It was a decade or so ago in Madison that artificial intelligence, or AI, first hit Nhi Le’s radar — except it wasn’t commonly referred to as “AI” yet.
Le, whose family emigrated from Vietnam to the United States in 1994 when she was 7, was studying for a PhD in materials science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was also working with the startup investor gener8tor, which was helping a Madison startup called DataChat. According to a 2017 Xconomy article, DataChat allowed users to “retrieve data from different sources by typing a simple query into a text box.”
“At the time,” Le says, “they were struggling to articulate in layperson terms what it was they were doing. Now, you would just say it is AI.”…