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by andy99·5y ago·view on hn ↗
This is a point worth emphasizing. So many proposed "AI" use cases insist on trying to make some kind of end-to-end prediction, rather than let ML do something it is well positioned to do (e.g.) search more effectively, and let a person make the judgement for the things that aren't so readily predicted.

My analogy is a weather forecast. Regular forecasts give you the temperature and precipitation, and let you decide what to do based on this. If meteorologists instead black boxed the weather and just tried to tell people what kind of clothes to wear every day, I suspect people would start ignoring the forecast. But this is how so many ML use cases are set up.

I'm happy to see an application that respects ML for what it can do and not try and shoehorn it into the "prediction machines" paradigm.

1 comments
I love that analogy so much! Thank you for that.

We'll definitely clarify that in future posts as well. We did our best to provide an example in the post, but it's tough. We got into talent/recruiting because I'm a former data science manager (my last startup was an AI one as well) and it always bothers me how little intentionality and awareness there is around limitations of AI in AI-driven products. Doesn't help that marketing teams tend to just promote the idea that "AI will solve everything", either!