Your Competitive Advantage Comes From a Great Data Asset

The Data Driven Podcast was joined by Tristan Rouillard, a co-Founder of Hasty.ai. Hasty.ai supports vision AI practitioners and their evolving needs by developing best-in-class vision AI tools that are supported by a community of machine learning engineers, data scientists, and software developers.

Some of the topics that Tristan and I discussed:

• The genesis of the idea for Hasty came from the founders’ own experiences
• Manual image labeling and just how time-consuming that is
• The idea was NOT to change the technology but to change the process
• The necessity to bring the neural networks into the process earlier on
• The importance of having a clean data set
• With Hasty, one is not looking for mistakes in the dataset, but fixing the ones the neural network has found
• There is no substitute for a ground-truth data set
• When you are building a product, you are looking for ‘love’ and ‘wow’
• Hasty is changing a process and that is the hardest thing to change
• Bringing agile methodology to machine learning
• How sometimes the biggest competition is the status quo
• Taking domain-specific assets and leveraging them in a good way
• Data ownership and one of Hasty’s USPs
• It is likely that the training data is the differentiator, not the neural network
• The nuance and complexity of image recognition is yet to be understood
• The need for data documentation
• Hasty is teaching machines how to identify and see the world the same way we do
• Everybody that joins Hasty has to label a data asset

The quote from Alan Nichol, a co-Founder and the CTO of Rasa, came from this LinkedIn post.

(A shout-out to the incredible Head of Operations at Hasty.ai, Lisa Wantig, for helping to make this possible.)