When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, the industry is at a crossroads of fascination versus function. We're awed by the technology, but a number of forces are conspiring to minimize the progress we're making, especially in the Enterprise. There are a few people out there who are adamantly trying to address this. One of them is Hilary Mason, Cloudera's GM of Machine Learning[1].
Mason was previously Chief Data Scientist at Bitly[2], then founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs[3], which Cloudera[4] acquired in 2017. While Fast Forward still exists as a unit of Cloudera and is doing very important work, Mason's role puts her at the head of AI at Cloudera overall. That's a powerful place to be, for a couple of reasons. One is that Cloudera's recent merger with Hortonworks[5] makes it an undisputed leader in the data lake/Hadoop[6]/Spark[7]/analytics world. Perhaps more important, though, is that AI is one of the company's three core focuses (the other two being the Edge and Data Warehousing).
Executive opinion
With that seat of power and the experience that comes from her current and previous roles, Mason's brain is one of the best to pick, in order to get a sense of how applied AI is going, as a commercial effort. I had the chance recently to talk to Mason and do just that. And what I found out is, while Mason is genuinely optimistic and excited about AI, her view is that, as an industry, we could be doing better.
Mason says people are paying attention to the wrong things. She believes strongly that we are focusing almost exclusively on the technology