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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. mcapodici · · focus · HN ↗
      1052 pts on HN. I'd say they are pretty good at marketing actually.

      While they may not initially done well they are certainly riding this wave.

      1. onion2k · · focus · HN ↗
        1052 pts on HN. I'd say they are pretty good at marketing actually.

        HN readers are awesome at saying something is great and upvoting it, but unless HN readers are your market it means absolutely nothing. Marketing is as much about putting your message to the right audience as it is about saying the right thing.

        This is made more complicated because a group as diverse as HN readers probably does contain some people who are in your target market, to be fair. The problem is that you're getting a strong signal from the whole cohort rather than the bit you're interested in, and it's really easy to conflate that with a sign of success.

        As always with any startup activity, unless people are actually giving you their money it doesn't count and you should consider it a vanity metric.

      2. derwiki · · focus · HN ↗
        I would have clicked sooner if it was titled “I built Jev a year ago”; instead, I waited until this had 1400 points to see what all the fuss was about
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