Overheard a dev at a coffee shop say 'the training data is the product' and it clicked

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Austin last Tuesday and caught part of a conversation between two AI folks. One of them said something like 'people focus on the model but the training data is the real product.' That stuck with me because I've been spending weeks tuning hyperparameters on a project. I went back and cleaned up my dataset instead, removed duplicate entries and fixed some mislabeled images. Accuracy jumped 12 percent in two days without touching a single model setting. Anyone else find that better data beats better algorithms more often than not?

3 comments

3 Comments

spencerm4614d ago

Did you find any bad data patterns that were obvious after you cleaned it?

the_lucas13d agoMost Upvoted

Funny how the messiest datasets often have the simplest fixes hiding in plain sight.

david_rivera414d ago

Yeah I once spent three days fixing bad timestamps only to realize my clock was wrong the whole time.