Don’t Buy Machine Learning

By Marcos Sponton, Machinalis. http://www.kdnuggets.com/

During a conversation I had with Peter Norvig, we discussed about the kind of projects that we do at Machinalis and how strange does it feels to say that “we are a Machine Learning company”: In many projects, the amount of effort spent on R&D on Machine Learning is usually a small fraction of the total effort, or it’s not even there because we plan it for a future phase after building the application first. At this moment, Norvig quoted a friend of him who said:

“Machine Learning development is like the raisins in a raisin bread: 1. You need the bread first 2. It’s just a few tiny raisins but without it you would just have plain bread.”

So how do companies purchase this raisin bread?

Typically, two things can happen:

A large company, at a higher level, decides to move away from standard tools, given that “our business and our data are different/peculiar”, incorporating Machine Learning or Data Science into their processes. In these situations they call us just to get some raisins.

A startup, after a few funding rounds, decides to transform the prototype they built to a production ready scalable MVP. In these situations they call us because they want the whole raisin bread, or perhaps some other kind of pudding which will need raisins at some point in the future.

Even if eating this is trendy, many people are not used to the new flavour, and it might not sit well with them.

The trick is not buying “the Machine Learning thingy…”

Unless you…

Do you think you can overcome all these obstacles? Congratulations, you have a good chance of enjoying a nice raisin bread in your business. Andwe’d love to hear from you.

(*) At this point is the same if you’re about to start a ‘Data Science’, ‘Big Data’, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ project instead of a ‘Machine Learning’ one, and you don’t see the difference among those terms.

Bio: Marcos Spontón @MarcosSponton Entrepreneur, data Business & Growth passionate.