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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I've said this many times: Google's AI services are superior in every way. They have better results and are easier to use.

Amazon is the master of the "good enough". Their service works well enough that you can check the box that it exists and then point it at all that data you already have in AWS. And that's all that most everyone needs.

If you are using AI and your competitors aren't, it doesn't really matter all that much how good the AI is -- you're gonna do better and be more efficient.

It's only after everyone is using AI that it will start to matter how good your particular implementation is. Right now we're at the stage that any implantation is better than none.

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I disagree with this sentiment that any "AI" is better than none no matter how poor it is. If I'm a customer and you try to extract text from an image for me, but it's wrong over half the time, then it looks really bad. An incorrect extraction is a bug. You're basically just adding bugs to your product. Better a good product with less features than a bug ridden product with lots of features.

It's appropriate in search, if you use the data as features to improve recall

> "any "AI" is better than none no matter how poor it is"

You don't have to disagree. The OP said:

> "it doesn't really matter all that much how good the AI is"

I think you're both correct and you bring up an interesting point. As long as your AI is "good enough" to replace what would've taken more resources to do otherwise, it's a win. I'm not sure if that's "half" as you stated, but I bet it depends on the task. If the task is saving a few seconds to query something, then I'd agree, half of the time wrong isn't a savings. But, if you have less than half a chance at saving thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours if it works correctly, then that may be chalked up as a win.

I dunno, there's clearly a bar for "good enough". From the article it's not obvious to me that AWS Rekognition meets that bar (yet). 21% precision with 54% recall isn't the kind of thing that achieves "if you're using AI and your competitors aren't, you're ahead".

I like your framing/sentiment though: it's not about small differences in "betterness", it's about the difference in kind in going from "no ML/AI" => "whoa, it works!".

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not in ML).

> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not in ML).

Since you work there, hopefully you can see this feedback and filter it up: I love your tools. They are the best. I have tried using your tools. They are hard to use, despite the fact that I have a pretty solid understanding of how to use them. I would like to use your tools more, but getting support is hard (partly because the docs aren't great, partly because there is no community, because see #1).

I don't know how to fix this, but it would be great if maybe Google spent some time focusing on building a community around your tools, like AWS did. At the beginning they had a lot of employees hanging out on the forums and on other forums, answer questions and building a community of users, and especially helping third parties who tried to build libraries for their tools (like boto for Python). It would be great if Google did that too.

Thanks for listening!

Google has contributed quite a bit to Boto. The GCS command line tool, gsutil, is built on top of boto. If you're talking about Boto 3, though, not so much.

Is there any data that points to Google's AI service being superior?

I want to know which AI platform is the strongest, I did find in my anecdotal tests Microsoft's Vision API performed better but this was in mid to early 2016.

Well the post we're discussing has some hard data. :)

But generally speaking when I talk to AI experts they all agree that for the services that Google actually has, they are better, with MS being #2.

well, not so sure about Google's AI services are superior in every way.

Actually, Google has fewer public APIs when compared to Msft/AWS for AI use cases, ex: Face recognition etc. Maybe they just don't release stuff unless it's much better than the competitor's.

I should have clarified, I meant the services that they had were better, but you're right, they don't have the breadth of services that the others do.

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