Chris Nicholson (entrepreneur)

Chris V. Nicholson
Born Christian V. Nicholson
(1975-09-15) September 15, 1975
Billings, Montana
Residence San Francisco
Nationality American
Alma mater Deep Springs College
Occupation entrepreneur
Known for Skymind, FutureAdvisor, The New York Times
Title CEO of Skymind
Website Deeplearning4j web site

Chris Nicholson (born September 15, 1975) is an American entrepreneur and writer. He is the co-founder and CEO of the artificial intelligence/deep learning company Skymind and co-creator of the open source framework Deeplearning4j.[1][2][3][4][5]

Career

Nicholson served as head of communications and recruiting for almost two years at the Sequoia Capital-backed startup, FutureAdvisor. FutureAdvisor is a robo-advisor that was acquired by BlackRock for a reported $150 million to $200 million in 2015.[6][7]

Nicholson co-founded Skymind in late 2014 with Adam Gibson. Skymind was admitted to Y Combinator's Winter 2016 batch and raised a seed round later that year from investors such as Tencent, Ron Conway's SV Angel, Ray Lane's Greatpoint Ventures, Google's Amit Singhal and Krishna Bharat, Joe Montana's Liquid2 Ventures and Muse's Matthew Bellamy.[8][9][10] He is based the Bay Area.

Journalism and writing

Nicholson wrote for The New York Times Company for more than five years, reporting and editing for both The New York Times and the late International Herald-Tribune in Paris, France and Hong Kong while covering technology and finance.[11] He also served as mergers and acquisitions editor for Bloomberg News and reported for both the news service and the magazine Bloomberg Businessweek.[12] His writing on technology has appeared in Pacific Standard, TechCrunch, Pando Daily, Mattermark and The Next Web.[13][14][15][16]

Early life and education

A fourth-generation Montanan, Nicholson was born in Billings, Montana and grew up in Helena, Montana, where he attended Helena High School.

Nicholson attended Deep Springs College, the all-male, tuition-free school near Bishop, California where students govern themselves, select each incoming cohort and hire and fire the faculty. He graduated in economics from the American University of Paris, studied Islamism with Gilles Kepel at Sciences-Po, and micro-finance with Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Teaching and speaking

Nicholson is frequently quoted and speaks publicly on such topics as artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning trends in technology, and public relations.[17][18][19] [20][21] [22] [23] [24] [25][26][27] [28][29]

Of Elon Musk's plans to mitigate the risk of SuperIntelligence, Wired quoted him as saying "Thinking about AI is the cocaine of technologists: it makes us excited, and needlessly paranoid."[30]

References

  1. ↑ "Skymind Profile". Crunchbase. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  2. ↑ http://deeplearning4j.org/about.html
  3. ↑ Motley, Josiah (October 15, 2016). "Interview with the man who's bringing scalable, deep learning to businesses". The Next Web. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  4. ↑ King, Rachael. "Orange Tests Deep-Learning Software to Identify Fraud". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  5. ↑ Metz, Cade. "The Mission to Bring Google's AI to the Rest of the World". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  6. ↑ Foley, Stephen. "BlackRock buys 'robo-adviser' to woo millennials". The Financial Times. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  7. ↑ "Bankrate Contributing Reporter bio". Bankrate. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  8. ↑ Dwoskin, Elizabeth. "China is flooding Silicon Valley with cash. Here's what can go wrong.". Washington Post. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  9. ↑ Constine, Josh. "The top 7 startups from Y Combinator Winter '16 Demo Day 1". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  10. ↑ Mannes, John. "Skymind raises $3M to bring its Java deep-learning library to the masses". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  11. ↑ Nicholson, Chris. "Recent and archived work by Chris V. Nicholson for The New York Times". The New York Times. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  12. ↑ Nicholson, Chris. "Recent and archived work by Chris V. Nicholson for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  13. ↑ Nicholson, Chris. "Machine learning can fix Twitter, Facebook, and maybe even America". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  14. ↑ Nicholson, Chris. "Recent and archived work by Chris V. Nicholson for Pando Daily". Pando Daily. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  15. ↑ Nicholson, Chris. "Rise of the Robot Artist". Pacific Standard. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  16. ↑ Nicholson, Chris. "Blood, Sweat and Years: Raising Money As A Deep Learning Startup". Mattermark. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  17. ↑ "AI Disruption: Market Opportunities & Threats". AI World Expo. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  18. ↑ Metz, Cade. "Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  19. ↑ Clark, Jack. "Google Sprints Ahead in AI Building Blocks, Leaving Rivals Wary"Paid subscription required. Bloomberg. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  20. ↑ Metz, Cade. "OpenAI Joins Microsoft on the Cloud's Next Big Front: Chips". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  21. ↑ Bergen, Mark. "Apple Hires an Artificial Intelligence Expert From Nvidia. Is He Going to Work on Self-Driving Cars?". Recode. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  22. ↑ Metz, Cade. "AI Pioneer Yoshua Bengio Is Launching Element AI, a Deep Learning Incubator". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  23. ↑ Metz, Cade. "The Guy Who Taught AI to 'Remember' Is Launching a Startup". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  24. ↑ Metz, Cade. "Google's Hand-fed AI Now Gives Answers, Not Just Search Results". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  25. ↑ Metz, Cade. "Google Just Open Sourced TensorFlow, Its Artificial Intelligence Engine". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  26. ↑ Nicholson, Chris. "PR for Startups: Reporter-Oriented PR". YouTube. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  27. ↑ Metz, Cade. "In a Huge Breakthrough, Google's AI Beats a Top Player at the Game of Go". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  28. ↑ Metz, Cade. "The Best AI Still Flunks 8th Grade Science". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  29. ↑ Motley, Josiah (December 26, 2016). "We chat with deep learning company, Skymind, about the future of AI". The Next Web. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  30. ↑ Metz, Cade. "Elon Musk's Billion-Dollar AI Plan Is About Far More Than Saving the World". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
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