eh. I built a lead gen system at a fortune 1000. The heuristic SQL version brought in 10M a year. The random forest version brings in 100M a year. It saw things we didn't
can you elaborate?
You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
101–110 of 331 posts
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#102My startup was approached by a corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment. Based on the attendee list from our meeting, which included very high up folks from the company, I felt good going in. They expressed interest in our technology that makes reading on screen easier [1], but they were surprised to learn that we didn't use machine learning to accomplish this. I indicated that it was actually quite ef…
I posted that link in slack and it's twitter:* meta content is really strange: Parade of Fans for Houston’s Funeral NEWARK - The guest list and parade of limousines with celebrities emerging from them seemed more suited to a red carpet event in Hollywood or New York than than a gritty stretch of Sussex Avenue near the former site of the James M. Baxter Terrace public housing project here. I found an example [1] with…
Wow, how embarrassing. Thanks for pointing this out. I have no idea how we didn't catch it sooner.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#103My startup was approached by a corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment. Based on the attendee list from our meeting, which included very high up folks from the company, I felt good going in. They expressed interest in our technology that makes reading on screen easier [1], but they were surprised to learn that we didn't use machine learning to accomplish this. I indicated that it was actually quite ef…
Can someone explain the dynamic that’s going on here? I somehow can believe that VCs are so stupid to be purely hype driven, so what is pushing them to make this their investment focus? Do they just jump on every bandwagon in the hope that one of them might pan out?
They invest in future potential. What you can do now is nearly irrelevant besides showing vision and competency. The next big thing isn't going to come from a couple of clever sql scripts.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#104My startup was approached by a corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment. Based on the attendee list from our meeting, which included very high up folks from the company, I felt good going in. They expressed interest in our technology that makes reading on screen easier [1], but they were surprised to learn that we didn't use machine learning to accomplish this. I indicated that it was actually quite ef…
If your code has even a single magical constant (I guess it likely has, if only because your code has to figure out whether a period is sentence-ending), you can and, now that it is cheap and easy, probably should use machine learning (a moniker that includes such algorithms as gradient descent) to optimize that constant. Also, if you ever have considered two code variants where one is a bit better in situation A and…
You don't need AI to find values for free parameters. Unless you consider all of statistics to be a subfield of AI.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your code has even a single magical constant (I guess it likely has, if only because your code has to figure out whether a period is sentence-ending), you can and, now that it is cheap and easy, probably should use machine learning (a moniker that includes such algorithms as gradient descent) to optimize that constant. Also, if you ever have considered two code variants where one is a bit better in situation A and…
You don't need AI to find values for free parameters. Unless you consider all of statistics to be a subfield of AI.
I personally consider all of modern AI (i.e. statistical pattern matching) to be a subfield of statistics. Mind you, I'm probably just a grumpy old man.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#106My startup was approached by a corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment. Based on the attendee list from our meeting, which included very high up folks from the company, I felt good going in. They expressed interest in our technology that makes reading on screen easier [1], but they were surprised to learn that we didn't use machine learning to accomplish this. I indicated that it was actually quite ef…
Great product idea! I'm glad people find it useful.
Hypotheses:
> corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment
They want to put money in your company to make sure they don't have to compete with you or compete with someone else who might buy you down the line.
> They kept prodding around on the ML stuff, and how we might be able to use ML to accomplish roughly the same thing.
They're looking for secret sauce, barriers, friction. Something patentable. Something to keep others out and keep them ahead. Perhaps something that they don't think they can do themselves or maybe rip off when they realize it's useful. Remember Flux?[0]
They're investment thesis makes sense from this perspective: they're thinking like classic, amoral businesses.
Also note that if your product is simple and popular enough, people will likely make free clones. You'll need to be a good steward to keep your value.
Best of luck!
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A bit of feedback: you need to be more transparent and up front about what how and why you're using analytics, and let people opt-in. I was a bit disconcerted to see you using Google Analytics in your extension without informing me.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#107While I see the author’s point, I fail to understand what any if this has to do with SQL. The problem ML solves isn’t querying databases, it’s making decisions. If a human came up with the idea “let’s lookup people X and send them email Y” and it works, great. But a human made that decision, and SQL is just a tool for making it happen. If you want to take the human out of the loop, SQL won’t save you.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#108As someone who sells both of these services, I can only add that it depends, and if you have a good dataset, it's trivial to write either one. But once you start having to account for noise or seasonality or autoregression or dynamic weights or non linear kernel spaces, pure SQL really starts to fall down on the job.
Curious. OP gave a few examples for Ecommerce where SQL will do fine. Can you give a few where ML will do something otherwise impossible or harder with SQL?
staying in business
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they wanted us to do something with NLP and ML, to make it syntactically-based. I happen to have studied linguistics and know how complex this would be — and of course it would have to be custom-built for every language. The current version, which just uses line position, works fine and is language-independent. Another explanation: they didn't actually know how they wanted us to us ML — they just knew they wa…
I do ML/NLP, and recently have been doing color related things. I think you are underestimating how useful NLP could be in your application. I tried out one of your test cases, and I did find it useful. However, I think that blending colors based on entity recognition along with your line based system could focus attention on important parts. Have a look at [1] (sorry for the long URL) and imagine the colors blending…
I don't disagree that NLP could be powerful, and I have thought about ways to make it syntactically aware.
But honestly the biggest barrier we face in adoption among licensees (platforms that would integrate our tech) is that they are simply uncomfortable with text that has colors in it. It's not about how much it helps any metrics (the things that NLP could improve) — it's just that most folks don't want to be early-adopters of crazy-looking tech.
Though I should note we do have some great licensees, especially in the education, impact, and accessibility markets.
Regardless, I'd love to chat with you further — please shoot me an email (contact@[domain]) if you're up for chatting about how we could deploy NLP as we develop.
Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts
#110Are SQL skills disappearing from companies? Could this be a reason people are reaching for more complicated solutions because they don't know what a good SQL database can do?