After many months of research and development, this week our team released Iris.ai version 5.0. The new software includes a very substantial algorithmic upgrade, currently being evaluated in full by our research engineers. Having said that, initial results point to a potential fifteen percentage point improvement in precision!
The release timing coincided with Spain’s very polarised general election. Amidst vast exaggeration on all hell breaking loose if party X or Y didn’t get a sufficient majority, the day before the vote one of Spain’s most highly respected political scientist, Pepe Fernández Albertos, tweeted about an old favourite of mine, the famous Louis Brandeis sentence: “the most important political office is that of the private citizen”.
The two things put together made me think of the beauty inherent to linear improvements attained via hard day-to-day work. In a fashion we treasure both at Iris.ai and Civio –call it culture, call it something different–, age has taught me that the things that really matter, the most valuable contributions one can make, are those achieved via honest, continued effort, prolonged over time.
In a context where OpenAI betrays the faith that many had placed on it, abandoning its non-for-profit path, for example, it is refreshing to remind oneself that there is no magic wand for impact in the world, no fantasy home run or golden ticket, as a satisfactory substitute for that feeling of deserving the achievement that finally arrives; even if eventually, fast forward some years now, in the end it does not!
