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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#21

Post by syllogism »

ethanbond wrote: post #18

I’ve been working in the “real world business processes that companies are trying to AI-ify” realm for quite a while now. Pharma, cyber security, oil and gas production, etc. This article doesn’t mention a really, really straightforward factor for why AI hasn’t invaded these domains despite billions of dollars being dumped into them. An automated process only has to be wrong once to compel human operators to double o…

In those sorts of domains the best pitch for AI is as a failsafe. The model and the human probably make different errors, often a human will make mistakes due to simple inattention. This lets you substitute the model for some other process controls that you'd need to maintain 100% accuracy, e.g. instead of having the work reviewed by a second person, you can have model + person.

In lots of business contexts, probably most, reducing variance is much more valuable than reducing mean expenses. Variance can halt downstream production, so the loss can be some huge amount of opportunity. And variance propagates through a supply chain, so your customers will hate variance in your output, as it may mean they have to ship the variance forward, which their customers hate. Plus if you allow your supply chain to get away with inconsistency, they can start to rob you with lower average quality and it will take you time to notice.

If a company has been bothering to do some process manually and they haven't outsourced it to the cheapest humans possible, then they care more about low variance than low cost. Pitching these businesses a solution that lowers cost at the expense of unknown high variance is very unattractive. Instead, you want to tell them "I can reduce your variance even further! Here's what that would cost".

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#22

Post by jerzyt »

A better question would be why AI works great for some business (e.g. Netflix, AirBnB, Uber, Waze, Amazon) yet fails miserably for other (JC Penney, Sears). In my view, the older companies are trying to strap on AI on top of a traditional dataset, which never collected any useful signals. The new companies designed their entire business concepts around data, and collected what's needed from the get-go. Sears may have a 100 years worth of useless data. AirBnB has about 13, but so much more informative. Amazon applies A/B testing all the time - would anyone at Sears even know what it is?

A secondary issue with business data is that vast majority of the features are categorical, for example: vendor id, client id, shipper id, etc. These usually get hot-one encoded, and you end up with hundreds of features where there's no meaningful distance metric. Random Forest and XGB are about the only that produce somewhat rational models, but in reality, they are good because they approximate reverse engineering of business process.

And lastly, the hype far outweighs the possibilities, at least until the business are ready to re-engineer the processes, if it's not too late.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#23

Post by BlackFly »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #7

> why can't it read a PDF document and transform it into a machine-readable format? > why can't I get a computer to translate my colleague's financial spreadsheet into the format my SAP software wants? Because you probably expect it to be 100% or maybe 99.999% accurate, and we can't do that. Imagine "AI" translating someones financial spreadsheet into a different format and dropping a zero somewhere. Oops.. but your…

If school grades are indicative, even a 90% accuracy is commendable for human driven tasks. The big difference is that when a human double checks their own work, they may not make the same mistake twice. Or even better, when a second person checks the work.

Mistakes are tolerable, but you need to be able to recover from them somehow, and recovery from an AI mistake seems to be something that people like to pretend is unnecessary or impossible.

We currently live in a world where failures are tolerable but seem adamant that moving to an AI driven world means that failures are no longer tolerable. We still haven't lost the ability to make mistakes (because we still do many things manually) but we really seem keen on losing it.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#24

Post by dwighttk »

syllogism wrote: post #20

> why can't it read a PDF document and transform it into a machine-readable format? It can definitely do that, but you might not like the cost/benefit analysis, depending on how many such documents you want to process. The costs are coming down steadily though as the tech improves. If you need to do millions of such documents, yeah a model will probably be worth it. But if you need to do a few hundred you probably sh…

> The thing is, reality has surprisingly high resolution. When you give out a task like this to a person, they will likely come back to you for clarification about how you want to deal with some of the examples.

Why isn’t this generally solved, though?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#25

Post by roenxi »

The obvious answer to me is that the hardware is only available to handful of players and the libraries aren't mature yet. PyTorch has been around for about 4 years; that isn't enough time for a lot of people to have gotten comfortable with it.

The people who have access to people with software and hardware have found a lot of uses for the tech - I assume AI basically is Google Image Search.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#26

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

ethanbond wrote: post #18

I’ve been working in the “real world business processes that companies are trying to AI-ify” realm for quite a while now. Pharma, cyber security, oil and gas production, etc. This article doesn’t mention a really, really straightforward factor for why AI hasn’t invaded these domains despite billions of dollars being dumped into them. An automated process only has to be wrong once to compel human operators to double o…

Huh, N26, a major online bank in Europe is famous for some of its customers getting their accounts blocked every time they tweak their ML model and yet is doing great financially dispite the shitstorm it generates each time.

It's not like Google blocking your email or YouTube account, we're taking about your friggin bank account here.

I don't know how they're still in business and growing with such a process in place.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#27

Post by michaelbuckbee »

It's sneaking in, just not announcing itself.

I used to work for a really well-known medical dictation/transcription, documentation, and coding (in the medical billing sense) company.

They're using ML models all over for speech to text, document analysis, etc.

It enables some very real efficiency gains but it's not positioned the same as something like IBM's Watson and it's somewhat ridiculous AI claims.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#28

Post by NikolaeVarius »

thewarrior wrote: post #15
laichzeit0 wrote: post #7

> why can't it read a PDF document and transform it into a machine-readable format? > why can't I get a computer to translate my colleague's financial spreadsheet into the format my SAP software wants? Because you probably expect it to be 100% or maybe 99.999% accurate, and we can't do that. Imagine "AI" translating someones financial spreadsheet into a different format and dropping a zero somewhere. Oops.. but your…

Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Unless you’re dealing with ancient data wouldn’t it be easier to have whatever that’s generating the PDF return machine readable data ? This suggests to me that lot of office jobs will be lost just by modernizing systems and making them spit out JSON

PDFs do not solely consist of computer generated files. PDFs also come in the form of paper that have been hand written on or scans.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#29

Post by valine »

The problem goes much deeper than researchers not having enough PDFs. If you look at where machine learning is successful it’s usually processing spatially related data. The pixels in a photograph have a spacial component where points near each other are more related than points far apart. Same goes for audio, and even text. Words in a paragraph that are close to each other are usually more related than words far apart.

A spreadsheet has very little or no spacial component for a neural network to learn, and the location of an important number in a pdf probably has little to do with the number’s significance. Without a spacial component to do pattern recognition a lot of the recent advancements in machine learning like transformers or convolution get thrown out the window.

There are some machine learning problems that can be solved with more or better data, but I don’t think PDF to JSON is one of them.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#30

Post by dade_ »

I forget the name of that silly robot in the picture, Ginger or something. Designed to take food orders and possibly deliver them to tables, they get dragged out to bank branches and need to be supervised by employees the whole time. It is bad enough that they could only provide the most trivial of information (worse than web search), IT also struggled to keep the things connected to WiFi. Multi-billion dollar corps 'doing AI'.
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