alt Hacker NewsIt’s a tale as old as time — people don’t understand that marketing and branding are just as important, if not more so, than the product. Jev is exceptionally-well branded. Anyone can look at the webpage and understand it, and the implications, instantly.
OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!
I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.
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> “Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means?
I can understand it, and it wouldn't excite me at all.
Jev has a beautiful API and is advertised as something much more general.
It's also well established that an algorithm or architecture alone are not enough to produce a useful model. The same architecture can produce vastly different results depending on the training data, post-training, harness, etc.
Especially with „ sales conversion probability“ it just doesn’t sound universal to other issues - there’s tons of unique models for specific use cases
You're right but it's not the full picture. It's much easier to market when you have a name brand behind you. Not sure the author would've done much better even if he messaged it better. It's like the difference between someone random saying something smart on Twitter and no one gives a shit and Karapthy saying the same thing and everyone talks about it. I'm not saying it in a bad way - those with clout around them earned the people's trust by doing something right. But it's not easy to get there and there are many people doing great things that get very little publicity if at all. Not to mention in this case Jev came from a startup that raised a lot of money and can spend it on good marketing.
This 100%. Engineers really lack understanding in marketing and branding.
No one cares if you are "first". They only care if your product is known by as many people as possible and is better than all the other alternatives at solving a problem that is worth paying for.
If you don't market, then no-one will care that you exist even if you solved a problem decades ago. Someone else will use your solution and take inspiration (and credit) off of your discovery because you didn't bother to tell anyone about it.
This is exactly what happened here.
I think OP, as said on Reddit, wanted to get a lot of investment and ride the wave but did not know how to. This was said as such on Reddit today by them. This is indeed a shame especially it was a year earlier but indeed a lack of marketing; many people on Reddit told what to do in this case, in hindsight, it’s worth checking it out imho.