Traditional news media companies have struggled to shift online — ad revenue is dropping, and they're even competing with millions of independent blogs and social media feeds for readership!
This is The Age of AI Series, where we talk to the foremost entrepreneurs and innovators around the planet using ML to transform industries.
My guest today is Mari Ahlquist, whose company iMatrics provides AI software that intelligently tags and categorizes news articles, to enable personalized recommendations to readers like Netflix or Youtube.
- Setting up the problem:
01:44 — The real challenges of running a news media organization in 2021: revenue, subscriptions, etc.
07:12 — The "Coca-Cola problem" that news media faces in terms of competition
10:34 — Why structuring, categorizing and tagging content is the key technical feature that enables all other things
- Why tagging is a hard ML problem, and approaches to solve it:
17:38 — Why tagging is an ML problem, and can't just be programmed
20:38 — Potential landmines: how your tagging system can affect the creative freedom of journalists, and how to avoid that from happening
27:40 — Exactly how "intelligent" does the algorithm need to be to tag articles better than humans?
29:34 — How the product really works (simple explanation), the huge number of corner cases, and why the system has to be surprisingly complex
39:19 — The world is changing. How do the automatic tags keep up?
42:05 — Aman goes into a geeky brainstorm about predicting the coronavirus pandemic and Mari politely indulges him
- Getting operational: how the team and product evolved
47:15 — How many engineers they needed to build the system, how much is manual vs automated, etc
50:00 — Origins and product evolution
Here's the original blog post: https://sanpram.com/2021/10/09/ai-newspapers-netflix/
This podcast is produced by Sanpram Transnational Corp., an education and media company helping non-technical professionals be tech-fluent. See our programs: https://sanpram.com/teaching/
