
Machine Intelligence in the Real World - kevindeasis
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/26/machine-intelligence-in-the-real-world/
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jonsmit
The article does a great job at helping create a language around the ML/AI
field to help laymen reason about it. Shivon did a similar taxonomy based
article last year titled The Current State of Machine Intelligence - also a
good read.

Unfortunately Bloomberg Beta has the same blinkers on that the rest of the VC
industry has. They use Context Relevant as an example but don't disclose their
investment. Context Relevant is currently undergoing layoffs after recently
kicking out their founder and CEO. I've been watching them for years, their
pitch was classic VC bait. Even as an outsider I could tell that their tech
stack and corporate culture was not going to work. Their glassdoor reviews
makes for interesting reading. I've been using Context Relevant as a
bellwether for the rest of the industry as I expect when they can no longer
hide their losses there is going to be a whole class of data science / big
data / ml VC funded service companies that will go belly up around the same
time.

Which has me wondering how Bloomberg Beta will fair after that. I'm sure Mike
Bloomberg will have bigger things to worry about at that point in time. People
get sick of paying for fancy expensive charts showing them precisely how much
money they're losing very quickly.

Anyway - that's enough pessimism from me for one day :)

TL;DR

A good read, but take with the usual prescription of a giant grain of salt

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joeyrideout
My favourite recent real-world application of a "laser" focused industry-
specific dataset is the crisis text line - it is both fascinating and
unnerving to think that crisis response is something we can train computers to
do (or in this case, _suggestions_ for crisis responders):

[https://youtu.be/KOtFDsC8JC0](https://youtu.be/KOtFDsC8JC0)

