This is SO interesting! I am surprised by how companies are trying to solve AI problems... Machines normally take you 80-90% there, and using humans for that 10-20% left is an amazing idea. It's also a great monetization model for many companies.!!! Also, Clara is awesome :)
To me this seems like the right approach - either you start with some massive amount of data that's not quite adapted to the problem (think Google), you start with full automation and have to basically write the decision tree yourself, or you generate the appropriate labeled training data like this.<p>However, it seems like there are some scale issues if you start upmarket like Clara Labs has been. I wonder if there's benefit in having a cheaper more mass-market version as well that can be used to generate larger amounts of data and test algorithms better?
We've posted a follow up on the humans behind Clara here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074657" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074657</a>
This is AWESOME. Human+Machine is always going to be better and stronger than machine alone. Keep it up! I wonder how this can impact the amount of people that can participate in crowdsourced projects.
Would love to integrate the ML and context aspects of Clara into our existing assistant team. Curious if that's something that's doable, or if it's just a package deal of their trained operators + AI.<p>But yeah, basically awesome and everything we'd need. Being able to go even more in-house and specialize our personal assistant and equip them with augmented capabilities here would be even more awesome.
Very similar to x.ai, although x.ai seems to be currently constrained to one problem domain (meeting scheduling). However, I'd bet they're looking to move be beyond just this.<p><a href="https://x.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://x.ai/</a>
Related: <a href="http://messymatters.com/ai-plus-ui/" rel="nofollow">http://messymatters.com/ai-plus-ui/</a><p>About how AI often needs a good UI to handle the last few percent of cases.
Navigating to<p><a href="https://claralabs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://claralabs.com/</a><p>freezes my Linux system - a reboot is necessary. Is this a SPAM blog post?
Reminds me of the writeup a few days ago about Google's machine emotional intelligence for email suggested replys - except Clara is doing it (and more) with a team the fraction of the size.<p>The business solution here is very clever. As an engineer, my instinct is to fully automate any system. Clara is a great example where the most effective answer is getting the 90% solution, then going the last mile with humans to bring it up to 99% (making that up) accuracy, with most of the same savings. Imagine similar solutions for customer support (especially over website chat bars. Some systems like this already exist.)
Contemporary ML is really (and by that I mean human-level) good for some things: classifying images, guiding a car along prominently visible lane lines in perfect conditions, predicting timeseries that have latent patterns.<p>It's NOT good at the general "bot" problem (or should I say "true AI" problem), and some "features" of human assistants like EQ, generalized task completion, and complex planning are decades away from getting solved.<p>I would even argue that a mechanized/automated Clara would HAVE to pass the Turing test in order to work.