4 ms·

What do you mean by doesn’t drive business decisions? ~65 million Alexas were sold last year, and the product would be fairly useless without very high performa

What do you mean by doesn’t drive business decisions? ~65 million Alexas were sold last year, and the product would be fairly useless without very high performance speech recognition powered by deep learning. I personally own a startup that uses deep neural networks as part of its core product functionality and our business decisions would be drastically different if it weren’t for modern machine learning. We could technically ship some similar products, but they would either be far inferior or take orders of magnitude longer to engineer by hand.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago
Most business requires data analysis and planning. Under the hood regression models and/or some sort of component analysis is used. Deep learning is a cool feature to differentiate Alexa from competing home electronic gadgets. But if you want to forecast Alexa sales, or understand market segmentation, or the portrait of a typical Alexa buyer then you need something other than deep learning because neural nets utterly failed in this domain. The business metrics problem is vastly, vastly more important than the "making cool gadgets" problem, and huge resources were poured into making deep learning a thing in this space. The money was mostly wasted. (A negative result is still a result, but still the misallocation of resources is staggering.)
- joefourier 5y ago
  I get that it didn’t work in your particular field and that obviously that’s what matters the most to you, but I would suggest reading up on its wider applications before dismissing the whole technology. Entire classes of products suddenly being possible is not just a “cool feature”. FYI, deep learning isn’t a differentiating feature for the Alexa, it powers essentially all modern voice applications.

4 ms·

What do you mean by doesn’t drive business decisions? ~65 million Alexas were sold last year, and the product would be fairly useless without very high performa

by joefourier 5y ago

otabdeveloper4 5y ago
Most business requires data analysis and planning. Under the hood regression models and/or some sort of component analysis is used. Deep learning is a cool feature to differentiate Alexa from competing home electronic gadgets. But if you want to forecast Alexa sales, or understand market segmentation, or the portrait of a typical Alexa buyer then you need something other than deep learning because neural nets utterly failed in this domain. The business metrics problem is vastly, vastly more important than the "making cool gadgets" problem, and huge resources were poured into making deep learning a thing in this space. The money was mostly wasted. (A negative result is still a result, but still the misallocation of resources is staggering.)
- joefourier 5y ago
  I get that it didn’t work in your particular field and that obviously that’s what matters the most to you, but I would suggest reading up on its wider applications before dismissing the whole technology. Entire classes of products suddenly being possible is not just a “cool feature”. FYI, deep learning isn’t a differentiating feature for the Alexa, it powers essentially all modern voice applications.