Thread by @QuinnyPig

Well slap me naked and hide my clothes, it's another #reQuinnvent livetweet thread, this time of the @awscloud #reinvent Machine Learning keynote.

We go live to the home of ML, a magical technology able to find anything in your data aside from a viable business model.

This startup founder is 19 years old and worth $1.2 billion due to something called Serverless Blockchain with ML. You should have studied harder.

But even this founder can't afford the new Apple headphones.

And we're off. I'm told that Swami is super down to earth, since unlike some other AI folks he doesn't require his team, colleagues, children, spouse, or pets to refer to him as "Doctor" in conversation. #reinvent

"Why is my logo on this list? I didn't think we did any ML work."

"You get an @awscloud bill, don't you?"

#reinvent

Talking about @Nike using SageMaker to deliver relevant recommendations.

I polled the @LastWeekinAWS readership when SageMaker first shipped. Everyone had a different use case, and they all started with an "I'm not a data scientist" disclaimer. Transformative. #reinvent

"Why isn't the new Trainium chip on the slide?"

"Because the name is terrible and I won't allow it in my presentation."

I confess I haven't kept up on the latest @Pokemon. #reinvent

Bug, not feature. It's confusing the hell out of customers.

Talking about @awscloud's tenets of Machine Learning. #reinvent

I know ML is ethically fraught because Swami just said "AWS, in partnership with Facebook." #reinvent

We need more EC2 instance families specializing in machine learning.

"Read your contract, you're required to talk about the chip into which we invested massive R&D and absolutely nothing for naming."

And we're now into the part of the ML talk where the prerequisite starts to resemble a masters degree. #reinvent

SageMaker now supports distributed training, enabling you to spend money on AWS compute resources faster.

The second tenet is to create the shortest path to success.

*Finding* the shortest path to that success requires ML. This is called the Traveling Cloud Salesman problem. #reinvent

SageMaker has seen massive adoption.

Talking about using ML to ensure player health and safety at the @NFL, an organization renowned for highly valuing the long-term health of its players. #reinvent

The NFL is still talking, since AWS is clearly in love with the brand. It's aspirational, but rather light on details. #reinvent

Now talking about how Intuit uses ML to figure out which congresspeople to lobby to stall implementation of pre-filled tax returns. #reinvent

Talking about last week's rollout of SageMaker Data Wrangler.

SageMaker Data Wrangler expands integrations beyond "other AWS services" and into "the third party services where your data actually lives." #reinvent

Talking about SageMaker Feature Store, the store you can't buy anything from #reinvent

Pack it in, SageMaker Clarify has solved the algorithmic bias in AI problem!

It's called "Clarify" because that's what @awscloud PR will spend the next month doing. #reinvent

So what's SageMaker Clarify going to say when I use "pictures of Fortune 500 CEOs" as my training data set?

Now @phenomenashlie is talking about how this works. She very clearly knows her stuff, and I have little doubt that Clarify does what she says it does. I just don't see it being listened to by a lot of companies. "Bias laundering" is the reason some of them use ML. :-/

Ooh. This seems relevant to my cost interests.

Huh. Why didn't they just give this another "SageMaker RandomWord" name? Did someone lose a bet?

There we go, back to form. SageMaker Pipelines came out last week.

And now Dr. Matt "Doctor" Wood takes the stage to demo this thing. #reinvent

Doing a demo to solve the burning societal problem "what song do I listen to next, and how do I make sure it's a bop?" #reinvent

Someone at @awscloud is firing on all cylinders: this thing has tagging support! AND THEY PUT IT IN A DEMO! 🥳🥳🥳

Dr. Matt Wood has referenced "high danceability" enough times that I'm positive I never want to go through a technical interview for a position on his team. #reinvent

Last year Dr. Matt Wood unveiled DeepComposer to bring ML to music. Is he likewise about to attempt to rip humanity's soul out of dancing this year? #reinvent

Not this year. Back to Swami! Now we're talking about ML at the Edge and its biggest problem: how can AWS charge you for this?

Introducing Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager.

