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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I used to work in a family construction business and now I do machine learning contracting. When I compare the value you get for 300k worth of construction to what 300k of ML specialist time buys you, it's hard to agree with your comment. I understand the reasons, but generally I'm blown away by how cheap most labor intensive things are, compared to how much people will pay for software projects.

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I don't agree with your comment. $50,000-$100,000 of well placed funds with the right software consultancy can generate a project that pulls in enough cash flow to pay for itself multiple times over in just the span of months.

Machine learning is not a high return investment on its own. It is only leveraged as a technical piece of an already cash flow healthy larger pie in most organizations.

The division of labor and supply of various workers makes most labor intensive tasks self-explanatory in cost.

$300,000 can buy you a property that takes years to double in value in comparison. They're completely different categories of capital utilization.

FWIW, there are many opportunities for significant ROI in ML / analytics projects.

Low-hanging fruit I've seen in this area has included automating or augmenting labor-intensive manual processes (e.g., classifying insurance claims), replacing human judgement with time-series forecasts within an ordering system, and optimizing email campaigns with RL.

It's all about the things that scale to many people vs things that don't. A feature improvement in some app that makes extra $0.01 / year value for tens of millions of users is simply a larger effect than building a house for one family.

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