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Comment by fizzbatter | Hacker News Reader

Man, i really love wit.ai, one of the coolest projects i've worked with. Unfortunately, these days i'm becoming jaded to X as a Service. Things like hosting or databases as a service are quantifiable, i have an idea of how much effort it takes me to migrate away... but AI? Especially the cool AI flavored NLP that wit.ai offers - it's just too hard to migrate away from for me.

With that said, i understand how hard doing this in a home baked way could be. I think i just won't be happy until we have repositories of standardized ai training sets or baked results (forgive any pseudo terms). It just feels like these days, using awesome AI services means cementing yourself into the service, and making their service stronger as you increase their datasets and training.

As much as i really do love wit.ai, i just don't want to use these types of services unless my backs against a wall.

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(cofounder of Wit.ai here) Thanks for your kind words :) I understand your concerns, here is my take.

X as a service allows you to get X with a lot less efforts. It allows you to understand the problem and your needs by getting started quickly. Over time, if X as a service saved you enough time and you become successful, you can choose to develop an expertise in X and cut the dependency.

Wit is also about building a community of developers and advancing the state of the art of NLP in apps. Once the bot engine matures a bit, we'll be focusing again on the community aspect of Wit and hopefully advance the field enough so that efforts like the standardization you mentioned are started.

Could you explain why it is in your best interest to do so? Unless your community-based efforts are focused on "built on Wit", you would be actively lowering the bar to entry.

From a company standpoint, the commoditization of the GP's comment is directly counter to your incentives as a business.

Not sure I correctly understand your question, but I'll give it a shot.

Today, Wit offers many advantages out-of-the-box so you don't have to setup your own solution.

As NLP gets more commoditized (e.g. through open-source, open datasets), Wit will have to provide even more value than today to stay relevant. Value can be ease of use, accuracy, etc. That's how the field makes progress.

Regarding best interest, if you mean FB's best interest, FB wants more intelligent bots in Messenger, VR, etc. It makes sense to provide the tools to do so. Opening these tools also helps make them better (why is FB open-sourcing React for example?)

If you mean the Wit team's best interest, we're always happy to provide better tools to developers and innovate in AI / UX. That's why we started Wit after all :-)

Will FB open source Bot Engine too for the betterment of NLP and communities working around it?

> X as a service allows you to get X with a lot less efforts.

I think it's more accurate to say that it allows you to borrow X. It's very true that it helps to bootstrap your own product and eventually if things work out you can bring X in-house.

My worry about everything-as-a-service is that until that point, each different service that you use is an another vulnerability to your product. This goes double for specialized services like AI, where unless you already have experts in that field, you're unlikely to have the expertise to replicate the service in-house. (Although by that same token, in this case without the service you couldn't provide your product anyway.)

There's little risk of depending on external services if you use multiple that provide the same type of service hidden behind an abstraction layer and can remove one of the vendors from the mix with the press of a key.

That mitigates the risk of depending on services, but it introduces a huge new risk by committing development time to a feature that provides no value to the user and potentially, if the providers last, no value to the business either.

Any startup founder who follows this strategy is concentrating on the wrong thing. Pick the provider who's most likely to last and build against their service. That way you are more likely to fail than they are.

You're conflating "using an external product" with "using an external service". The third option is self-hosting a third-party product, which gives you the best of both worlds (reduced development cost and time, reduced risk due to continued reliance on third party).

But that seems very difficult when the service provided is a black box of artificial intelligence.

Isn't microsoft's luis.ai providing a very similar kind of service?

I believe we share the same goal: make it easy to build smart bots. This is a very hard problem, all of us are far from solving it. It's good that different approaches are tried.

I didn't mean to imply your service isn't valuable or original. Just remarking on the OP's assertion that wit.ai would be hard to migrate away from.

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