Why is AI so useless for business? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#121

Post by ilaksh » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #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 thi…

In that case would it not free up time to identify the standard ones and do them automatically but kick the deviates ones out?

Then that data should possibly go to an executive's inbox to remind them of the need to standardize and reform.

Although most business people are not willing or capable of solving actual problems like standardizing things.

But anyway great comment that gets at the heart of the matter.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#122

Post by numpad0 » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

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’m confident* that “AI” these days means DNN that takes n-dim input in n>2. Anything else is “contemporary“ or “conventional” maths or theories.

* Read “not at all”

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#123

Post by simonh » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

cameldrv wrote: post #35

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.

This is interesting to reason about because it's may even be true that the human and AI error rates could be the same. In fact the human error rate might even we worse, but the kinds of errors and their impact makes a big difference.

I can only speculate, but while it's true humans can fail when following a process, it's also true they can sometimes spot a potential failure even then there is no process to prevent it. They can come up with new processes, or ways to improve existing ones. They can also account for their actions, and managers can account for the activities of their team. All of this builds trust that the process can be improved in ways that can be well understood.

People are also scalable. You can implement controls like four-eyes on changes and critical metrics, so you're less exposed to one person's idiosyncrasies. It's hard to do that with AI.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#124

Post by nnq » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

Unpopular opinion: AI will start being useful to business when it will start being used to re-organize and re-architect core business processes... Not as part of existing business processes, the "augmentation" will never offer too much!

It will be when AI systems will decide who to hire and who to fire and who to promote and demote, or what other companies to acquire or to merge with - profit will be increased, and almost everyone will hate it!

It will be when huge fusioned megacorps AI systems will gain monopolies and replace free markets with centralized planning systems that will actually outperform markets ("socialist planning" can't work because it can't work with humans ...bringing in "other" types of intelligences will change the game, and nobody will call it "socialism" bc it will not even try to benefit the people this time around - and there will be markets still, just likely HFT-style ones that will block direct human actors from playing in them) ...and most will hate it and likely wage war against the societies that will embrace it this way!

You'll see AI stops being useless to business, don't worry ...but it will come with many consequences and side effects, our society as it is can't handle it!

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#125

Post by henrik_w » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

leto_ii wrote: post #11

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…

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…

This is one of the key points in Melanie Mitchell's book "Artificial Intelligence – A Guide for Thinking Humans". In the process of showing this, she gives really good explanations of how current AI/ML systems work. Really worth a read in my opinion.

https://henrikwarne.com/2020/05/19/artificial-intelligence-a...

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#126

Post by mywittyname » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

goalieca wrote: post #81

jerzyt wrote: post #22

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…

> Amazon applies A/B testing all the time - would anyone at Sears even know what it is? I wouldn't be so certain of others ignorance. Retail stores have long done studies and applied consultants to problems on layout, music, pricing, etc.

The problem with Sears is not that they have bad technical leadership. Their problem is they were purchased by a vulture who attempted to extract all of the wealth from the company, in a short period of time, for personal gain.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#127

Post by ilaksh » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

rscho wrote: post #17

I'm at a hospital where someone at long last got authorized to try ML on the clinical database. The ethical committee required that prior to using any data, you have to make a static copy in another database. Their argument is 1. They don't want excel files flying around (which will happen regardless) and 2. To perform any analysis, you "obviously" have to have "structured data", which "obviously" means that you have…

Why is the ethical committee allowed to make technical architectural decisions if they aren't in the technical team? I would resign.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#128

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

nnq wrote: post #124

Unpopular opinion: AI will start being useful to business when it will start being used to re-organize and re-architect core business processes... Not as part of existing business processes, the "augmentation" will never offer too much! It will be when AI systems will decide who to hire and who to fire and who to promote and demote , or what other companies to acquire or to merge with - profit will be increased, and…

Silly conclusion. AI will also be able to answer the question "How can I change to further my career?". An answer that human overseers have a terrible time with.

And if you do what the AI suggests, it will work and you will prosper.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#129

Post by fauigerzigerk » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

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 parent's point is that "the model and the human probably make different errors".

That is frequently true. Take the job of a lifeguard for instance. A single mistake can be catastrophic, and yet we know that people have trouble staying completely focused for hours on end.

AIs have no trouble staying focused and they can be trained to spot drowing swimmers pretty well even on a crowded beach.

Having a human lifeguard plus an AI that alerts the lifeguard when it spots something suspicious could lead to better outcomes than employing two lifeguards.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#130

Post by mdorazio » Tue, May 26, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

rjsw wrote: post #117

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.

That really only solves part of the problem. Clean up your data. Clean up your processes. Then decide which processes can actually be improved in a meaningful way by ML. I've gone down the ML road twice now with companies that didn't do the second part and both times we had to kill the projects because the processes were so fuzzy and full of gotchas that no ML model could ever hope to be a net positive addition.