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How Clara Labs (YC S14) Is Using Humans to Build AI

blog.claralabs.com

1–10 of 34 posts

Re: How Clara Labs (YC S14) Is Using Humans to Build AI

#2
This is SO interesting! I am surprised by how companies are trying to solve AI problems... Machines normally take you 80-90% there, and using humans for that 10-20% left is an amazing idea. It's also a great monetization model for many companies.!!! Also, Clara is awesome :)

Re: How Clara Labs (YC S14) Is Using Humans to Build AI

#3
To me this seems like the right approach - either you start with some massive amount of data that's not quite adapted to the problem (think Google), you start with full automation and have to basically write the decision tree yourself, or you generate the appropriate labeled training data like this.

However, it seems like there are some scale issues if you start upmarket like Clara Labs has been. I wonder if there's benefit in having a cheaper more mass-market version as well that can be used to generate larger amounts of data and test algorithms better?

Re: How Clara Labs (YC S14) Is Using Humans to Build AI

#4
Would love to integrate the ML and context aspects of Clara into our existing assistant team. Curious if that's something that's doable, or if it's just a package deal of their trained operators + AI.

But yeah, basically awesome and everything we'd need. Being able to go even more in-house and specialize our personal assistant and equip them with augmented capabilities here would be even more awesome.

Re: How Clara Labs (YC S14) Is Using Humans to Build AI

#6
Reminds me of the writeup a few days ago about Google's machine emotional intelligence for email suggested replys - except Clara is doing it (and more) with a team the fraction of the size.

The business solution here is very clever. As an engineer, my instinct is to fully automate any system. Clara is a great example where the most effective answer is getting the 90% solution, then going the last mile with humans to bring it up to 99% (making that up) accuracy, with most of the same savings. Imagine similar solutions for customer support (especially over website chat bars. Some systems like this already exist.)

Re: How Clara Labs (YC S14) Is Using Humans to Build AI

#8
post #3

To me this seems like the right approach - either you start with some massive amount of data that's not quite adapted to the problem (think Google), you start with full automation and have to basically write the decision tree yourself, or you generate the appropriate labeled training data like this. However, it seems like there are some scale issues if you start upmarket like Clara Labs has been. I wonder if there's…

It's certainly possible. One advantage of our setup is that rather than getting ok -to- noisy labels from customers, our CRAs understand the end-goal of the application and generate pretty great data. We are also able to incentivize them to produce fewer errors.

Re: How Clara Labs (YC S14) Is Using Humans to Build AI

#9
post #2

This is SO interesting! I am surprised by how companies are trying to solve AI problems... Machines normally take you 80-90% there, and using humans for that 10-20% left is an amazing idea. It's also a great monetization model for many companies.!!! Also, Clara is awesome :)

We think it's a good idea too ;) Machines and humans truly have different talents: machines are great at memory, keeping track of state, distributing information while people are great at understanding subtle nuance in natural language.
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