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You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

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Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#141

Post by collyw »

rorykoehler wrote: post #103
xevb3k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither will the next big failure.

What has AI really given us so far? Amazon / Youtube recommendations and some self driving cars that have crashed in unexpected ways. (Have they managed to debug that yet?)

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#142

Post by BenoitP »

didibus wrote: post #75

What the article describes is called an "expert system" and is what AI in the enterprise used to look like. Basically, you try to capture the instinct of a great salesmen by formalizing it into computer logic. Often that's done with rules like in the article. It works good, but has its limits. The finer reasoning of human judgement are often not expressable, people don't know why they made that decision. Making it ha…

> The downside is it now similarly becomes challenging to formalize the machine's intuition

Tooting my own horn here: I'm taking up this challenge professionally. There are new methods being discovered to extract interpretations for humans out of a model[1][2][3]; and I'll gladly work and provide advice and implementations on this, as an independent contractor.

Having an interpretable/explicable ML pipeline helps in:

* Knowing what drives your customers' buying patterns

* Knowing where to look for signals closer to the root, helping go from correlation to causation

* Orienting your marketing messages. You don't engage users the same way if they're a repeat buyer or a "hot now" lead

* Concentrating on "would buy our product but won't because of X", which is where the market share battle lies; as opposed to "definitely would buy" and "definitely wouldn't buy", which are cases where you have little influence on.

* Listing buying patterns exhaustively, enabling you to discover low noise niches

* Providing auditable explanations of the decisions the model has taken, if it has been required legally

Here is my email: pro@benoit.paris

[1] https://distill.pub/2018/building-blocks/

[2] https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelli...

[3] http://interpretable.ml/

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#143

Post by coldtea »

gnicholas wrote: post #40

My 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 indicated that it was actually quite effective without ML, and that it was easier to explain to users this way. They kept prodding around on the ML stuff, and how we might be able to use ML to accomplish roughly the same thing.

Just call what you do ML.

IBM, for one, never shied from calling any old BS "AI" and branding it Watson.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#144

Post by blowski »

asfdsfggtfd wrote: post #127
gnicholas wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the feedback! Regarding analytics, I think this is some A/B testing, which I don't think is even active in the current version (though still in the sources). More importantly, we don't tie GA or any other usage analytics to individual users. We basically just use it to see where the extension is used and where people are blacklisting sites. We use this data to make the extension run better on more sites. W…

> we don't tie GA or any other usage analytics to individual users You may not identify individual users but Google probably do... > we should put this somewhere more prominent You should make it opt in by default. Or stop doing it!

IANAL, but have worked on GDPR a fair bit.

Google Analytics is already GDPR compliant, as long as:

* you are not pushing any unencrypted customer data to them in the clear

* you're careful regards who has access to your Google Analytics data

You can (and most businesses will) argue that you need to know how your website is used. It's a completely standard practice that doesn't put user privacy at risk. Moreover, Google has already offered an opt-out to Google Analytics globally, and you would be covered by that. As such, you don't need them to opt-in.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#145

Post by treydey »

sixdimensional wrote: post #34

Well, we are in the peak of a wave of hype about AI/ML, maybe even just past that peak. Many fundamental technological advancements in the field of AI/ML have sort of coalesced together at the current time to form a strong feature set that can be more broadly applied by a wider audience, not just those hardcore computer scientists who invented the technology. I've been in the thick of this previously, facing a comple…

I disagree that this is the peak of AI/ML. Companies are desperately looking for PhDs in AI that can fulfill their business needs. I think we're about to see a lot more applications of AI/ML.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#146

Post by collyw »

firasd wrote: post #15
rokhayakebe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Product Recommendations. Trending Items (Top items being sold this week as opposed to last week, while filtering out items that are generally popular.) Much easier with Elasticsearch than SQL https://www.elastic.co/blog/significant-terms-aggregation

That's not really ML.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#147

Post by azernik »

gnicholas wrote: post #65
azernik wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good to keep market-specific language to market-specific silos, but you need to put some little (milquetoast, plain-info) bit up front. Otherwise you turn off every market.

Totally agree. Would you say that GP's suggested language is sufficiently plain? I would worry that it would turn off publishing partners, who want to hear things like "increase audience engagement" not "read easier". Maybe something generic like "improve focus while reading", which could appeal to individuals and publishing partners? Appreciate your taking the time to share feedback — this sort of stuff is not somet…

I don't really have a good feel for any of those customers, so... ^_^

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#148

Post by collyw »

jmpeax wrote: post #126

> select from orders table where basket size is the biggest. We will then email a nice thank you note to this customer and attach a small coupon/voucher.... ...Guess what? 99% of these people became repeat customers Sounds like you definitely need some ML there, in the form of statistics. Was there a difference in probability of repeat customers between sending and not sending the voucher? Was there a difference betw…

Why couldn't you do that in SQL, sounds simple enough to me?

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#149

Post by collyw »

voltagex_ wrote: post #110

Are 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?

I blame the NoSQl nonsense from a few years ago. "Relational databases don't scale" apparently.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#150

Post by JepZ »

gnicholas wrote: post #40

My 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…

That is just how larger corporations work.

They probably decided they wanted to be part of that future market about AI and therefore want to invest in AI/ML startups. Someone sold your company internally as being a nice fit for the AI portfolio, but when you answered the question about ML with "No" the door was shut.

From someone who makes large trade deals as his daily business, I learned "Never say 'No'" (during a negotiation). In most cases, it is better to be diplomatic. So might have been better off with something like:

'So far we had decent results without ML, but we are constantly evaluating options to improve our technology, which includes optimizations based on machine learning.'

That way, some might hear '[...] includes optimizations based on machine learning.', while you just said 'we do not use machine learning' ;-)

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