[choppaface]

Classifiers don’t need to be 100% accurate. They might need 100% precision, or 100% recall, and likely just for a controlled set of data thrown at them. The spam filter in your email client doesn’t need high accuracy, just high precision. The “recommendation system” in your favorite product doesn’t need high accuracy, it needs good content to surface to users.

And there’s a spectrum of what constitutes a classifier. It might be a fancy deep model, or more likely just be some threshold functions (perhaps crafted based upon the results from some deep model that’s not too accurate and not yet ready for production).

The hype is that these classifiers are all 90% accurate now and thus all software is going to turn into AI. That’s garbage and can disenfranchise people who don’t understand AI. That storyline only benefits investors.

What’s different today versus 2012 is we have some deep research models with impressive results. But more importantly, software has compounded itself. There are tools to store and mine data. Mobile compute is also now closer to where laptops were years ago. Competition requires taking hold of these developments in order to innovate. Products will inevitably become more intelligent, AI hype or not.