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Sure it is. Much like most developers don't spend their time reading on computing science papers to do their job, I question why such academic rigour is to be d

Sure it is. Much like most developers don't spend their time reading on computing science papers to do their job, I question why such academic rigour is to be demanded from somebody trying to capitalize on the arbitrage opportunity. Math is good but my time won't be best used if I have to learn calculus all over again just to begin understanding the linguo. Rather have a generic model of what to use and when, hire those that have that capacity to dive deep when needed and implement the expected business outcome.

ori_b 10y ago
Because this is the language of the domain. Much like code is the language of programming. This isn't academic rigor or lingo. This is how things work. To me, your comment reads similarly to "Much like most business people don't spend their time reading code to do the job, I question why such academic rigor is to be demanded by someone who is translating business requirements into database operations".
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  I think we are after different things. My goal is not to understand the underlying technology at the academic level but just enough to make money by utilizing the people that do, just like any good capitalist. You don't need to be an oil rig worker to understand where the opportunity lies is what I'm saying. It's possible to understand systems from a blackbox point of view and still be able to exploit them. Afterall, this is what we do whenever we hire a new developer, it's impossible to know what they know so I leave that up to smarter and talented people while I allocate the capitals and set a vision for what's required to capitalize on the business opportunity that AI presents with it's superior performance, scalability and economies to scale. You outsource what you don't know or can't do and if you can't afford it you do end up doing it yourself. This is why capitalism works. It's not necessary for you to dwindle with all the underlying complexities when you model the business opportunity in terms of basic expenditure and investment returns.
  - deepnotderp 10y ago
    If you want to be a venture capitalist, then you need to bring money to the table....
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    I don't know why you expect to get ahead by hiring others to do your thinking for you. If you don't have a basic understanding of the technology you're hiring people to implement, they'll just pull the wool over your eyes, sell you something that doesn't work and make away with your money.
  - ori_b 10y ago
    Then hire someone who understands it.
deepnotderp 10y ago
> "...academic rigor..." "...calculus.." Dude, I'm not even asking you for anything that difficult here, how would you like it if I walked in and said "well, I don't need to learn any programing, my time is better spent magically making it work".
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  I found calculus and academia generally very difficult. I'm happy to know that you don't suffer from this terrible affliction which makes studying difficult. You don't need to know programming if you understand your workers and they understand it enough to convey to you the time & resource constraints. I have a million dollars for this project. What are the features and functions that will maximize my returns? Hire a couple of smart engineers who already holds the technical knowledge, able to communicate when asked all the pitfalls, potential roadblocks and unknowns so that their productivity is maximized. Set expectations on how they will be able to trade their time for money. At the end of the day, it's a naked call option with limited risk and unlimited reward by utilizing the correct knowledge workers. Why spend time learning the reference when you can look it up or hire somebody who already has a distilled version in their head which you can utilize?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    I think people are just saying that if you don't undertstand the technology a little bit yourself you'll never know who to hire. Maybe somebody looks like they know what they're talking about, but they don't. Maybe somebody really knows what they're talking about but they can't put that across very well. Maybe someome is simply unscrupulous and wants to milk you dry and will dazzle you with charts and graphs that they know you don't quite understand. It's, like, inadvisable, to leave yourself vulnerable like that.
    - maverick_iceman 10y ago
      Absolutely. I know just enough software engineering to bullshit my way in front of a nontechnical person. If any such person hires me to do serious dev work they'll be in a sea of trouble.
davidivadavid 10y ago
How do you suggest you take advantage of an arbitrage opportunity if you have 0 informational insight?
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  Because the arbitrage opportunity isn't present in the academic papers but at a higher level involving business problems. I say this is an arbitrage opportunity because AI is essentially commoditizing human intelligence. It didn't take much brains for people to realize cars could do away with horses. You don't need to understand how a car works down to the formula. It's enough to view it as a black box and still know all the outputs and constraints associated with it in order to orchestrate capital that allows you to seize the business opportunity. Again, the arbitrage is buying something for cheap and immediately selling it at a higher price...if you can't understand why a deep level understanding of the academia is not necessary in order to capture the opportunity then less competition for me which is great.
  - didibus 10y ago
    I think just read the Wikipedia articles about it. Also, the Microsoft documentation on Azure Machine Learning and the Amazon one on AML are good high level overview. That should be enough for you to have an idea what expertise you'd want to hire for. Granted, it sounds you're just looking for ML scientists or ML engineers. Data Scientist might also be able to help you out, so that's what you want to hire.
  - davidivadavid 10y ago
    And yet the people who made fortunes in the auto industry were all car makers? What an odd coincidence. But let's indulge your point of view for the sake of the argument. So you've got a black box AI that does something. You know what inputs it needs and what outputs it produces. How do you arbitrage it? What creates the price discrepancy that allows you to arbitrage at all, given that your incapacity to understand the black box renders you unable to gauge its value beyond what the market is telling you? In that case, why not trade any random commodity?
BucketSort 10y ago
The answer is that many ML solutions are leaky abstractions. See: https://medium.com/@karpathy/yes-you-should-understand-backprop-e2f06eab496b#.3dtcufc82 https://medium.com/@karpathy/yes-you-should-understand-backp...
tripzilch 10y ago
Remember "idea-men"? "Listen I have this great idea for a web app, it's going to be like the Facebook for hardware stores [or whatever] and people can rate/vote/tag ... I got the whole idea worked out, I just need someone to program it for me" etc. Every programmer has heard these kinds of proposals many times. One (of many) problems with this kind of proposal is that the idea-man, unable to program (and not wanting to learn) has no idea about the complexity of what they're asking. And even if they think they have the whole idea worked out, not being able to program means they probably missed a lot of shortcuts, possibilities and best practices. The worst ones hand-wave this with the possibility of a fresh outsider-look on things! Except that the whole (fully worked-out) idea probably needs to be reworked entirely before it's even feasible or competitive. The programmer would probably have been better off without the idea, cause that's where it started to go wrong. Similarly, if you believe math isn't worth your time but instead want to hire ML experts to implement your ML-related ideas (formulated in terms of "expected business outcome"), puts you in a very similar role. (Tongue-in-cheek) I got a really great idea, the expected business outcome is: make lots of profit. It's fool-proof. I checked with some of my people and they agreed, making profit is a solid idea. I just need some business dude to implement for me. I'm not really sure what sort of business person, my time can be spent better than learning about subtleties between sorts of business people. I just need to hire a good one. But remember, the idea was mine first.

