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

I have seen some specialized image classifiers find a market in analyzing scientific instrument data in academia, outside of that literally nothing else.

But there sure are a lot of stories about adversarial bayesian multi-model deep net retention markov cycle consistent custom asic demystified robust perturbations.

The speech recognition and predictive text on my phone is still awful.

I 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?

What do you mean exactly ? I've been running a machine learning / reinforcement / optimization service company since 2015 and our customers range from the largest EU corps to small and mid size startups. If you mean how many customers use AI/DL/RL in production right now, it's a smaller percentage of our customers, around 25% I'd say, but growing, slowly. Most is about research roadmaps and testing this testing that, though these can be yezr long projects.

DL integration into or as a replacement to pieces of software stacks, plus long term model updates, measurements, testing and avoiding regressions (very hard, think of ensuring all past samples are similarly predicted as before after a model update, that's beyond simply improving the accuracy) is difficult and standard practice is building up slowly.

Uptake has real (paying) customers specifically for their ML based solutions.

Agreed. Google Search encompasses some of the biggest ideas of AI.