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Why is AI so useless for business?

mebassett.info

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#71

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…

> yet is doing great financially

they might have a high valuation, but thats about all the financial success they have.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#72
post #11
post #4

In my opinion, most of the issues leading about AI "failing" in traditional organizations are due to the following: (1) Inflated expectations from higher/middle management which trickle down the organization. AI is seen as a high-profile case which has to lead to success (and a larger budget next year for my dept.) (2) Data quality issues. The data itself has issues, but the key issue is lack of metadata and disperse…

I pretty much agree with all of your points, but I also think there may be a more fundamental issue at play here. ML doesn't actually "understand" things - it can do very sophisticated and accurate pattern matching without actually "knowing" the logic of the patterns it's matching. This in turn means that it may fail catastrophically when faced with adversarial examples or with examples that are drawn from a differen…

How is that different from a typical human given a routine boring role? Specifically in regards to adversarial input, humans are often the weakest link in terms of process security.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#73
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Of course, this is why I wrote "catastrophic" above. I also would not call an email spellchecker a business use case. Regarding spellcheckers per se: I have worked with book publishing companies in the last few years, and I can assure you all major book publishers employ real humans for the final spellchecking before a book goes into print.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#74

> 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…

Train two AIs and have them check each others work. This must have been done already? No?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#75

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…

Why dump billions of dollars then? Nowhere else to spend it? Effective marketing?[1] Is no one asking this question?

"... and critically: there's no one to hold responsible for getting it wrong."

Could this be part of "AI"'s appeal? A dream of absolving businesses and individuals from accountability.[2]

1. "What's more, artificial research teams lack an awareness of the specific business processes and tasks that could be automated in the first place. Researchers would need to develop an intuition of the business processes involved. We haven't seen this happen in too many areas."

2. Including the ones who designed the "AI" system.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#76

> 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…

If I get 90% of my math correct on a test, that's great! If I get 90% of my math correct while engineering a rocket, that's terrible!

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Train two AIs and have them check each others work. This must have been done already? No?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#78
AI is terrible at dealing with unexpected events. Games AI is good at are relatively deterministic, i.e. all possible outcomes are known. Replicating art and images is the same way.

If you could script new combat units in a video game on the fly or tweak the rules slightly, the human would slaughter the AI when an equally skilled human opponent would not lose so easily or even necessarily lose at all. You can see this in games like Galactic Civilizations where you can build your own units and unusual combos confuse the heck out of the computer opponent.

Same with cars. The entire approach is currently based around exposing the AI to every possible outcome. I remember a seminar on AI Safety where the vehicle AI had a problem with plastic bags in the air and it would swerve to avoid them. No human would have an issue with that.

I worked in innovation for a bank looking at automating all these kinds of things and even spent a few days doing the jobs (and this was eye-opening) and I was a developer, so not a manager looking at a job spec, but someone who would have actually done the work. 90% of the job could be automated, but 10% was dealing with wacky exceptions, many of which they had never specifically seen before. We had someone who had the job of taking PDFs and extracting tables of income and expenses. They were generally standardized PDFs, so that seems like something good to automate right?

Well, no. As tons of the financial advisors had added custom rows which the person doing the input had to interpret into another column. It was quite eye-opening that while the jobs were menial data entry, it was nowhere near as mundane as one might imagine as the guy was still making a judgment call on whether to classify "farm income" under a person's investment income category or whether to classify it as regular income for the purpose of investment advice.

I have a friend currently on a robotic process automation internship with another bank. Same issue. When the RPA dev people actually go and do these jobs, they realize that is frequently deviates from the approved job spec with the people in them making small but significant judgment calls.

It is not a lack of knowledge about what AI can do in either of those cases. It is not a lack of data as both banks have armies of people doing it and millions of clients. It is that for AI to do the job, all manner of other things would need to be standardized and reformed and if that were done, why use AI to solve the problem in the first place as a lot of it would simply be computational.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#79

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 prob…

I would add "AI" produces results that are hard to understand and work with.

When you do "traditional coding" you are getting results that are easier to work with because you understand where they came form. Then it is easier to modify the model and understand the outcome.

Your background is robotics. As a robotics example, training AI model to keep bipedal robot upright might be possible but having proper control model that came from control theory, identifying the system, etc. will mean you can actually calculate the envelope of the model, the limitations, etc. and that the model is not likely to surprise you in catastrophic ways. It is a case where AI would be a poor replacement for traditional modelling.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#80

> 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…

> If school grades are indicative, even a 90% accuracy is commendable for human driven tasks.

School grades are in an environment where you learned it recently, have no access to references, and have not been doing it very long.

If you had to keep doing algebra for even a month on a full time basis, you will get a lot better than 90%.

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