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AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

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Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#51

Post by konschubert »

tabbott wrote: post #8

A poorly-kept secret in Silicon Valley is that many "AI startups" started over the last few years are actually using humans, with a long-term plan to slowly decrease the amount of work the humans do using algorithms (generally based on machine learning, but not always) as well as more basic automation. In some cases they don't actually do any "AI" work for the company's first few years, and if they do, it's more like…

> The actual approach is a perfectly reasonable business strategy,

It is, as long as you have reason to assume that you will be ABLE to automate the tasks. For many of these tasks, there is NO reason to assume that.

My feeling with AI tasks is that either they work reasonably well after a short time or they will never work well. (At least not until the next AI revolution.)

If a company doesn't have a good enough AI system for their task after a couple of months of toying with it, I will be Very sceptical that they will ever have one.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#52

Post by seanmcdirmid »

PhilipA wrote: post #35

I remember hearing from a colleague that Expensify wasn’t automatically identifying the expenses, but had helped with manual labor. I don’t know if it is true and quite honestly I as a consumer doesn’t care. If some is giving me a good experience which eases my work, I don’t really care if it was done with AI, human labor or magic - as long as it works.

You might care as an investor, lest great consumer experience come from burning through VC. As an anology, if Uber claimed to have self driving taxis, but actually had people hiding in boxes driving them, that would be investment fraud.

The promise of AI has always been not better experiences, but similar human touched experiences for a much cheaper cost.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#54

Post by blensor »

Radim wrote: post #27
tabbott wrote: post #8

A poorly-kept secret in Silicon Valley is that many "AI startups" started over the last few years are actually using humans, with a long-term plan to slowly decrease the amount of work the humans do using algorithms (generally based on machine learning, but not always) as well as more basic automation. In some cases they don't actually do any "AI" work for the company's first few years, and if they do, it's more like…

Very frustrating for companies who actually do use machine learning to solve a problem! Hard to rise above the background "AI noise" of well-funded marketing. And people are already fed up with all the AI marketing bullshit; "ebbing tide sinks all boats". One way is to offer real-time results via APIs or demos, which cannot be faked with humans due to sheer latency / volume. Another is to be active in the ML communit…

A company that needs to be protected from the market to be successful in this very same market, isn't this a fallacy?

Trying to create a startup that can't at least compete with the existing solutions isn't a very good business strategy in my opinion.

That's what academia is for. Research that is still too far away from being profitable but that has it's merits in the long run.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#55

Post by msg3 »

blensor wrote: post #54
Radim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very frustrating for companies who actually do use machine learning to solve a problem! Hard to rise above the background "AI noise" of well-funded marketing. And people are already fed up with all the AI marketing bullshit; "ebbing tide sinks all boats". One way is to offer real-time results via APIs or demos, which cannot be faked with humans due to sheer latency / volume. Another is to be active in the ML communit…

A company that needs to be protected from the market to be successful in this very same market, isn't this a fallacy? Trying to create a startup that can't at least compete with the existing solutions isn't a very good business strategy in my opinion. That's what academia is for. Research that is still too far away from being profitable but that has it's merits in the long run.

Not really - Korea protected Samsung et al for years before they were capable of competing globally.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#56

Post by sorokod »

cuboidGoat wrote: post #50
sorokod wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual approach is a perfectly reasonable business strategy Except for keeping this secret. Than it's called lying.

Looking around the world, lying seems to have been redefined as; "a perfectly reasonable business strategy" . One of the biggest shocks I had going from childhood to adulthood was the sudden flip between people telling you that you have to be honest and the people now telling you to stop being honest. And the people who had previously told you that you must be honest, they tell you "oh yes, that's work" , when you go…

Life is messy an there are grey areas. That doesn't mean that the abstract concept has no meaning at all, Theranos is an example.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#57

Post by sesqu »

blensor wrote: post #54
Radim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very frustrating for companies who actually do use machine learning to solve a problem! Hard to rise above the background "AI noise" of well-funded marketing. And people are already fed up with all the AI marketing bullshit; "ebbing tide sinks all boats". One way is to offer real-time results via APIs or demos, which cannot be faked with humans due to sheer latency / volume. Another is to be active in the ML communit…

A company that needs to be protected from the market to be successful in this very same market, isn't this a fallacy? Trying to create a startup that can't at least compete with the existing solutions isn't a very good business strategy in my opinion. That's what academia is for. Research that is still too far away from being profitable but that has it's merits in the long run.

The claim is that there may be a market for AI-powered technologies, but that market is suppressed by non-AI competitors exploiting information asymmetry.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#58

Post by PhilipA »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #52
PhilipA wrote: post #35

I remember hearing from a colleague that Expensify wasn’t automatically identifying the expenses, but had helped with manual labor. I don’t know if it is true and quite honestly I as a consumer doesn’t care. If some is giving me a good experience which eases my work, I don’t really care if it was done with AI, human labor or magic - as long as it works.

You might care as an investor, lest great consumer experience come from burning through VC. As an anology, if Uber claimed to have self driving taxis, but actually had people hiding in boxes driving them, that would be investment fraud. The promise of AI has always been not better experiences, but similar human touched experiences for a much cheaper cost.

My comment was merely mad as a consumer.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#59

Post by talltimtom »

PhilipA wrote: post #35

I remember hearing from a colleague that Expensify wasn’t automatically identifying the expenses, but had helped with manual labor. I don’t know if it is true and quite honestly I as a consumer doesn’t care. If some is giving me a good experience which eases my work, I don’t really care if it was done with AI, human labor or magic - as long as it works.

You don’t Care but some consumers will care that it’s real people going through all their data and not just a machine. And claiming to have AI but using manual labor is straight up investor fraud on a Theranos level.

Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI

#60

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

baddox wrote: post #49
tabbott wrote: post #8

A poorly-kept secret in Silicon Valley is that many "AI startups" started over the last few years are actually using humans, with a long-term plan to slowly decrease the amount of work the humans do using algorithms (generally based on machine learning, but not always) as well as more basic automation. In some cases they don't actually do any "AI" work for the company's first few years, and if they do, it's more like…

Do you have any specific examples of AI products that are allegedly secretly using humans (don’t bother dropping specific company names)? It strikes me as something that would only be viable in very narrow cases. Anything customer-facing and low-latency, like human language translation, image classification, or speech recognition doesn’t seem viable at even modest scale. Anything involving large amounts of data, like…

x.ai is, or at least was, powered by humans.
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