Kevin Mandich, Head of ML at Sprig, contrasts customer demand for real-time survey analysis with the technical advantages of batch ML processing.
Opinion
Tech is likely near the peak of the current generative AI hype cycle
“I think what we're going through now is we're probably close to the peak of the current hype cycle that was introduced earlier this year with, you know, ChatGPT and everything.”
Insight
Word clouds and topic modeling fail to capture nuanced customer feedback
“You know, people have done word clouds, word counts topic modeling, but, you know, none of those really capture the nuance of what people are saying. And you know, it doesn't account for the fact that people could be saying multiple things per response.”
Insight
Machine learning engineering skills transfer broadly across vision, NLP, and audio domains
“One of the things about machine learning and AI in this industry is that there's a lot of crossover between these different data domains. You know, if you're able to solve a computer vision problem pretty well, a lot of those skills are transferable to natural…”
Insight
Mandich: User research synthesis lacks an objective universal ground truth
“You can take two expert user researchers, give them the same list of, you know, 500 responses, tell them to distill them down into 10 actionable takeaways, and those 10 will be completely different, or even if they are the same 10 takeaways, the responses that…”
Insight
Complex non-deterministic LLM tasks still require manual human evaluation
“And that's just, that's something that's really hard to evaluate in an automated manner, at least right now, because it's a more complex task, because the output is, you know, non-deterministic and freeform. For now, it really just does require some manual eva…”
Insight
Hosted LLMs shift hiring demand toward full-stack machine learning engineers
“I think given our current switch to hosted LLMs and away from, you know, taking Google's Burt and fine tuning it ourselves, more towards, I guess we call like a full stack ML engineer, somebody who's able to, you know, help integrate this and actually implemen…”