ori_b 10y ago

Because this is the language of the domain. Much like code is the language of programming. This isn't academic rigor or lingo. This is how things work. To me, your comment reads similarly to "Much like most business people don't spend their time reading code to do the job, I question why such academic rigor is to be demanded by someone who is translating business requirements into database operations".

brilliantcode 10y ago
I think we are after different things. My goal is not to understand the underlying technology at the academic level but just enough to make money by utilizing the people that do, just like any good capitalist. You don't need to be an oil rig worker to understand where the opportunity lies is what I'm saying. It's possible to understand systems from a blackbox point of view and still be able to exploit them. Afterall, this is what we do whenever we hire a new developer, it's impossible to know what they know so I leave that up to smarter and talented people while I allocate the capitals and set a vision for what's required to capitalize on the business opportunity that AI presents with it's superior performance, scalability and economies to scale. You outsource what you don't know or can't do and if you can't afford it you do end up doing it yourself. This is why capitalism works. It's not necessary for you to dwindle with all the underlying complexities when you model the business opportunity in terms of basic expenditure and investment returns.
- deepnotderp 10y ago
  If you want to be a venture capitalist, then you need to bring money to the table....
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  I don't know why you expect to get ahead by hiring others to do your thinking for you. If you don't have a basic understanding of the technology you're hiring people to implement, they'll just pull the wool over your eyes, sell you something that doesn't work and make away with your money.
- ori_b 10y ago
  Then hire someone who understands it.

deepnotderp 10y ago

> "...academic rigor..." "...calculus.." Dude, I'm not even asking you for anything that difficult here, how would you like it if I walked in and said "well, I don't need to learn any programing, my time is better spent magically making it work".