That's off brand. Should have been SageMaker Edge Maker to keep the theme going. #reinvent

Tenet 3! Back during the California Gold Rush, nobody got rich by restricting who could buy their pickaxes and shovels. #reinvent

"Autopilot" and "ML" speaks to self-driving, but no: it's an AWS headfake. #reinvent

Here's my problem with the entire positioning @awscloud takes with ML:
They aren't articulating a business use case, and leaving that part to customers. They're just playing the "you need ML!" horn, and that's a premise I haven't yet accepted. #reinvent

That's really it. It just clicked for me. You're trying to sell me floor polish without either establishing or convincing me that a shiny floor holds any value to me first.

Solve for that and I'd become an ML evangelist basically instantly.

Now spilling ML onto a few databases. WHERE IS ROUTE 53 ML, @awscloud?! #reinvent

I think the big problem is that I work on @awscloud billing, which is a bounded problem space. And none of the vaunted ML solutions have solved for this. If you can't solve THAT, then how can you solve the unbounded stuff?

Now pouring ML on Redshift to solve a very specific problem.

That specific problem:

Oh hell yes! ML you don't need for a database you don't use! #reinvent

I so badly want QuickSight to be good enough to migrate onto, but it's just not. @petecheslock has more.

"How do I know I need to fire my BI team" is sadly not the subtext of this slide. #reinvent

"Oh no, a pie chart! Let's change it to a bar graph."

Now you're speaking executives' language! #reinvent

It really seems that with a few more years QuickSight might start to Excel.

"...and also you are very credulous." #reinvent

I don't have a use for Contact Lens, I can't afford Kendra, CodeGuru has potential if it ever finds my code problem, DevOps Guru has me *HIGHLY* skeptical.

I may not be the target customer for much of this. #reinvent

Kendra now supports 40 new connectors, presumably to AWS services that all start with "SageMaker." #reinvent

As @mike_julian has taught me, finding metric anomalies is SUPER challenging.

"Our customers asked how to make this detection easier?"

Introducing a service with a stupid name: Lookout for Metrics. #reinvent

I see @awscloud is really doubling down on "naming services after warning signs" this year. #reinvent

(Of COURSE that's better than whatever logo the service really has, because I Hire and Develop the Best graphic designers.)

Now it's time for a customer story, featuring AWS's best customer for ML services, Dr. Matt Wood. #reinvent

True story: Dr. Matt Wood lost an arm wrestling contest with a robot and was forced to name a service after the robot. That's where "Monitron" came from. #reinvent

("Why you shouldn't challenge robots to contests of strength" was apparently an elective at Doctor School.)

Talking about Lookout for Vision as well.

And of course here's its better logo.

And Lookout for Equipment...

Better logo, etc. etc.

And AWS Panorama Appliance if for some reason you don't want to replace all of your existing cameras with expensive ones that do on-device ML. #reinvent

This entire slide of services doesn't really apply to me; I don't have a factory or a warehouse. Just a house that's haunted ever since I installed multiple Alexa devices. #reinvent

The Panorama appliance is only $4K. Better than expected. Of course there's a monthly charge--this is AWS after all. But that's not bad. #reinvent

I have no use for it here; I've already got ML cameras in place.

https://twitter.com/quinnypig/status/1159937464095539201

Introducing Amazon HealthLake. Transforms data and lifesciences data at petabyte scale. #reinvent

At first I was against names like "HealthLake" and "Comprehend Medical" but what they're doing is highlighting that this is for the HIPAA crowd / healthcare vertical. A refreshing win for @awscloud Marketing from where I sit. Good job! #reinvent

Is there something different about this guy's audio? It feels like it's coming behind me to the left?! Surround sound in keynotes is a thing?! #reinvent

"DeepRacer in the Enterprise" only sounds nuts until you realize that it's gotten a bunch of people into ML who otherwise wouldn't have. I can't snark about that; it's legitimately awesome at breaking down gates. #reinvent

And that concludes the ML Keynote. Now over to twitch.tv/lastweekinaws to talk to the founder of @ChaosSearch about data analytics and searching: an actual problem companies have.