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Sorry to be negative, but can we stop touting companies solely on the mathematical concepts they rely on? Deep learning techniques are indeed very efficient at
by karambahh 10y ago
Sorry to be negative, but can we stop touting companies solely on the mathematical concepts they rely on?
Deep learning techniques are indeed very efficient at solving a very large spectrum of problems, but it does not mean that every company using DL is remarkable. That's remarkable is the goal they achieve or aim to achieve.
If they use decades old technologies in a meaningful way for their target industry, does it make their company less likely to suceed? No it does not, for all that matters is solving the customers' issues...
My company use DL in several fields, but what we sell is simply a solution to customers needs...
- plafl 10y agoI agree with you, but actually two of the companies listed target computer vision and the other three seem to be working on deep learning related hardware which looks like a very valid business although not consumer facing. I suppose most of them will fail, like most startups do, deep learning or not.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- saosebastiao 10y agoIt appears that your company is trying to make a profit. That isn't the point of "deep learning startups"...they're just trying to get a big money acquisition from large tech companies.
- karambahh 10y agoI confirm we aim to (and do :-) ) make a profit. I just can't wrap my mind around the idea that drafting a deck of slides full of buzzwords is enough to get a fat check from VCs...
- deepnotderp 10y agoAgreed, silly deepmind! /s The fact of the matter is, if you are smart enough, you can get acquihired for a lot of money. DeepMind, Geometric Intelligence, Deep Blue Labs, Vision Factory, TupleJump, Turi, etc. are all examples.
- karambahh 10y agoDeepMind delivered value on several fields. They happen to rely (partly) on DL to deliver this value, but they got acqui-hired not because "we are doing deep learning" but because "we have technology that can lower your costs/increase your profits"...
- iandanforth 10y agoThey did? My impression was that until the server farm optimization they were a cost center for Google.
- karambahh 10y agoThe server farm optimization is massive indeed. They also provided value before but nothing has been made public about it yet, unfortunately.
- kozikow 10y agoI think "deep learning startup" may be more exciting than company using "decades old technology" : - Applied deep learning is still not easy. Not many people have know-how about training models. There are no easy answers in hardware space. - Translate academia success to businesses. After DL achieved remarkable things in Academia, people expect that same success will be translated to business. Business success mostly only came from Google.
- karambahh 10y agoWhy would that be? I built a company on translating academia research to business so I can totally relate to that feeling. I consider that a company exists to provide value to its consumers. If a simple linear regression provides value, why go the DL route? I am absolutely not saying that DL has no use-case, we use it internally and on customers projects, I am just arguing that if decades old stuff does the job, don't bother with DL, in particular because applied DL is indeed very hard. To me, it is like an extension of the "if it aint broke, don't fix it" philosophy: "if it can be fixed with a simple solution, dont over-engineer". I often hear young software engineers laugh about banks still using COBOL for their core business. COBOL is lame, it's monolothic, etc. It may be all fashioned (and the little COBOL I've done I've hated it :-) ) but it goddamn works, why touch it and risk breaking stuff? If a new technology efficiently solves a use-case then fine, go for it, but I hate the "hype" phenomenon. For instance, about 5 years, the hype was RoR, 2 years ago Scala, now it's DL and Pony, etc... I do some pretty nice DL, it's useful. I really like the concepts of Pony. But I'm not going to promote a deep learning framework in Pony to replace SWIFT money transfer, even though I'd be ticking many boxes of hype with that...
- kozikow 10y agoPrevious approaches to AI couldn't beat game of go. There is not as much qualitive difference between pre-decesors of RoR, Pony and Scala. This makes me think that DL hype may be warranted. Anyway, I am working on deep learning and it enable us to solve problems of our users better than previous computer vision approaches.