
Ask HN: How to Make Money from Machine Learning? - sheun
I am currently learning Machine Learning and I am curious as to how I can use what I am learning for commercial purposes.
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StonyRhetoric
I manage a team that directly uses ML to create software services that our
customers pay money to use. This is relatively rare. Most ML applications are
internal - your customer is your own company. In this case, you should think
of yourself as an in-house ML consultancy for your company. You need to
reliably create value for the company, and be able to measure it.

In my opinion, there are three business "tiers" of ML.

1\. Process automation. You're turning a defined business process currently
done by a human into something automated, with some custom rule logic, of
which some of it may be via ML-trained models. The easiest, because the
criteria are well-defined and everyone knows what success looks like.

2\. Data Mining/Analysis/Insight. Your company sits on some unexploited set of
data, and you want to generate useful business insight from it. ML models can
help make sense of it. This takes the traditional business intelligence
function to the next level. Harder, because you may need to educate the
company on what ML offers. They may not even realize what types of new
questions ML can answer.

3\. Customer-facing automated-decision services. This is the most demanding
application from a business perspective, but not necessarily from a technical
perspective. The standards for quality, stability, accuracy, should be much,
much higher. If it's customer-facing, it can't mess up, or people will stop
trusting it. The customer may be internal or external.

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Avalaxy
Since you work at a ML consultancy company, may I ask you a question? How do
you sell this service to customers? How do they find you (what search terms do
they use, how do they reach you), how do you find them? My experience is that
potential clients don't go looking for "I need someone who can do AI", but
they have a concrete problem they need to fix (or more likely, they don't even
know that they have a problem or that it can be optimized).

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serioussecurity
Do Not Use This With Your Own Money.

Literally millions of people have already trod this path, the low-hanging
fruit in finance is already picked, and in many other contexts as well. The
big mistake people new to the field make is to reason about machine learning
as if it's a replacement for human intelligence, rather than just applied
large scale statistics.

Do you know some other area extremely well, where you could apply these
methods? Given how vague your question is, it sounds like you don't have much
background or sense of direction. You will get taken to the cleaners if you
try to compete with an established group; if you have some specialized context
in which you can use machine learning, by all means, but the short answer is
that you can't make money with machine learning. You may be able to find a
problem or an application you can improve with machine learning, and make
money that way. But it's very easy to lie to yourself in your evaluations with
methodological errors, and then ship a product that does nothing remotely like
what you intended / evaluated it for.

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Arqu
I've had the wonderful opportunity to work on several projects where AI/ML was
not just used as a buzzword and marketing gimmick.

The two types of applications I've seen so far generate real value (and thus
have monetary value where you can actually earn) are: \- Automate existing
processes to either reduce the amount of work needed to be done (feature
extraction from images or audio, document parsing) or to introduce a higher
level of resolution/response time. For example forecasts for the next day
every day or live detection of audio/visual events.

\- Generating models to extract signals from massive or complex data. Usually
once you're done here you can revert to traditional methods based on the
newfound insights. Rarely is there "magic" solutions to optimize away your
problems. In general it proves more to be a tool in the box to do analytics
than it is a solution.

Either of those create new value and you can put a price on it. There's decent
opportunity once you understand what are appropriate use cases.

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nurettin
My previous experience with machine learning involves applying to both oxford
and cambridge computer science undergraduate courses with specialization on AI
back in '98 and getting rejected because I asked for full scholarship. So I
feel fully qualified when I tell you that after you finish your course and
become an AI Expert, most of the time you will be selling snake oil to
companies that could easily do with simpler, more clever algorithms to
categorize and explore their data.

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goatinaboat
Teach ML at a bootcamp. That is the only way to make money at it unless you
already have industry/domain knowledge, in which case you wouldn’t be asking
this question!

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dest
Raise VC money, burn it

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jppope
You're missing the step where you try to sell a bad IPO to the public so the
VCs get paid...

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randcraw
Right now most jobs using ML do marketing or advertising. Fewer deal in image
analysis, voice recognition or generation, or signal processing. But soon more
jobs are likely to use ML to make mainstream apps, services, and tools more
fault tolerant, adaptive, predictive, consistent performing, and automated.

I foresee uses for these new capabilities in communication services, IoT
devices, user interfaces (esp language based), social communication tools,
security, reliability, surveillance, and even some far out cutting edge stuff
like personalization, GUI optimization, error correction, and restyling
content and games and media to better match your likes and dislikes.

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maximente
deliver value to a market willing to pay for it.

most technologists including ML engineers are more interested in how the
latest, greatest kernel provides a 0.04 higher F score on some academic facial
recognition task than they are understanding problem spaces, understanding
what problem spaces would benefit from "ML" (read: data + statistics), then
providing a solution that people value enough in order to pay for (this
includes sales, marketing, etc.).

or just work for a FAANG, probably easier and over time a wiser investment

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shivkumar123
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thermonot
Get a ML job.

Or predict and trade bitcoin.

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probinso
With computers

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auslander
Adtech

