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I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago

1363 points · 319 comments · nandakishor_ml

  1. johnfn · · focus · HN ↗
    It’s a tale as old as time — people don’t understand that marketing and branding are just as important, if not more so, than the product. Jev is exceptionally-well branded. Anyone can look at the webpage and understand it, and the implications, instantly.

    OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!

    I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.

    1. porridgeraisin · · focus · HN ↗
      I think their problem is more not being cited by the team at typesafe, as in general academic politeness. On the one hand you have the charitable assumption that they developed it independently. On the other hand, my opinion is that it is naive to expect companies to do that even if they took inspo from it, especially when this is a core product theme, and not just some supporting infra. They will of course market it as their own. If they ever release a technical report, they might cite it there, but there is no way their landing page and announcement tweet cites it.

      Also, the way highly empirical fields like ML work is that it could very well be the case that typesafe had to do a _lot_ of work to improve this one, and in this field it ends up different enough that they feel they are doing something entirely novel[1]. I am not endorsing that 100%, but that happens a lot even between academics. In many cases it is valid.

      [1] For example, this guys implementation seems to have atleast one serious issue, as {solution to OLS} points out in a sibling comment: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49770027">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49770027

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