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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

#211

Post by jrq »

I thoroughly enjoyed this post, so maybe I'm biased.

I think AI is extremely overhyped and under performant. In fact, I think a major strength of AI is founded in the technical ignorance of certain project managers or decision makers. The type of person who doesn't appreciate the simplistic elegance of sql+bash/cron for simple tasks is the person who will bite a pitch for AI customer retention strategy. Customers are people. Business is people. You don't need a rack of gpus to understand why sending someone an email who has a saved cart is a good idea. It's common sense. It doesn't matter if we can force machines through trillions of operations to vaguely capture a customer pattern of a guy at a console can write it by hand in five minutes.

(not always, I know, I work in finance so a lot of my business IS machines and not people, but you catch my drift)

I'm pro-AI research, and anti-AI hype train. They're computers. They're objects. They're not us yet. Consider the magnitude of the AI research market, which is tens of billions, and compare that to what they are actually capable of doing relative to human performance.

/rant

Maybe HN skews my perception on what the public tech enthusiast's perception on AI is...

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

#212

Post by jfz »

asfdsfggtfd wrote: post #172
blowski wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Goog…

This isn't about law it is about ethics. I wouldn't like it if someone followed me around meatspace with a clipboard all day. I don't like it online either.

That's not the best analogy - it's more like someone has two chairs in their waiting room and they note which chair is more popular among people waiting, so they can replace the worse chair with a copy of the better one.

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

#213

Post by 40four »

ashelmire wrote: post #200
40four wrote: post #177

I don't get this article at all. The author does not really back up their argument with any examples of ML. What in the world does common marketing practice & seemingly basic SQL queries have to do with AI/ML? What am I missing here? To me, this just sounds like a "Get off my lawn" type of rant. "Why do we need the newfangled AI when we still have good ole' SQL & bash!(waving fist in the air)" On the other hand comme…

Data cleaning is reeeally messy. It requires a lot of training data to get a system that does even a bad job of it automatically. So you still end up needing a lot of clean data, and getting the system to that point probably isn’t worth it if you’re not one of the biggest tech companies (you can spend time creating a system to clean the data or just clean the data). But your other points are spot on. This article is…

I see what you're saying about cleaning the data. This is something I'm very unfamiliar with, so good to know!

Yeah I think the article is garbage too, makes me wonder why it gained so much traction? The argument/ topic are not developed at all.

I guess the point they were going for is there are people who want to use ML because it's 'trendy' or something, and simpler solutions would suffice. I could see that being true, but this article is BAD. I hate seeing low quality articles get rewarded.

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

#214

Post by crabasa »

Back in 1999 I worked at an early web consultancy that built apps for clients on top of Oracle. We used their DB + a programming language called PL/SQL.

There was a feature of Oracle called SOUNDEX which was magical. Here's an example from their docs page [1]:

    SELECT last_name, first_name
    FROM hr.employees
    WHERE SOUNDEX(last_name)= SOUNDEX('SMYTHE');
This query will return all people with a last name that sounds like 'Smythe', including 'Smith' and 'Smithe'.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14200/funct...

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

#215

Post by bo1024 »

sverhagen wrote: post #121
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…

Newbie question: would you not design ML systems to be able to explain themselves? Alike: hey, query planner, what's your query plan?

This is often called "interpretable machine learning" and it's an active area of research. By default, ML systems just make predictions; they don't explain anything. And it's not obvious how to get explanations from them.

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

#216

Post by msumpter »

crabasa wrote: post #214

Back in 1999 I worked at an early web consultancy that built apps for clients on top of Oracle. We used their DB + a programming language called PL/SQL. There was a feature of Oracle called SOUNDEX which was magical . Here's an example from their docs page [1]: SELECT last_name, first_name FROM hr.employees WHERE SOUNDEX(last_name)= SOUNDEX('SMYTHE'); This query will return all people with a last name that sounds lik…

I've used similar phonetic algos in Excel to deduplicate CRM data during corporate acquisitions, it always seemed like the source data was hopelessly duplicated, but running a few of theses algos against the data, and then providing the 'best guesses' to the sales team to then do the final massaging of which accounts are truly duplicate or should be left alone.

Soundex is very simple but works well, calculating a strings Jaro–Winkler distance also helped.

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

#217

Post by dvogel »

halflings wrote: post #116
guy98238710 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need AI to find values for free parameters. Unless you consider all of statistics to be a subfield of AI.

Why use the term "AI" when the GP specifically used the less ambiguous Machine Learning? Machine Learning = statistics + linear algebra + computer science, mostly. Naive Bayes and Graphical Models are pure statistics, but they are mostly used for toy problems. Machine Learning scales these approaches to high dimensionality problems, and tasks where data is abundant.

AI and ML have different goals, which sometimes overlap. The goal of ML is to discover relationships in data that can only be (easily) observed by a machine. That usually serves as decision support data for a human decision maker or another more conventional algorithm. This is usually based on an entire data set at once. Accuracy and precision are valued over quickness and robustness.

AI is about substituting human decision makers or other conventional computer decision algorithms. AI is used for situational decision making. It needs to be quick (like the conventional algorithms) while also recognizing the nuance and multi-dimemaional nature of a lot of decisions. Robustness and quickness are often valued more than precision.

IOW the GP is only using ML for everything because it is a buzzword.

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

#218

Post by duckqlz »

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…

Is there a white paper or a clinical study to back up the claims on bee reader? I have read numerous studies claiming the exact opposite especially on a light projecting surface. I personally found the colour changing on each line to be extremely distracting and straining on my eyes. Furthermore, this seems like a bad joke for someone who is colour blind. Finally, VCs asking for ML are really asking how your technology fits in to the general future. With a script that reads line length and changes text between 3 colours, let’s be honest, I could have made beeReader when I was 10. Perhaps the VCs were initially wow’d by how profound you believed your product to be but then were underwhelmed by the tech (I’m guessing that’s why the individual page is burried). And if any publishers are in talks with you about using this in printed media (welcome to imaginary land) just keep nodding to what ever they say take their money and run.

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

#219

Post by nkozyra »

leblancfg wrote: post #204
nkozyra wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A word against hasty generalisation - just because you don't interact with it on a daily basis doesn't mean it isn't being worked on elsewhere. There is an increasing number of ML-first companies out there. They are solving problems like object detection, portfolio strategy optimization, medical diagnosis, etc. Things that are 100% not possible to do with just SQL and Bash, and much less expensive than to have humans…

My point is less that everything can be done with SQL, but that most of what people are doing is based on things possible 10, 20, 40 years ago. This leaves ml engineers dealing more with software modeling than ml modeling.

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

#220

Post by purerandomness »

adriand wrote: post #170
JepZ wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should never mislead a potential investor. Why would you want an investor who is misaligned with your core technology/strategic direction?

How is this misleading?
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