Thread

1. johnfn · 1789843452 · 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. calebkaiser · 1789849620 · focus · HN ↗

      This is also a really common thing in ML specifically. We joke about getting Schmidthuber'd, which is when Jurgen Schmidthuber (sometimes correctly) announces that he or one of his colleagues actually proposed your thing 37 years ago in a Japanese linguists journal.

      Statistical modeling, from simple classical stuff up to modern deep learning, just has this dynamic where the theory is rich and bottomless, but the actual components of implementation are pretty neat and compact. So for any given idea, there are probably 20,000 other people who have had the same intuition, just with subtly different application or implementation. Add in that depending on what your particular flavor of research is, you might name an almost identical implementation something completely different. And it leads to a huge amount of sour grapes whenever anyone's idea really garners attention.

      If you listen to any podcast with a founder in the ML space who has been in it for long enough, they will invariably say at some point "We actually developed xyz over a year before OpenAI"

      1. hiddencost · 1789877486 · focus · HN ↗

         Schmidhuber rarely ever executed the idea correctly, which makes his claims particularly obnoxious.

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