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Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

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Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

#51

Post by orasis »

posedge wrote: post #20
orasis wrote: post #7

Most 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.

I’ve meditated a lot and come to the clear conclusion that this whole thing is just pattern matching and pattern generation. We’re not that special.

Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

#52

Post by montenegrohugo »

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #48
montenegrohugo wrote: post #31

We use DL at my company. It's used to help and suggest the people in data input what some of the inputs should be. It's been getting better over time as it collects more data points. Apart from that, I'm also personally responsible for implementing DL for data anomaly detection. So yes, ML/DL is very much over-hyped right now, but it has real world tangible benefits. It is being used in multiple fields and I believe…

Hi, what services do you use for data annotation? We've been using DL for some projects of ours and had to set up a data annotation team (remote) to get more control over the labeling process. We are looking to see if others might be interested in utilizing a service like ours, which will also help the people we've acquired gainfully employed. At present we are mainly looking at taking on small projects. If this is o…

Hi Chaitanya,

That's quite an interesting project you have. Unfortunately probably not really relevant to my use case since two skills are necessary:

1. (good) control of the native language (not english) 2. Understanding and experience at the subject field

I don't want to give too many details but the workflow basically consists of taking a poorly labeled entry and expanding/filling out the missing fields. To do this you both need to speak the language and have some experience in the field.

As for the data anomaly detection I don't do any data annotation

Anyways, sorry it's not really relevant to my case but good luck, I think it's a great project that certainly has a lot of potential. Maybe in a future stage you might be interested with partnering up with a platform like coursera to form your workers to do slightly more complex data annotation jobs (like mine).

Regards

Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

#53

Post by matt_the_bass »

At my company we try to sell a product that solves a customers need. Some of the things we’re doing as part of the solution we chose for the customers product could be called AI. But honestly, our customers don’t really care _how_ we solve their problem. They would be happy buying magic wands if that would solve their problem.

So sibling comments mentioned that some companies struggle with selling products not technologies. I agree.

Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

#54

Post by laughingman2 »

I think legal contract analysis is an area where machine learning is actually needed for core features to work.

Some products like https://www.contractstandards.com/ are beginning to appear. They need document classification, text sentence level classification, entailment, clustering are all necessary for making contract analysis easier for the user.

And these products need good domain experts to identify pain points where ml can help.

In ml as API side, one potentially valuable product suite I have seen is https://aylien.com/text-api/ . Even they are building additional products like news analysis.

But I am little sceptical on whether ml as API can scale in terms of addressing specific task-specific nuances needed for products building upon them.

Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

#55

Post by ChaitanyaSai »

montenegrohugo wrote: post #52
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, what services do you use for data annotation? We've been using DL for some projects of ours and had to set up a data annotation team (remote) to get more control over the labeling process. We are looking to see if others might be interested in utilizing a service like ours, which will also help the people we've acquired gainfully employed. At present we are mainly looking at taking on small projects. If this is o…

Hi Chaitanya, That's quite an interesting project you have. Unfortunately probably not really relevant to my use case since two skills are necessary: 1. (good) control of the native language (not english) 2. Understanding and experience at the subject field I don't want to give too many details but the workflow basically consists of taking a poorly labeled entry and expanding/filling out the missing fields. To do thi…

Thanks for your response! Partnering with Coursera is an intriguing idea; will look into that. Thank you

Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

#56

Post by darrin »

duchenne wrote: post #33

In the first startup I created, we made ML-based underwriting and credit scoring models for several banks and insurance companies. The results were astonishing. For instance, one insurance company improved its profit by ~70M$/year, thanks to our model (according to our client's report from actual data, not simulation). But, it was actually tough to sell, because of several factors. 1) The internal risk team did not r…

How do you price a product like that before it has a track record? I'd imagine a high up-front sticker price is a deal killer, and it's probably not practical to tie it to profit (which may have too many other factors in it anyway).

Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

#57

Post by JBCaptain »

vonnik wrote: post #35

AI is not a business model. It's usually just a component in a larger solution. You need to get a lot of other things right for AI to produce value, notably around the data you gather and pre-process. For most startups, that data is hard to access, and without it, their algorithms won't have much to train on. While there are a few horizontal ML/AI/data science vendors, most AI is invisible, a component in some vertic…

Hi There - Could you please clarify what you mean by "horizontal vs. vertical" solutions/vendors? Maybe you could provide an example of each of those?

Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

#58

Post by vonnik »

JBCaptain wrote: post #57
vonnik wrote: post #35

AI is not a business model. It's usually just a component in a larger solution. You need to get a lot of other things right for AI to produce value, notably around the data you gather and pre-process. For most startups, that data is hard to access, and without it, their algorithms won't have much to train on. While there are a few horizontal ML/AI/data science vendors, most AI is invisible, a component in some vertic…

Hi There - Could you please clarify what you mean by "horizontal vs. vertical" solutions/vendors? Maybe you could provide an example of each of those?

Horizontal means platforms, frameworks and tooling that are agnostic to the industry they're applied to.

Skymind is a machine-learning operations company (one of several): we help businesses train, deploy, monitor and update AI models. The same software is used by telecoms, finance, e-commerce and automotive companies -- horizontal.

There are countless vertical specific companies: e.g. Merlon applies ML to anti-money laundering.

Re: Ask HN: Do AI/ML companies actually have real customers?

#59

Post by lewisjoe »

apexkid wrote: post #50
lewisjoe wrote: post #41

We use DL for our grammar checker in Zoho Writer ( https://zohowriter.com ). We don't advertise our product as "The next generation intelligent word processor". It's just one of many features that's best done with AI. I like it that way. Pitching utility is so much better than pitching how we built something with blockchain, AI and IOT combined ;)

I hate to see that I need to login just to take a demo of your product. I find it a bad approach. First let the user checkout your product without intrusion.

We do have a trial editor without sign-in. Use this https://writer.zoho.com/writer/publiceditor.im
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