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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#31

Post by ethanbond »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #26
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…

I’ve found that financial institutions have a disproportionately large appetite for this. This is frankly because they view their own mission criticality as somewhat low — lower even than their customers perceive it.

Undoing bad automation in finance often means reversing a very cheap edit on some database and pissing off a customer who’s so powerless that it won’t affect your business anyway.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#32

Post by jqpabc123 »

Because at this stage of the game, "artificial intelligence" is still an oxymoron .

It's really just a database developed through trial and error (aka "training") that we "hope" contains enough differentiating data points to produce a reasonable, weighted "best guess".

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#33

Post by morelisp »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #26
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…

> N26... is doing great financially.

Are they?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#34

Post by amcoastal »

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…

Do you do any work with uncertainty estimation with neural networks? There are many different ways to estimate uncertainty depending on your application, such as ensemble-training or dropout during testing to produce ranges of predictions that you can then use to get boundable error measurements.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#35

Post by cameldrv »

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…

Humans are hardly ever 99% accurate instantaneously on classification problems either. Humans have the ability to know when they should collect more information though, and can often perform some sort of hedging action when they are unsure.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#36

Post by indymike »

People try to apply AI to high-risk problems that smart people can't solve. When AI is applied to lower risk probelms that are usually easy for people to solve, we seem to get great results (i.e. recommendation engines).

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#38

Post by h91wka »

indymike wrote: post #36

People try to apply AI to high-risk problems that smart people can't solve. When AI is applied to lower risk probelms that are usually easy for people to solve, we seem to get great results (i.e. recommendation engines).

Never in my life I encountered a good recommendation engine, let alone a great one.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#39

Post by syllogism »

dwighttk wrote: post #24
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?

What could that even look like? In the extreme case this is like asking, "Why do I have to write programs, can't the computer just do what I tell it?". Writing the program is telling it what you want. In supervised machine learning, annotating the data is, instead.

If you tell me, "Go to ebay and get me a list of the prices of washing machines", that sounds simple, but then I'm faced with some washer/dryer combo or some hand-crank contraption. These are things you didn't think of. I can either ask you, or take a guess and hand you something that needs to be cleaned up later.

If I'm instead training a model, I need to encounter these tricky examples in order to ask you for a policy on them. If I'm collecting an unbiased sample of the training data, this could take a very long time. If there's some sampling strategy maybe it's faster, but there's still a minimum number of examples we need to think about, no matter what.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#40

Post by cmendel »

dwighttk wrote: post #24
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?

Because people aren't necessarily great at clearly communicating their needs.
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