver and LINE. Not to mention Alibaba (through WI Harper), Temasek (through Pavilion Capital) and EDBI.
  • What is the mission and vision of Appier?  [6:40]
  • What is the backstory behind your company Appier? [7:05]
  • Who are behind the team in Appier given you have made a couple of high profile hires, for example, Sean Chu from Microsoft, Junde Yu from App Annie & Charles Ng from Coupang. [11:22]
  • Can you give us an insight into the AI technology that you use in your products? [12:40]
  • What kind of algorithms does Appier adopt, for example, supervised or unsupervised learning and are the business data different? [15:00]
  • As I understand that Appier is an AI startup that helps enterprises to solve their business problems, can you discuss your product: the Appier Axion platform or other services and what it does to address the problem? [16:24]
  • Can you provide some examples to how Appier has helped enterprises in different verticals (please state 3 examples preferably in different verticals)? [19:43]
• Perspectives on AI [21:32]
  • What are the key developments will be for AI in the next 12 months? [21:43]
  • One of the interesting aspects of leveraging on AI technology is that it makes predictions based on existing data, what I am interested to know is that there are cases where it might over-predict and how does Appier compensate on cases of such? [24:16]
  • A lot of people are talking about the pros and cons of AI lately, with Andrew Ng who is positive about the technology and its applications and Elon Musk on the other end worried about their uses. Where do you see AI as a technology and its impact to society? [26:23]
• Closing [28:15]
  • How do my audience find you?

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The show is hosted by Bernard Leong (@bernardleong & weibo) and are sponsored by Ideal Workspace (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) with their new Altizen Desk on Indiegogo (Twitter, Facebook, Medium). Also check out Ideal Workspace’s new standing desk, Altizen and sign up for their mailing list. Sound credits for the intro music: Taro Iwashiro, “The Beginning” from Red Cliff Soundtrack.