
Ask HN: Why are so many employees leaving Clarifai? - chirau
The company has lost a good fraction of its staff, it is not replacing them and most of the first employees have left. Does anyone know why?
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PaulHoule
I cannot imagine they are getting much traction with the current product. It
is not that good.

So far as I can tell, they take a frame out of the video every second or so,
and perform something like the ImageNet task to tag individual frames. It does
not try to put together a story about what happens across or between the
frames.

More than 10 years ago there were video analysis competitions and they all
used multifaceted approaches that would analyze audio, read closed captions if
available, OCR text, put together a story across time, etc.

The image-at-a-time approach would have looked like science fiction 10 years
ago but now it is a "fork it on GitHub" kind of thing.

The problem of useful video analysis is complex enough that you can't leave
easy things like OCR text on the table. It is complex enough that you do have
to take advantage of coherence in time.

One reason why the "commercialization valley of death" is so feared is often
entrepreneurs have unrealistic plans like "commercialize a product that
analyzes videos a frame at a time" that involve wishful thinking.

The real danger though is that this is the road to "AI Winter" and
unfortunately failures of this type are discrediting to everyone in the
intelligent systems field. People say "I tried IBM's Text Analysis API and it
sucks" and that makes it much harder for people who have a realistic
understanding of the problems to make sales.

