[HN Gopher] Andrew Ng says AI has a proof-of-concept-to-producti...
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       Andrew Ng says AI has a proof-of-concept-to-production gap
        
       Author : TN567
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2021-05-03 21:59 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
        
       | fny wrote:
       | Clickbait headline. He did not say it's a long way from use, but
       | instead that it's challenging to ensure models translate well to
       | real world conditions.
       | 
       | Yes, it's a challenge, especially with vision models, but it's
       | doable. Health care models I've worked on have been put into
       | production, and they just need to be monitored to remain
       | effective.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Ok, we've replaced the title with something he actually said.
        
       | Der_Einzige wrote:
       | While this is indeed clickbait as mentioned by others - I am
       | consistently shocked with how little the most common technique
       | for ensuring that a model you trained works on unseen data,
       | cross-validation, is used in the real world.
       | 
       | I had it drilled into my brain that I really shouldn't trust
       | anything except the average validation score of a (preferably
       | high K value) K-fold cross evaluated model when trying to get an
       | idea of how well my ML algorithm performs on unseen data.
       | Apparently most people in my field (NLP) did not have this
       | drilled into their head either. This is partly why NLP is filled
       | with unreproducable scores (because the magically score if it was
       | ever found was only found on seed #3690398 train/test split)
       | 
       | As far as I'm concerned, if you didn't cross-validate, the test
       | set score is basically useless.
        
       | Pokepokalypse wrote:
       | "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
       | In practice, there is."
       | 
       | - Benjamin Brewster . . . 1882
        
       | sesuximo wrote:
       | Title seems somewhat misleading. He said ML often performs poorly
       | on out of sample inputs. Seems different from being "a long way
       | from real world use." I don't think anyone would argue ML is not
       | being used in the real world!
        
         | tharkun__ wrote:
         | Yes and no. Let's quote a bit more:
         | 
         | > "All of AI, not just healthcare, has a proof-of-concept-to-
         | production gap," he says. "The full cycle of a machine learning
         | project is not just modeling. It is finding the right data,
         | deploying it, monitoring it, feeding data back [into the
         | model], showing safety--doing all the things that need to be
         | done [for a model] to be deployed
         | 
         | Healthcare has some special needs in regards to what "real
         | world use" means. Especially the "showing safety" part he
         | mentions.
         | 
         | That's way different from some recommendation engine
         | application, where it doesn't really matter, whether your ML
         | approach just creates a bunch of bad feedback loops and people
         | get sent into rabbit holes of bad music. No lives are at stake
         | in that sense but the recommendation engine still "performs
         | poorly on out of sample inputs" and is so to speak, "a long way
         | from real world use". It's just that either nobody notices or
         | even if they do, again, no lives are at stake and so it's OK
         | that we're getting banana software (i.e. software that ripens
         | in the hands of customers).
        
       | master_yoda_1 wrote:
       | They are trying to generalized "Andrew Ng comment about AI
       | application to healthcare" to all the application of AI. When
       | these journalist learn to properly report.
        
         | throwaway287391 wrote:
         | And besides that the current HN title is further misleading
         | IMO: "Andrew Ng says ML may work on test sets, but is a long
         | way from real-world use". The actual headline was "... but
         | _that 's_ a long way from real-world use".
         | 
         | Those are very different statements even though they're only
         | one word off. The HN title implies ML is not in real-world use
         | (which is certainly not true); Andrew Ng is saying ML
         | performance as measured on IID held-out dataset splits isn't
         | (always) a good proxy for performance on the data you'll run
         | into when the model is deployed in the real world.
        
         | retendo wrote:
         | From the last paragraph: "This gap between research and
         | practice is not unique to medicine, Ng pointed out, but exists
         | throughout the machine learning world.
         | 
         | "All of AI, not just healthcare, has a proof-of-concept-to-
         | production gap," he says."
        
           | nerdponx wrote:
           | Only because it's been wildly over-hyped and tech journalists
           | + startups have over-promised on it. It's perfectly effective
           | in its place.
        
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