brilliantcode 10y ago
I found calculus and academia generally very difficult. I'm happy to know that you don't suffer from this terrible affliction which makes studying difficult. You don't need to know programming if you understand your workers and they understand it enough to convey to you the time & resource constraints. I have a million dollars for this project. What are the features and functions that will maximize my returns? Hire a couple of smart engineers who already holds the technical knowledge, able to communicate when asked all the pitfalls, potential roadblocks and unknowns so that their productivity is maximized. Set expectations on how they will be able to trade their time for money. At the end of the day, it's a naked call option with limited risk and unlimited reward by utilizing the correct knowledge workers. Why spend time learning the reference when you can look it up or hire somebody who already has a distilled version in their head which you can utilize?
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  I think people are just saying that if you don't undertstand the technology a little bit yourself you'll never know who to hire. Maybe somebody looks like they know what they're talking about, but they don't. Maybe somebody really knows what they're talking about but they can't put that across very well. Maybe someome is simply unscrupulous and wants to milk you dry and will dazzle you with charts and graphs that they know you don't quite understand. It's, like, inadvisable, to leave yourself vulnerable like that.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    Absolutely. I know just enough software engineering to bullshit my way in front of a nontechnical person. If any such person hires me to do serious dev work they'll be in a sea of trouble.

davidivadavid 10y ago

How do you suggest you take advantage of an arbitrage opportunity if you have 0 informational insight?

brilliantcode 10y ago
Because the arbitrage opportunity isn't present in the academic papers but at a higher level involving business problems. I say this is an arbitrage opportunity because AI is essentially commoditizing human intelligence. It didn't take much brains for people to realize cars could do away with horses. You don't need to understand how a car works down to the formula. It's enough to view it as a black box and still know all the outputs and constraints associated with it in order to orchestrate capital that allows you to seize the business opportunity. Again, the arbitrage is buying something for cheap and immediately selling it at a higher price...if you can't understand why a deep level understanding of the academia is not necessary in order to capture the opportunity then less competition for me which is great.
- didibus 10y ago
  I think just read the Wikipedia articles about it. Also, the Microsoft documentation on Azure Machine Learning and the Amazon one on AML are good high level overview. That should be enough for you to have an idea what expertise you'd want to hire for. Granted, it sounds you're just looking for ML scientists or ML engineers. Data Scientist might also be able to help you out, so that's what you want to hire.
- davidivadavid 10y ago
  And yet the people who made fortunes in the auto industry were all car makers? What an odd coincidence. But let's indulge your point of view for the sake of the argument. So you've got a black box AI that does something. You know what inputs it needs and what outputs it produces. How do you arbitrage it? What creates the price discrepancy that allows you to arbitrage at all, given that your incapacity to understand the black box renders you unable to gauge its value beyond what the market is telling you? In that case, why not trade any random commodity?

BucketSort 10y ago

The answer is that many ML solutions are leaky abstractions. See: https://medium.com/@karpathy/yes-you-should-understand-backprop-e2f06eab496b#.3dtcufc82 https://medium.com/@karpathy/yes-you-should-understand-backp...

tripzilch 10y ago

Remember "idea-men"? "Listen I have this great idea for a web app, it's going to be like the Facebook for hardware stores [or whatever] and people can rate/vote/tag ... I got the whole idea worked out, I just need someone to program it for me" etc. Every programmer has heard these kinds of proposals many times. One (of many) problems with this kind of proposal is that the idea-man, unable to program (and not wanting to learn) has no idea about the complexity of what they're asking. And even if they think they have the whole idea worked out, not being able to program means they probably missed a lot of shortcuts, possibilities and best practices. The worst ones hand-wave this with the possibility of a fresh outsider-look on things! Except that the whole (fully worked-out) idea probably needs to be reworked entirely before it's even feasible or competitive. The programmer would probably have been better off without the idea, cause that's where it started to go wrong. Similarly, if you believe math isn't worth your time but instead want to hire ML experts to implement your ML-related ideas (formulated in terms of "expected business outcome"), puts you in a very similar role. (Tongue-in-cheek) I got a really great idea, the expected business outcome is: make lots of profit. It's fool-proof. I checked with some of my people and they agreed, making profit is a solid idea. I just need some business dude to implement for me. I'm not really sure what sort of business person, my time can be spent better than learning about subtleties between sorts of business people. I just need to hire a good one. But remember, the idea was mine first.