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softwaredoug | on: A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis
This is like saying we don’t need Dropbox because we have FTP servers.

People vastly underrate the patience of people to learn and setup a classifier. Jev is one API call. Training a good classifier is hard.

atherton94027 | parent | next
I don't know, a lot of the things we used to take for granted as "hard" just aren't anymore. Writing a parser for a compiler? It used to be an endeavor that took several days, now an LLM will do it in 20 mins.

Same for annoying training jobs, with sufficient data you can probably let an LLM loose on it in autotrain mode and it will come back with a decent classifier.

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trollbridge | parent | next
Training classifiers is shockingly easy nowadays with LLMs. This is probably the biggest single piece of bespoke software I ship that I didn’t used to.

We have in the works a classifier for if a prospective customer will be long term profitable or not. This changes everything.

suoloordi | root | parent
> We have in the works a classifier for if a prospective customer will be long term profitable or not

I'm curious, why do you use a classifier for long-term profitability? Wouldn't predicting expected lifetime profit with a forecasting model be more meaningful than just predicting whether a customer will be profitable or not?

trollbridge | root | parent
The purpose is to sort which customer to prioritise calling back versus putting at the bottom of the pile.

Eventually we hope to identify ones who are going to be lifetime duds.

Y_Y | parent
We don't need Dropbox, it's a heap of shit.

With enough marketing you can sell anything. Also a decent way to make a product is to do the hard part for someone else.

I've been training classifiers for ten years, it used to be hard. Now it's hard to do really well but it's trivial to do well enough.

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