> I cannot imagine ever paying anything close to $25k for consulting advice, that’s just bananas to me
The parent already explained why he was willing to pay $25k for a consultant, but you ignored his explanation and just started talking right past him and insulting the work he's doing.
" It makes so much more sense to pay $25k to get direct knowledge of systems and techniques versus your team spending a bunch of time exploring different products/methods/algos to find something that might work in the end, or might fail in a few months. $25k is like 5 MacBooks, hardly worth thinking about versus being able to get experienced direction from someone who has done what you're trying to do and saving your team literally hundreds of hours of exploratory work."
>Spending 6x that amount for _advice_ about NLP, which practically grows on trees today, is just totally unrealistic.
If you can't conceive of what useful advice might look like then that's just a failure of imagination on your part. Getting any ML model to work properly involves a lot of esoteric domain-specific tricks. You have to use A,B,C to model the problem domain, apply X to transform the data, clean the data by throwing out Y, impose constraints Z on the model. You can pay your full-time employees hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend hundreds of hours discovering these through trial and error, or you can just pay someone $25k to explain these to you up front.
Of course you can find a billion worthless, generic, baby's first bag-of-words spam filter type NLP tutorials online, but that's not the same as commercially applicable expertise.
The parent already explained why he was willing to pay $25k for a consultant, but you ignored his explanation and just started talking right past him and insulting the work he's doing.
" It makes so much more sense to pay $25k to get direct knowledge of systems and techniques versus your team spending a bunch of time exploring different products/methods/algos to find something that might work in the end, or might fail in a few months. $25k is like 5 MacBooks, hardly worth thinking about versus being able to get experienced direction from someone who has done what you're trying to do and saving your team literally hundreds of hours of exploratory work."
>Spending 6x that amount for _advice_ about NLP, which practically grows on trees today, is just totally unrealistic.
If you can't conceive of what useful advice might look like then that's just a failure of imagination on your part. Getting any ML model to work properly involves a lot of esoteric domain-specific tricks. You have to use A,B,C to model the problem domain, apply X to transform the data, clean the data by throwing out Y, impose constraints Z on the model. You can pay your full-time employees hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend hundreds of hours discovering these through trial and error, or you can just pay someone $25k to explain these to you up front.
Of course you can find a billion worthless, generic, baby's first bag-of-words spam filter type NLP tutorials online, but that's not the same as commercially applicable expertise.