Michael Cavaretta, Ph.D. on LinkedIn: "I'm a fan of the…

I'm a fan of the a16z podcast and was intrigued with their recent discussion on the'end of theory.' The idea is that Artificial Intelligence tools, like unsupervised learning, don't require any hypotheses to generate insights from the data. From my perspective as an analytic executive in a large company, I'm going on the record that this is a terrible idea. While there are some startups that can embrace this'black-box' approach, the fast majority of large companies are run by people, not algorithms. These people are smart, and require evidence before they will turn over critical business functions to something they don't understand and can't explain.