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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#141

Post by duckmysick »

leto_ii wrote: post #98
falcor84 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't thinking that there are no roles that can be automated, rather that there are some that can't be. > Specifically in regards to adversarial input, humans are often the weakest link in terms of process security I have yet to encounter a (healthy) person who looks at a photo of static and mistakes it for a cat.

How about a photo of a dress where some people say it's blue and some say it's gold?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#142

Post by astronautjones »

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…

because it's a grift

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#143

Post by kingkawn »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #129
lqet wrote: 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 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 lif…

This is very dependent on the false positive rate. Similar to the examples above about false negatives, if the AI gives false positives the lifeguards will stop paying attention to its feedback.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#144

Post by ganstyles »

numpad0 wrote: post #122
astrophysician wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

That's right. ML and AI are interchangeable at this point and both mean basically what you said. Though not necessarily a DNN per se. But that's the idea.

Academically we mostly specify AGI to mean things more advanced or speculative.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#145

Post by paulsutter »

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…

> It's always the same experience working with AI/ML engineers:

This is about as constructive as most political discourse today (disclaimer: I'm working with both robotics and AI/ML folks right now, and they're all terrific)

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#146

Post by euix »

I have been in this space in the financial sector for two years. I think this article is mostly spot on. There is one other piece, typically the places that can most benefit from innovation can get most of it just through automation and RPA as it is now called. Basically some guy filling a spreadsheet and copying it someone else, replace that with a bot.

But even that and other processes are difficult because a lot of these corporate enterprises have a bazillion different systems that don't talk to one another. Forget data science or ML, you really just need a unified data view. Typically the workflow is some use case comes, somebody, an analyst manually pulls data from some system via the GUI (because that is all they interact with). A model is built based on that data set and the project stops dead in its tracks from there on because it's impossible to get an API to query for that data from its source system. That is a technology and business process project and will rapidly blow up into a clustefuck.

The key competitive advantage of these so called "technology" companies is really this. The ability to expose any part of your data storage and pipeline to any other part of the organization as a API. Every piece of software is built with that concept in mind.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#147

Post by ganstyles »

astronautjones wrote: post #142
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…

because it's a grift

Like many things it can be. And has been used in that way a lot, like other hyped things (blockchain comes to mind). But unlike blockchain, ML has a real use and can be unreasonably effective at certain things. It's not a grift when used for the purposes for which it is effective.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#148

Post by throaway435912 »

That's easy: the business people don't understand "AI" and the "AI" people don't understand the business.

Well the business people actually do understand AI, but their understanding of it is that it is a marketing tool they can use to sell to customers and/or investors. And in terms of doing that, it AI works very well.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#150

Post by dpflan »

euix wrote: post #146

I have been in this space in the financial sector for two years. I think this article is mostly spot on. There is one other piece, typically the places that can most benefit from innovation can get most of it just through automation and RPA as it is now called. Basically some guy filling a spreadsheet and copying it someone else, replace that with a bot. But even that and other processes are difficult because a lot o…

Thanks for sharing. Does you use MuleSoft to help connect these different systems? From what I understand MuleSoft began as a solution for the tedious task of connecting disparate services in the financial sector.
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