I wrote a book in 2005 that suggested the military wouldn't invent AI first. Instead, it would be the financial sector. I reasoned that as more and more humans come online through mobile devices, more and more data would be generated: video, audio, social, geospatial, and other domains yet to be popularized. (Looking at you, voxel clouds!)
Eventually, we would generate hundreds of exabytes per second. I reasoned that Moore's Law would hit a point where quantum problems with heat would slow it down, forcing transistor counts to scale horizontally (via clouds and specialization) instead of through innovation at the atomic scale.
This means while storage prices go down, processing costs to extract first move advantage shoot through the roof. Unlike their Soviet counterparts, the West would not be able to hire half of the population to analyze the data. It couldn't even hire 200% of the population to analyze that pipeline.
Thus, financial markets start to tackle the problem one bite at a time to find foo