re: Airbnb now Using AI to Screen Renters and Cancel Reservations

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Based on the article, it's nowhere near that simple.

They didn't analyze billions of records for a simple if-statement.

You're assuming they automatically cancel a reservation if all of those conditions are true. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. That's why this is an AI problem.

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Here's a more serious question then: what are they doing that's "AI" in the sense that it goes beyond simple statistics? If you have a bunch of variables and you want to build a mathematical model that predicts the value of some other variable ("willHaveParty"), isn't that just a matter for ordinary statistics, like a linear regression model or whatever?