What Oasis can teach you about training data

Oasis wouldn’t have existed without The Beatles.

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Liam and Noel were raised on British rock and roll – The Beatles, Bowie, T-Rex, The Smiths, The Stone Roses.? This rich tapestry of British rock just bubbles through their music - the swagger, the confidence, the sweeping strings alongside the raw sound of an Epiphone.? A lifetime of consumption of British rock music created, arguably, one of the two greatest Britpop bands of the 1990s.

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As for The Beatles – they were at the forefront of a seismic shift in the 1960s music scene.? They drew influence from Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Motown, Hamburg’s music scene.? They were inspired by others, but drawing from such a wide range of inspiration resulted in something new, which shifted pop and rock music as we know it.

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I unashamedly love both bands.

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I was listening to The Masterplan on the tube this morning and it got me thinking… this could be a way of explaining the impact of training data on AI solutions (yes, I do need to get out more.)

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Oasis is a great example of relatively narrow training data.? They’re great at what they do because that’s what they’ve been trained on.? You wouldn’t ask Noel Gallagher to write an R&B song, but you’d trust him to write a great indie classic.

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The Beatles are a great example of a broad training data set.? They scraped far and wide, listening to everything, and it resulted in a body of works that evolved over time.? They drew on a broad range of influences to stylistically shape-shift.? Would I trust Paul McCartney to write a Rihanna track over half a century later?? He literally did it.

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It’s the same in AI.? Do you need a consistent star performer in one industry segment, or do you need an overarching solution that evolves and bridges lots of different needs?? Are you building an AI application for, say, the financial industry?? Give it industry relevant data, and make sure it’s great quality.? Are you building an AI application that helps summarise text for any office workers to make it easier to digest emails quickly?? You need a broad data set.

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And needless to say, quality data matters.? To take this analogy to the extreme, I wouldn’t want to listen to a band who grew up listening to Las Ketchup and The Cheeky Girls as their main influences.

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The way that you construct your datasets, and the breadth of your data will heavily influence the outcome.? If you ever doubt that, pop on some Oasis and appreciate that sometimes yes, it does sound a bit like Lennon had a time machine.? But that’s not always a bad thing.