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I built an AI company to save my open source project

timefold.ai

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Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#101

Post by nialse »

vasco wrote: post #31
yorak wrote: post #28

Geoffrey, thanks for sharing your story with us. OR sure is a weird niche. Good enough algorithms for solving these problems have existed for decades1, but we still see low adoption and your 95% estimate of the companies not optimizing their operations rings true. Similarly to you, I spent a short while trying to sell VRP optimization with an API business model, and what dawned on me was that most companies do not ha…

If nobody does something in a whole industry perhaps it's because it's not a differentiating factor. Do you have a link to the Swedish company? It just sounds like typical "software engineers know better" story where they go bankrupt after a few years because turns out the important bits are in other parts of the business.

The company would probably be Airmee, they have a scheduled delivery at my door in an hour.

https://www.kth.se/en/om/innovation/alumner/airmee-levererar...

https://www.airmee.com/en/

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#102

Post by valiant55 »

I need to check this out. In a past life my primary role was scheduling a call center of up to two hundred seats (at our peak). I had built out a complicated network of spreadsheets that used historical data and future projections to mostly automate the process, so much so that I was able to move us from what was monthly schedule releases to quarterly and had a full on preference survey that each agent filled out. It still was a few days work going through the responses and actually compiling the final result but what once was a headache for my manager I turned into 10% if my role and was able to focus on delivering value elsewhere by streamlining data reporting.

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#103

Post by elcritch »

internet_points wrote: post #32

I love that GOFAI companies are also calling themselves AI, because seriously why not. If a pile of linear algebra (fittingly trained on The Pile) can be AI, then so can optimizers and solvers.

I've seen quite a number of sensor companies doing it for a couple of years. Their sensor uses a statistical algorithm, it's "AI"!

Really, it's hard to say it's not AI.

Glad to see an open source project gaining benefit from the AI hype train at least. :)

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#104

Post by dust3317 »

Excellent article. You certainly managed to synthesize the startup experience with Open-source (two very challenging sectors). Do you just gravitate towards mathematically wicked problems? :)

Like you experienced, a good product without a team and without revenue is simply not enough, no matter how good the idea. I have unfortunately been one of the 90% of startup failures to experience that brutal reality.

My next project with a few others is to make open source coding & development profitable. We want to keep advancing open source while also helping others to get paid for their efforts. We are still technically in stealth mode, but plan to be launching soon. Our website will be codebounty.ai (we don't yet have it fully built out yet). With that being said, if you are interested to participate as a sponsor, maintainer, or contributor we would love to hear from you about what you would like to see in this program: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmlxJHIqOlwr1Nw3q0... .

We would like to see it become a place where new coders can learn, develop skills, and get mentored by others. We would also like to have it as a way for others to have an income while looking for full time employment (rather than driving for uber). Heck, it could even become a recruiting tool for companies.

If you have ideas, I would love to hear from you so that we can help to make more amazing open source projecets like Timefold a more common reality!

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#106

Post by ge0ffrey »

WJW wrote: post #83
yorak wrote: post #28

Geoffrey, thanks for sharing your story with us. OR sure is a weird niche. Good enough algorithms for solving these problems have existed for decades1, but we still see low adoption and your 95% estimate of the companies not optimizing their operations rings true. Similarly to you, I spent a short while trying to sell VRP optimization with an API business model, and what dawned on me was that most companies do not ha…

I always assumed it was due to (a lack of) scale for most companies? 1% improvement in container planning for Maersk is hundreds of millions of dollars per year, so they can have an entire team dedicated to that. Meanwhile at the other end of the scale, 1% improvement of job scheduling at $DAYJOB probably wouldn't even pay for its own ongoing costs, let alone the costs of setting it up.

A 10% productivity gain is a lot for any company, regardless if they are operating a fleet of 50 or 50 000 vehicles.

However, the cost and risk to achieve that productivity gain is typically huge. Many Operations Research projects fail. And when they do, they are very expensive failures. "Managers getting fired" expensive.

With our technology, we're making OR projects easy and quick to put into production.

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#107

Post by ge0ffrey »

QuantumGood wrote: post #96
idiotsecant wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this story is far too soothing to the software engineering ego to be actually true! Generally real world problems are messy, hard, and full of human problems. It's a little aggravating when 'software engineers know everything' stories like this are taken at face value and reinforce that mistaken idea.

True stories like this happen, but generally only when a domain expert on the business side was incorporated from the beginning—and that may not be mentioned by the software side.

There is truth in this.

Without involving the human planners, the project won't succeed. We're empowering them, with PlanningAI assistance, so they can focus on what they planning must do, for who, instead of how it gets there. So when the plan goes off the rails - 5 people call in sick - they can get it back on the rails in seconds with Real-Time Planning.

The engineering work is only half the work, or less. Fitting the technology into the human processes is another big chunk. Half of my videos on youtube deal with such cases: Continuous Planning, Real-Time Planning, Non-distruptive Replanning, Pinning, ... Not code, not technology, but design patterns.

And even then, this is far from 100% of the solution. Technology and education is still not enough.

That human planner with 30 years of business knowledge in his/her head is still a critical: he/she will always need to tweak, oversee and sometimes overrule the planning solution in production.

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#108

Post by ge0ffrey »

imtringued wrote: post #98
ge0ffrey wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing your story too, Yorak. Yes, having in-house expertise to integration optimization into their existing tools is hard. Especially if they use low level solver APIs (especially if it's math equations). We're working making that easier with high-level REST APIs (Timefold Field Service Routing, etc). And with education (Timefold Academy) by creating videos and articles on how to integrate real-time plan…

Symbolic math equations isn't a low level solver API. That's the high level interface. A low level interface expects you to provide the optimization problems as raw matrices. What you're talking about is known as a problem reduction.

I would argue that inputting a loadBalance(sum(shift.duration)) function per employee is a higher level abstraction than inputting a quadratic math equation to accomplish the same thing.

Think Java/C++/Python vs Assembly.

Ironically, talking about problem reduction... most math equation based solver can't scale quadratic equations, so users "relax" the business constraints (to the point that projects fail in production).

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#110

Post by tailsdog »

Nice project!

I am wondering if there is a risk, as it is open source, that a company with bigger marketing spend starts offering timefold in the cloud, kind like AWS with Elasticsearch? Or is there a big enough moat with the models on your cloud platform to prevent this situation?

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