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It's always interesting to me to see people get excited by ideas like this. While the idea is clearly useful, I think it suffers from the same limited market as

It's always interesting to me to see people get excited by ideas like this. While the idea is clearly useful, I think it suffers from the same limited market as directions. Unless you're a nomad, most people eventually settle into a routine and know what is in the area and how to get there. What continues changing are live event schedules and traffic conditions, neither of which requires AI to serve. What is needed is what Google already has, a large-scale sensor network that gives you the location and velocity of many people and the computing infrastructure to process it in real time and serve it back to the same devices the data is collected from. You end up in this situation where the app is adding features useful to visitors, but the vast majority of users just want a drive time estimate.

charcircuit 3y ago
>What continues changing are live event schedules and traffic conditions, neither of which requires AI to serve Finding the optimal route given the current and historical traffic conditions along with information of what is happening that day (e.g. A festival or sporting event) is an AI problem.
- tomrod 3y ago
  Actually, its a quantitative problem that people normally use operations research algorithms to resolve. Can AI be trained to solve it? Sure, but it's a weird and perhaps un-needed use case when there are several better understood and more efficient algorithms that approach lower bounds. I work in the AI space, love the challenges it presents and the use cases it enables. We have to be careful to not hype into AI -- applying it to places where it isn't necessary or could never work -- because it will absolutely continue to technically improve but may be overly scrutinized from a regulatory perspective.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >Actually, its a quantitative problem So is the rest of AI because we are using computers which operate on numbers. OR algorithms are one tool to emulate intelligence.
    - tomrod 3y ago
      Perhaps you misunderstand my term. Quant problems are broader the AI. A more appropriate term would have been constrained optimization problem. While this space has overlap with some AI methods, AI and OR have some daylight.
      - tomrod 3y ago
        Note to folks, the grandparent comment appears to have changed their comment, if I recall right. It originally stated "So all of this is AI."

charcircuit 3y ago

>What continues changing are live event schedules and traffic conditions, neither of which requires AI to serve Finding the optimal route given the current and historical traffic conditions along with information of what is happening that day (e.g. A festival or sporting event) is an AI problem.

tomrod 3y ago
Actually, its a quantitative problem that people normally use operations research algorithms to resolve. Can AI be trained to solve it? Sure, but it's a weird and perhaps un-needed use case when there are several better understood and more efficient algorithms that approach lower bounds. I work in the AI space, love the challenges it presents and the use cases it enables. We have to be careful to not hype into AI -- applying it to places where it isn't necessary or could never work -- because it will absolutely continue to technically improve but may be overly scrutinized from a regulatory perspective.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >Actually, its a quantitative problem So is the rest of AI because we are using computers which operate on numbers. OR algorithms are one tool to emulate intelligence.
  - tomrod 3y ago
    Perhaps you misunderstand my term. Quant problems are broader the AI. A more appropriate term would have been constrained optimization problem. While this space has overlap with some AI methods, AI and OR have some daylight.
    - tomrod 3y ago
      Note to folks, the grandparent comment appears to have changed their comment, if I recall right. It originally stated "So all of this is AI."