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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#111

Post by sobellian »

astrophysician wrote: post #99
lmilcin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

I mean, part of the problem is that no one can seem to agree about what "AI" even is anymore; you described a control theory model that "calculate[s] the envelope" which I'm interpreting to mean some sort of confidence interval/posterior, but to me that's exactly what you should be doing whenever possible in an "AI" model, as in, control theory (it sounds like with Gaussian Processes or something) is the right "AI" a…

I took envelope to mean the operating conditions under which the control system is stable. For many control systems this isn't really a confidence interval except insofar as the parameters of the control system are imperfectly known.

For as long as I can remember, AI has been a synonym for "hard CS problem" or even just "hard math problem." It has more use as a marketing term than as a technical term with precise meaning.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#112

Post by perculis »

The article fails to address the bigger issue: if enough data is provided and the information becomes clear, what then is the resultant?

Without a genera A.I. (which we are a long way from) how can the process work be done and what will it mean if it can be done? We’d like to think that we’d be more productive... we’d create new and better “things”... but if history is any guide, we’d simply focus on straightforward profit generating bullshit...

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#113

Post by ilaksh »

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…

Strange they didn't mention RPA in the article. In fact I think that most of their examples could be addressed with advanced RPA.

I also believe that the leading edge RPA systems do take advantage of some real AI techniques. And that more AI will be deployed in RPA as time goes on.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#114

Post by shermanmccoy »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #27

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.

I'm surprised to hear this organisation is successfully doing ML speech to text. Is it running 100% of volume in production? Or is it more of a pilot type thing? I know of a French multinational bank that just tried for 2 years to get a ML speech transcription up and running, for transcribing conversations with customers, but due to unreliable results, recently put the project on ice. Their experience was much along the lines of everything discussed in this comment thread.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#115

Post by mywittyname »

lmilcin wrote: post #79
NalNezumi wrote: post #68

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 mo…

I used to go with decision trees where possible for exactly this reason. It's easier to explain than a solution that uses PCA, but has roughly the same results.

They are probably not what most people would call ML, but they are simple and solve a number of common problems.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#116

Post by arbitrage »

jerzyt wrote: post #83
MattGaiser wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI works for online businesses where you have millions going to a single interface and thus any testing is on a random selection of the population. You couldn't do that as well with different stores simply because malls have different demographics (meaning any conclusions could be noise) and the costs of shuffling where things are located is high so you can't just test 50 different setups and see what works.

Sears has been around for about a 100 years, and they have invented the catalog sales model - they were the Amazon of that era. I don't blame them for not doing things like A/B testing a 100 years ago, but 10 or 20? They were asleep at the wheel. That's when Walmart took off like a space rocket. Essentially the same offering to the same demographic. Yet Sears collapsed.

There were other factors at play in the downfall of Sears than just failure to take advantage of their positions at the time. Sears, in a sense, became a victim of its own success. In the heyday of parasite capitalism, it became more profitable for a small group of bad actors to make Sears fail.

Xerox is a more apt example of the 'missed opportunity' narrative.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#117

Post by rjsw »

Macuyiko wrote: 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…

My background is in Standards for engineering data. I'm trying to push the idea that cleaning up a business' data before trying to apply ML to it may give better results.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#118

Post by paulus_magnus2 »

A rather lazy / uninformed article by someone who grossly underestimates the complexity of what would it would take to completely automate business processes of a company.

The title question is equivalent to asking: a robot cannot build a car, it's so useless for manufacturing?

Robots can build cars but we need to arrange them in an "alien dreadnought".

Businesses are not prepared to pay the price of full automation, what they expect is to put some open source AI run by a fresh graduate and fire all office clerks the next day.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#119

Post by nnq »

NalNezumi wrote: post #68

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…

> have any insight to what you can actually deliver

Maybe that's the problem. In lots of AI/ML problems you just CAN'T know ahead of time what can be deliver you need to spend the time and resources to do it and then see how well it works...

The problem imo is on the business side, most businesses don't know how to transform unpredictable progress into profit (even if average on a large timeframe that progress might be HUGE).

So ML/DS people need to overpromise in order to get anything approved, otherwise they'd just have to sit around and do nothing, and overall everyone would be worse too, bc that real but unreliable progress would never happen.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#120

Post by shermanmccoy »

arethuza wrote: post #45
h91wka wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I seem to emit some kind of anti-AI field - voice recognition works about 40% of the time so is basically useless, recommendation algorithms seem to recommend stuff I have already watched or seem completely random and as for the mechanisms that select adverts - Youtube seems to be taking the approach of showing me the same adverts again and again and again (and yes, I do click thumbs down on them) until I passionatel…

The recommendation algorithms seem to be just the most simplistic type of pigeon holing. Think Netflix, just because I watched a European political thriller last week, it is assumed I now want to watch this genre for eternity.
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