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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

#21

Post by taeric »

reilly3000 wrote: post #17

This is the opposite of AI use cases in marketing. You are declaring a specific timeframe for your message delivery. That is not how a marketer should deploy AI. I haven’t been in any pitch meetings since AI assclownery took hold so I can’t comment on how the term is being abused. What I can say is that a model that used AI would take every parameter it could about each customer and determine the optimal time to sent…

I think the big problem with your example is that most companies just don't have something I want to talk with them about. For large stretches of the year. No amount of ai is going to change that I am not in the market for a car, as an example. Even biking gear is off limited sellability to me most years. Hard to know when I'm going to buy new booking shoes, unless you know when my shoes are going to go bad.

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

#23

Post by edraferi »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #7
kthejoker2 wrote: post #2

As 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?

Anytime you need to make sense of unstructured data like images or text and drive an automated business process off it.

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

#24

Post by zer00eyz »

reilly3000 wrote: post #17

This is the opposite of AI use cases in marketing. You are declaring a specific timeframe for your message delivery. That is not how a marketer should deploy AI. I haven’t been in any pitch meetings since AI assclownery took hold so I can’t comment on how the term is being abused. What I can say is that a model that used AI would take every parameter it could about each customer and determine the optimal time to sent…

Though your generally right, the article sets a tone in the first paragraph.

It is saying that if your looking for ML/AI solutions for marketing and you ARENT doing the basics already then your throwing good money after bad. You should START with some sql and targeted emails before you dive into a large and potentially expensive project.

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

#25

Post by threeseed »

hahla wrote: post #14
threeseed wrote: post #4

Who on earth are these people describing ? I've never heard of anyone hiring expensive Data Scientists, spinning up Spark/H2O clusters, building a data lake, doing a database offload to S3/HDFS all for a "select from orders table where basket size is the biggest" query. AI/ML doesn't even work like this. It's simply not designed for giving 100% accurate answers to highly structured queries.

These people are describing 99% of the Fortune 500 companies who have no idea what AI means other than hiring a team of data scientists that will hopefully solve all of their problems in the name of technology.

I've worked for half a dozen Fortune 500 sized companies within Data Science teams.

Nobody, repeat nobody is spending tens of millions on Data Science programs for answers to problems that a Data Analyst could already do.

If you know names please be specific but what you are saying is a bit ridiculous.

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

#27

Post by kahnjw »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #7
kthejoker2 wrote: post #2

As 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?

Forecasting and prediction. Specific example: given a high quality dataset, forecasting sales is a good use case for machine learning. Of course, you could do this with SQL as well, but again, given a good dataset and a complex domain like sales, some relatively simple models will be hard to beat with a 10 line SQL query.

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

#28

Post by threeseed »

jrs95 wrote: post #9
threeseed wrote: post #4

Who on earth are these people describing ? I've never heard of anyone hiring expensive Data Scientists, spinning up Spark/H2O clusters, building a data lake, doing a database offload to S3/HDFS all for a "select from orders table where basket size is the biggest" query. AI/ML doesn't even work like this. It's simply not designed for giving 100% accurate answers to highly structured queries.

People who don’t know what AI actually is and buying it anyways. I’ve actually seen this first hand. The developers/data scientists involved simply did what they were asked even though it didn’t make much sense (we had tried and failed to explain why this was a waste too many times and got nowhere) Although to be fair, this outcome was still an improvement. At least with using machine learning unnecessarily the data…

Nobody knows what AI is though.

Even Data Scientists couldn't tell you if it just means neutral networks or if it include ML techniques. There are technologies like AutoML which automate feature engineering but is that ML or AI. Not sure.

So I am not concerned whether people know AI/ML or not. What I have issue with is people thinking that you can 90% of AI/ML using SQL. Which makes no sense.

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

#29

Post by donatj »

I almost took a "big data" data scientist job about a year ago with a local company.

After talking to a number of their engineers, it became quite clear to me that instead of a data scientist, they just badly needed a DBA / someone with ownership and a complete vision of the data structure.

They had no foreign keys, poorly 'designed' indexes, and tons of redundant tables with no rhyme or reason to them.

They'd organically grown their database with hardly any review. They did not have big data, they just had a big mess. And wanted someone else to clean it up.

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

#30

Post by nkozyra »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #3

Companies have a large problem of having their data tucked away or inaccessible to the stakeholders. When people talk about AI / ML what they actually need is their data cleaned to the point where they can communicate to their stakeholders. Also, all of the companies who sell AI / ML as consultants are really good already at cleaning data. When companies actually hire data scientists what they typically do is clean d…

100%. What this all boils down to in 2018 is data. Data acquisition, data cleansing, data filing, etc. But what else is there, now? You're going to create a new, novel ANN network? Cool, can't wait to peruse your paper. Maybe someday it's considered groundbreaking. Right now it's not solving immediate problems. Immediate problems were solved with 1970s ideas + 2018's infrastructure.
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