Buzzwords
If you are a developer, a random tech interested person or you don’t have anything to do with tech, you must have heard phrase machine learning many many times in past few years. You can read about it on blogs, in newspapers, on TV and even when going to the supermarket. It looks like machine learning is one of those buzzwords that is buzzing and buzzing. Why is that?
Why?
One reason is that there are some people, companies that are using machine learning for solving cool and serious problems. They are solving things that were not solvable before, taking a different approach to all sorts of topics. Machine learning helps them solve problems, and new value for their products, that eventually brings them profits. And that is all cool.
On the other hand, there are people that like to jump on a train of buzzwords. And we have more and more people like that every day. Just like people say that are blockchain experts there are a lot of people that put machine learning before or after explaining what they do or what their product does. In the best case, they are using some kind of out of the box machine learning solution, some generic solution, and they present it like they are doing quantum physics. But so many people are just using basic statistics and try to sell it as machine learning. If somebody tells you they are machine learning experts as a first thing they say, they are not. If they tell you they use machine learning in their project, just ask them what methods are they using, what data, how do they collect and manage data, what kind of software and hardware are they using. Their answers and relaxed or non-relaxed answers will let you know if they are serious about it or just buzzword riders. 🙂
Leverage
But let’s be serious. Machine learning is a great set of tools and techniques that can give you lots of leverage when making your products. With great problem analysis, data collection, data marking, using correct approaches, models and techniques, you can make your product better. You can make your product stand out from the crowd, not just by telling that you are using machine learning to make it, but really give great results to users, giving them real value. That value can be speed and time saving, it can also be a way for solving some problem that wasn’t solvable before.
If you are interested in machine learning look at a course on Coursera “Machine Learning” taught by Andrew Ng or just explore internet and look for different materials about it, youtube talks and companies that are working with machine learning (but not those charlatans, look for real ones, like this one or this one or this one)
It is important for you to know who are machine learning scammers and charlatans, and who are people that are really using it. Machine learning can bring you money in many ways. One way and a fast way is just to talk that you use it and cross your fingers people will fall for it (many do), give you money by investing in your companies or buying your products. The other way is to really use it to make your products better and eventually bring you more money!
