It's all done by Algorithms! This guy's name is Algorithm, and this guy, and these other guys...
This guy's name is al-Khwarizmi..
AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
101–110 of 121 posts
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#102I didn't use manual labeling during pilots for ML-based service and I regret it after the fact.
Your customer cares about a business value. From my experience using buzzwords like "AI" will only get your foot in the door, but in the end, the business value will sell. IMO it's a completely valid business strategy if you are selling something at cost with the plan of reducing the cost later and you can stay solvent in the meantime.
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#103Being in the public sector, I have the joy of sitting in a lot of meetings with companies and consultants that want to sell us AI for analytics and prediction. I’m still unconvinced. The closest I’ve seen to anything useful was Watson, and all it really offered was stuff we’ve been doing for years. I mean, we have 5 people working with data and building models, and Watson could maybe automate some of that, but you’d…
> We’ve run proof of concepts on stuff like traffic, and a small startup with a relationship with a university, build a route prediction thing that would make it easier to avoid jams. It worked, but it frankly didn’t work better than what our traffic department was already doing, using simple common sense. So we diverted the project to work on traffic light control for maximum flow, and it turned out that the settings our engineers had come up with were already optimal. Only our engineers had come up with the same results, using less resources.
The AI came up with the optimal solution on an "already solved problem", twice, and this is a failure on the part of the AI?
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#104Being in the public sector, I have the joy of sitting in a lot of meetings with companies and consultants that want to sell us AI for analytics and prediction. I’m still unconvinced. The closest I’ve seen to anything useful was Watson, and all it really offered was stuff we’ve been doing for years. I mean, we have 5 people working with data and building models, and Watson could maybe automate some of that, but you’d…
> We’ve run proof of concepts on stuff like traffic, and a small startup with a relationship with a university, build a route prediction thing that would make it easier to avoid jams. It worked, but it frankly didn’t work better than what our traffic department was already doing, using simple common sense. So we diverted the project to work on traffic light control for maximum flow, and it turned out that the setting…
It’s a failure if it’s more expensive. It wasn’t very good at the first example though.
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion, we cannot compare blockchain and AI : blockchains are a type of data structure based on hashes, while AI is a wide and fuzzy concept with different meanings over the years. Process automations and "AI" (let's say, complex autonomous systems) are parts of a bigger picture which is the digitalization of the society. Sometime, they are sold as a drop-in replacement for current human processes, but it actu…
I understood the OP in that he put AI and blockchain in the same hype / bullshit trap category.
Yes.
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#106Being in the public sector, I have the joy of sitting in a lot of meetings with companies and consultants that want to sell us AI for analytics and prediction. I’m still unconvinced. The closest I’ve seen to anything useful was Watson, and all it really offered was stuff we’ve been doing for years. I mean, we have 5 people working with data and building models, and Watson could maybe automate some of that, but you’d…
> But for analytics and prediction it’s been extremely useless compared to actual people. Usually the problem is that companies are going to sell you an AI solution for your data, but these companies are not going to tell you that with your current data there is very little an AI system can do. I say this because I saw companies who wanted a prediction system with 2 years of data (40 datapoints per year). Any AI expe…
We took this into account and worked with data from multiple municipalities. 25 years of data in a region with 1 million people is quite a lot.
The problem for ML seem to be that we’ve been using the data for a while and that we’re already very good at it.
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Lean Startup approach specifically recommends doing something like this as a "concierge MVP" to gauge customer demand before actually building the automation technology. It's a general approach, not anything specific to AI. Of course the underlying assumption there is that the technology is actually feasible.
This is the main problem imo and the reason why people with real domain knowledge hate these companies. Most of the people funding, selling, or buying “AI” products have no clue what is feasible!
An investor in an absolutely terrible NoSQL company told me point blank that he knew the team were clowns who didn't know what they were doing but that, having raised a lot of money and gotten a lot of traction from people who didn't understand how bad the project was, they could afford to hire professionals from Oracle and other companies who would be able to turn it into something less broken.
I also happened to know one of the people they later hired, and right up to that point they were seriously enraged by this company's deceptive nonsense. The company didn't describe his job quite in the way the investor did, but yeah, that's pretty much what the job was. The compensation was very good.
In a sense people with strong domain knowledge and experience could view these companies as basically a way to outsource the two hardest startup filter functions (finding product-market fit, establishing timing) while at the same time preserving their option to join as highly-compensated ICs and leads.
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#108Earlier 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…
In times of funding plenty the valley is awash with companies that are basically faking it. This was very common in the previous valley bubbles, the Real-Intelligence-Masquerading-As-Artificial thing is just one in a long line of semi-frauds that the valley tends to accumulate. In the 90s the flood of B2B companies was as crazy as the current flood of AI companies. This will pass when funding gets tight again and/or…
It's crazy when you consider that the Lean Startup advocates in the past actually advocated to fake things. For outsiders it's virtually impossible to tell if something is real or not.
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#109[deleted]
Re: AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
#110They appear to have stolen the plot of the film "Shooting Fish". Trailer - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120122/videoplayer/vi276031106...
Damnit or good... someone else remembers this. Oh well.
Maybe they should've tried trading a red paperclip for a house?