Some do, such as companies that produce software to help radiologists detect cancer.
Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
#22Facebook and Google use ML as a core part of their products? and they're some of the biggest companies in the world, so...
Right, but the ML they use is largely developed in-house. It's not part of a prepackaged ML "product" provided by an outside group.
Right, and it's only reasonable to expect that if ML is a core differentiator for them, it wouldn't be provided by an outside group.
Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
#23My general rule of thumb is that any AI/ML is a result of it being a solution to a pain point within existing product(s). Not having a product with a necessary scale or require the technical sophistication of AI/ML but pitching it as if it has it is imo a red flag. This I call premature optimization.
Another point is marketing. A ride sharing service like Uber or Lyft could easily market themselves as "using AI/ML to solve last mile transportation". There's reason to believe they have some ML teams that do amazing work to support the ride sharing product. Both above have paying customers.
Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
#24Most people that balk at the term A.I. seem to presume that intelligence is some capacity unique to humans. Intelligence is merely pattern matching and goal oriented planning, exactly what machine learning is doing today. Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.
The term "Intelligence" does not have a definition everyone agrees on but it surely is not "pattern matching". Machine learning today does little more than pattern matching and it is far from intelligence at a human level.
> Machine learning today does little more than pattern matching and it is far from intelligence at a human level.
I'm rather less confident about this than you may be. When I'm doing something that I could plausibly claim requires "intelligence", then it certainly doesn't really feel like I'm just doing pattern matching. But I'm increasingly of the view that our perception of our own mental processes is a poor guide to their reality. The likelihood that my intelligence really is just large scale pattern matching, even though it doesn't subjectively feel like that, seems quite high to me.
Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
#25I find it hard to wrap my head around this question because "AI" is a relative (and moving) target. Alexa would be considered advanced AI in the 90s, wouldn't it? Google Search or Facebook ad targeting might be, too. They certainly fit some definition of ML. It sounds like you're thinking of companies that are doing simple data analysis and calling it AI, right?
Also all the advanced image recognition/classification/manipulation that's powering a lot of Facebook's products. Definitely AI territory.
Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
#26Right now the whole AI/ML is basically just a buzz word everyone uses because it is popular to use.
In reality, a true AI/ML company is basically just using AI/ML to create services/solutions for existing issues.
Case in point: google is using ai/ml to improve their speech to text and text to speech services.
Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
#27Facebook and Google use ML as a core part of their products? and they're some of the biggest companies in the world, so...
Right, but the ML they use is largely developed in-house. It's not part of a prepackaged ML "product" provided by an outside group.
My experience is that applying the ML to a domain is 99/100ths of the job; once you've got some traction with well known methods it's time to develop techniques that address their failings. But, any company that's done the hard yards of getting something working is definitely adding value. A good example is NLP, there's no rocket science in building embeddings, but any company that can build a specialist embedding for an important domain (medicine, engineering, finance) has an interesting and useful artefact that might be worth paying for (probably not as much as they would like though).
Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
#28Most people that balk at the term A.I. seem to presume that intelligence is some capacity unique to humans. Intelligence is merely pattern matching and goal oriented planning, exactly what machine learning is doing today. Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.
"Intelligence is merely pattern matching and goal oriented planning" > ok you can talk about (parts) of cognition in that way, but it boils down to "we're all Turing machines" which is fine fine fine apart from the issue that what kind of turing machine doing what we do can fit into the soggy stuff in between our ears (as opposed to being able to model a conversation and yet the size of Jupiter with a run time of 2/3 the history of the universe). And there are parts that aren't covered by pattern matching and goal orientated planning such as goal generation and selection (accepting that if a pattern matcher is doing that -somehow - we have to explain how the pattern matcher "knows" to do it)
Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
#29Yes they do, it's generally smoke and mirrors. But by being buzzword complient, party like it is 1999. Ai/ml is a cute way to fleece clients for 99.999 percent of the time. Ml/ai from the consumer side is a joke.
Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?
#30The most difficult thing to do is to pitch a product instead of a technology . This is more accentuated by the fact that we're mostly engineers and we're not good at pitching benefits vs features. But I can assure you that customers do appreciate the AI component, especially when explained to them. I do a LOT of education in commercial meetings and demos. Some of our customers we invited to our offices for a more in-…
You are incredibly correct. If you are pitching the tech vs the product it's game over.