Hacker News Reader

Comment by lvh | Hacker News Reader

> We've met with hundreds of Fortune 500 / Global 2000 companies, startups, and government policy makers asking: "How do I get started with artificial intelligence?" and "What can I do with AI in my own product or company?"

You're definitely never in a concerning part of a hype cycle when you have a technology in search of a problem. How many of these organizations just needed someone who could write a SQL query?

View on HN

I generally agree that SQL could do alot of what these companies need, and not AI/ML. That said, there is definitely proper use cases for AI/ML and SQL cannot address them all. Furthermore, employing AI/ML may not just be to solve whichever problem they are trying to solve, but it may also be used to impress investors and stakeholders through the use of buzzwords; AKA, using AI/ML may be out of FOMO, used not only to address a real business problem but also to show stakeholders that they are keeping up with trends.

Sure! My position is definitely not "ML is useless"! I've written plenty of ML and particularly think the current focus on DL is missing a lot of opportunities for augmented human intelligence (and risk mitigation of systematized bias) with explainable models.

As for showing stakeholders they're keeping up with trends: yeah I'd definitely categorize that as regrettable :-)

Well, one reason to "keep up with trends" is because if your direct competitor does use ML to unveil some market/product/business opportunity or optimization, and you (executive/CIO/CEO) weren't at the least looking into the technology, heads are going to roll.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com