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I just really don't know what to tell you, I'm sorry. We saw the value, pursued the person, and had an engagement with them effectively consulting for 50 hours.

I just really don't know what to tell you, I'm sorry. We saw the value, pursued the person, and had an engagement with them effectively consulting for 50 hours. There was no justification to anyone outside of our team, other than getting the very quick approval, and the consultant worked with our team directly and not to anyone outside the team. There was no internal politics at play. And again, this wasn't a "freelance consultant" in the sense of the original story posted to HN, but an accomplished person at a very respected company who was able to secure the approvals from their side to help us out. This was novel/niche work for which "drop in pretrained models" don't really exist or apply. Frankly to judge and belittle someone else who is just sharing their experience by saying they're not doing serious work and don't have serious customers is very rude.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
It’s not rude at all to highlight how this warrants huge skepticism. “Just calling someone up” to spend $25k+ on “advice” and claiming it’s justified in time saved of your existing staff not flailing around to research the same topic is _very_ weird. That doesn’t line up with any professional experience I’ve ever seen in any machine learning team at Fortune 500, startup, finance & academia jobs. _Maybe_ for appearance fees to have a big name researcher come and give a company presentation or keynote. _Maybe_. Absolutely not believing it for ad hoc freelance consulting based on someone having some NLP projects on GitHub, conference presentations or publications, or gigs at “fancy” AI employers, and I find it’s worth making this comment so other readers can consider how extremely shaky that premise is.
- arbitrary_name 6y ago
  Just to provide another perspective : I've consulted for 20+ companies. Spending money for outside advice or actual work products is extremely common and generally worthwhile if done right. There's a reason why consulting is a multi billion dollar industry.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    I disagree. Consulting is fashion signaling. It’s a huge business because it’s about buying and selling political status in the context of company decision making. It offers value from social signaling, not from strategic facts that demonstrably yield improvements to success metrics.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

It’s not rude at all to highlight how this warrants huge skepticism. “Just calling someone up” to spend $25k+ on “advice” and claiming it’s justified in time saved of your existing staff not flailing around to research the same topic is _very_ weird. That doesn’t line up with any professional experience I’ve ever seen in any machine learning team at Fortune 500, startup, finance & academia jobs. _Maybe_ for appearance fees to have a big name researcher come and give a company presentation or keynote. _Maybe_. Absolutely not believing it for ad hoc freelance consulting based on someone having some NLP projects on GitHub, conference presentations or publications, or gigs at “fancy” AI employers, and I find it’s worth making this comment so other readers can consider how extremely shaky that premise is.

arbitrary_name 6y ago
Just to provide another perspective : I've consulted for 20+ companies. Spending money for outside advice or actual work products is extremely common and generally worthwhile if done right. There's a reason why consulting is a multi billion dollar industry.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  I disagree. Consulting is fashion signaling. It’s a huge business because it’s about buying and selling political status in the context of company decision making. It offers value from social signaling, not from strategic facts that demonstrably yield improvements to success metrics.