[HN Gopher] Improving a Machine Learning System - Broken Abstrac...
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       Improving a Machine Learning System - Broken Abstractions
        
       Author : gigalord
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2021-11-08 02:35 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (danshiebler.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (danshiebler.com)
        
       | cgearhart wrote:
       | Very reminiscent of
       | https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2015/file/86df7dcfd896f...
        
       | lumost wrote:
       | My two cents:
       | 
       | Most ML solutions in most businesses have either questionable
       | business value or debatable ROI. This lends itself to many
       | products which are shipped quickly and then semi abandoned. In
       | many cases the ML that's shipped barely outperforms the heuristic
       | solution if at all.
       | 
       | Further, most of the teams tasked with maintaining or improving
       | these systems have little practical interest in the production
       | service - it's much easier and rewarding to bemoan a slower
       | portion of the business while publishing research than improve
       | the production service. It's not uncommon to encounter ML teams
       | who claim multiple year's worth of innovations are backlogged
       | against engineering. I once encountered a 20 person team who
       | owned the core bidding algorithm for a large ad-tech startup
       | which hadn't made a change in 3 years. The business believed that
       | they were making regular releases.
       | 
       | What this all says is that we're in a strange valley of ML
       | maturity where enough people know about it to try it out, but few
       | are able to navigate how to make a sustainable investment.
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-09 23:02 UTC)