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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#61

Post by afarviral »

tyingq wrote: post #42
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #16

Our immediate goal should be to set our sights lower; forget ML, instead improve and expand technologies like RPA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation ), which is only "AI" in the narrowest sense. Example: my wife is an admin in a school office, and a ludicrous amount of her and her colleagues' time is spent on replicating data entry between a multiplicity of different incompatible systems. The…

RPA can be a dangerous band aid. It often uses screen scraping or similar brittle interfaces that are known to change. Or, it doesn't know about certain error conditions, etc. Also, if it's been running for months before it breaks, the humans that used to do the work are gone, or have forgotten how to do it.

At my work we are leaning heavily on RPA to automate away drudgery and ultimately reduce expendature. However it has been immensely frustrating, prone to errors and garnered endless suspicion. The experience has been that bots written by the service desk staff doing the job function better and are much more under our teams governance, which the official "automation" teams within our org are painful to deal with due to their lack of availability and not having first hand knowledge of the things being automated. I think the RPA approach requires dedicated people developing and monitoring the bots who have an active part in the process being automated. The difference in approach determines the result.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#62

Post by gridlockd »

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

You generally do not control the process that generates the PDF or other unstructured data.

Consider invoicing, you may have hundreds of distinct sources, but none of them individually would warrant automation.

It is a problem of standardization. Any standard complex enough to cover all business cases would be too expensive to implement, or you could not get all stakeholders to adopt it, and so on. Accountants would not want to make themselves redundant, obviously.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#63

Post by higeorge13 »

h91wka wrote: post #38
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.

We should keep in mind that companies and sectors set a different goal for the recommendations. Others prefer to show recommendations on similar items, others from what similar users have purchased/viewed/listened, others on highly-profitable items, others focus on discoverability of new items, etc. And as a result people view recommendations differently based on their personal taste and purpose.

And of course, we should always compare the recommendations with the usual baselines. e.g. i sometimes hate youtube recommendations, but what if the baseline was videos that are trending or are watched by users in my country? I would hate them more.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#64

Post by sitkack »

tyingq wrote: post #42
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #16

Our immediate goal should be to set our sights lower; forget ML, instead improve and expand technologies like RPA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation ), which is only "AI" in the narrowest sense. Example: my wife is an admin in a school office, and a ludicrous amount of her and her colleagues' time is spent on replicating data entry between a multiplicity of different incompatible systems. The…

RPA can be a dangerous band aid. It often uses screen scraping or similar brittle interfaces that are known to change. Or, it doesn't know about certain error conditions, etc. Also, if it's been running for months before it breaks, the humans that used to do the work are gone, or have forgotten how to do it.

The work an RPA does is obvious, you can watch what it does.

Your first statement is a trusism, any solution can be a dangerous band aid, if applied incorrectly. RPAs solve real problems now, really the only correct measure.

Of the RPAs I have raised, I always watched them work, they just prevent mistakes. I would suggest taking a screen recording and verbally annotating it for posterity. Furthermore, nothing says your RPA has to run open-loop, one can put in checks to ensure that it hasn't gone off the rails.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#65

Post by colinmorelli »

amcoastal wrote: post #34
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.

That sort of misses the point. The uncertainty estimation is, itself, dependent on and a direct result of the quality of the training data you give it and that training data's representation of reality.

And even if the inputs are great, it's hard to understand what we can do with a 99% confidence prediction. The next great unlock that society is waiting for in the AI realm applies to industries where failure is not an easily acceptable outcome.

Take self-driving cars for example. Even if we can objectively prove that current AI models can drive on current roads in current conditions with a lower fatality rate than humans (this is debatable anyway, but let's assume) - what do we do when it knows it's not confident? If we assume the driver hasn't been paying attention during the ride so far, and a scenario comes up that the AI is uncertain about...the human now has likely mere seconds (at most) to capture their surroundings, analyze the risk, and take corrective action. If we assume the driver has been paying attention during the ride, then what was the point of the AI? Moreover: what if it thought it was confident, but it was still wrong. Who do we blame? How do we mitigate future instances of it? What were once societal problems we could blame on a fallible humans are now obscure technology problems we can't introspect. That's a scary place for a lot of people to be.

Basically, we've reached the level of AI where it can be used as a backup to humans and protect us from royally fucking something up. But the next big unlock will come when it can be the primary actor. It's hard to imagine how we'll get there without the AI actually understanding what it's processing in some real way.

Edit: rephrased the 3rd paragraph.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#66

Post by bsaul »

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

don't know why you got downvoted. The widespread use of PDF is a disease that needs to be eradicated... the only problem is we don't know (yet) with what we should replace it, but it's definitely amazing we have to hope for ML to be able to understand a format we, humans, decided to have machine produce.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#67

Post by tgb »

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…

AI for pharma seems to be targeted at things like drug discovery, where yes every output from the algorithm has to be carefully validated. But that's already the case for human-generated ideas. So I don't think your argument makes sense in this context.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#68

Post by NalNezumi »

I'm going to go against the flow of most comment here and say that it's not always business misunderstanding AI. Bad labeled data and unclear goals/expectations sure, but the latter one should be identifiable by a good ML/Data scientist, if you have any insight to what you can actually deliver.

But most ML/Data Science people have no proper understanding of AI/ML, and when just traditional "coding" can solve the problem rather than throwing fancy statistical models and buzzword.

I'm not in business nor AI/ML, but in Robotics. And as a person in Robotics it's always the same experience working with AI/ML engineers: They first say they require large amount of data, then give great promises. (but never specific metrics, except maybe a percentage of success) Then they deliver a module that fails outside the perfect scope of deployment(works only in the lab at 1pm). This is ofc never specified in the delivery. Also crucially, it does not give a good indication of failure. The amount of ad-hoc you need to add after the thing is delivered is just staggering.

On top of this reality, most ML/Data science peoples response to this entire process is to point and blame the data, or the "well you guys is expecting too much from this!" when they had ample time to outline the scope, limitation and requirement before they even started collecting the data.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#69

Post by MaxBarraclough »

lqet wrote: post #51
syllogism wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> instead of having the work reviewed by a second person, you can have model + person But the argument still applies then - if only one incident occurs where a catastrophic mistake was not spotted by the model failsafe, and if later investigations show that the mistake could've been easily spotted by a second human, a human will be installed as a failsafe for the failsafe. I think the general problem is the following…

> But the argument still applies then [...] a human will be installed as a failsafe for the failsafe.

Surely this will depend on the cost of failure, and the cost of the human failsafe.

Spellcheck in an email client helps prevent the minor embarrassment of typos and spelling errors in emails, and few emails are so consequential that it's worth having them carefully manually vetted.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#70

Post by bsaul »

gridlockd wrote: post #62
thewarrior wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You generally do not control the process that generates the PDF or other unstructured data. Consider invoicing, you may have hundreds of distinct sources, but none of them individually would warrant automation. It is a problem of standardization. Any standard complex enough to cover all business cases would be too expensive to implement, or you could not get all stakeholders to adopt it, and so on. Accountants would…

there's probably a better tradeoff than a format that only gives you "print this character at x,y coordinate".

Websites have been able to produce "ready to print" html for a while now, and html (even with a lot of restriction) would be hundred times better than PDFs.

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