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by bigred100 2378 days ago
Is any sizable portion of these jobs interchangeable with deep learning?

The best deep learning engineers with infinite hardware built Amazon’s recommendation algorithm, and it’s largely trash. I can’t imagine it’s magically thousands of times more capable for these other tasks.

2 comments

> built Amazon’s recommendation algorithm, and it’s largely trash

What is trash for you may not actually be reflective of how good the algorithm is. My experience is that Amazon's algorithm actually works somewhat well.

Recommendation algorithms usually work well for people who are closer to average (i.e. their preferences being closer to the aggregate). People who deviate from the average tend to get poorer recommendations. It does even worse for segments that deviate so far from average where there are few sample points.

Recommendation algorithms optimize for aggregate conversion -- if it can get the most number of people to convert, it is good (for the merchant) even if it looks like your personal recommendations suck. It's all a matter of perspective on what "good" is.

Which one? This wasn't really true in quite a lot of cases of Amazon recommendations. Usually it's just kinda smart engineers.