Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is AI so useless for business?

mebassett.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 391 posts

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#161

Post by Jommi »

nnq wrote: post #119
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…

I would love to learn how unpredictability can be leveraged as a positive. Any tips?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#162

Post by [deleted] »

bo1024 wrote: post #159

AI gets such a bad rap. People only think of unsolved or sort-of-solved problems as AI, and don't give AI any credit for the problems it has solved, I guess because by definition those problems seem easy. Think how much Microsoft Office and competitors have amplified business productivity over the last 20 years (yeah yeah, make your jokes too). Word and Powerpoint and Excel are full of AI whether it's spellcheck or a…

[deleted]

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#163

Post by amcoastal »

colinmorelli wrote: post #65
amcoastal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I agree, the question of how to deal with high uncertainties is definitely task dependent. In your example of a self-driving car the answer is not clear. However, for many other tasks its entirely reasonable to have the AI make decisions and then pop it out to human review upon high uncertainty, or just not act on it. In tasks like this AI can be the primary task-doer with the human as the backup.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#164

Post by leto_ii »

twelfthnight wrote: post #155
leto_ii wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what about if a person sees a cat but accidentally presses the dog button because they were distracted? (To your point, though, I agree that machines can make strange errors, raising trust issues. My experience is that ML is useful in cases like recommendations or search results where a person can interact with predictions rather than being a complete replacement)

There is no button involved. If you look at a cat (that is within your field of vision in good lighting etc.) you will understand it's a cat. Without mistake. Most certainly you won't mistake it for a square full of static, or for a car or for smth else.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#165

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

The entire premise up front is false and probably a primary culprit. Expecting ML to do things it can't yet by extrapolating from what it can do today (after reading current capabilities through a filter of marketing hype):

>Today's work in artificial intelligence is amazing. We've taught computers to beat the most advanced players in the most complex games. We've taught them to drive cars and create photo-realistic videos and images of people. They can re-create works of fine-art and emulate the best writers.

Today's work in ML is amazing.

> We've taught computers to beat the most advanced players in the most complex games.

Not true. You can spend a zillion dollars on self play to get an AI superhuman at games simple enough that you can simulate at many many times real life speed, but we're just now learning to do games like poker, which intuitively seems less intellectual than Go or Chess, but so does starcraft and that came after those other games. In ML, placing tasks in order of achievable to currently impossible can be really unintuitive for lay people.

> We've taught them to drive cars and create photo-realistic videos and images of people.

No again. We're getting there with cars, but it turns out that it's really really hard. Harder than playing superhuman chess! But people who play chess better than computers can drive cars better than computers. Weird, right? Again, in ML, placing tasks in order of achievable to currently impossible can be really unintuitive for lay people.

We can make photorealistic pictures of people, but we're sorta limited (it's complicated) to faces at high resolutions and just really really really recently getting them without weird artifacts. But the face is the most complex part of the body, right? So the rest should be easy!

> They can re-create works of fine-art and emulate the best writers.

This is soooo much of a nope, and you know what I'm going to say anways.

This xkcd is always relevant, even if the bar has moved. Maybe it's even harder because the bar is moving quickly. https://xkcd.com/1425/

> In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible.

In ML, we're really good at some tasks, so it seems like we should be good at adjacent tasks, but that's not how it works.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#166

Post by mrosett »

mywittyname wrote: post #115
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 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.

Single decision trees? Or forests?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#167

Post by EthanHeilman »

ganstyles wrote: post #147
astronautjones wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blockchain has a real use, in that people use it and it lets people do things they could do before. Blockchain has an expectation problem, its most breathless promoters promised things that no technology can deliver and then when it fails to deliver on those very high expectations it creates the impression that Blockchain failed. Blockchain, for instance, can't fix journalism, but it shouldn't be expected to, anymore than the internet or databases could be expected to "fix journalism".

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#168

Post by nostrademons »

nnq wrote: post #119
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…

> 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).

There's an interesting whole vs. parts observation in there. Societally, we know exactly how to transform unpredictable progress into profits: markets. And they work very well, over the long term.

It's just that markets work by trying lots of new random things, most of which will be failures, and then creating an incentive to double down on the winners. Every individual market participant has an incentive not to innovate, because most innovations fail. But some of them do succeed, and the ones that succeed end up replacing the companies that never tried to innovate in the first place.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#169

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

bo1024 wrote: post #159

AI gets such a bad rap. People only think of unsolved or sort-of-solved problems as AI, and don't give AI any credit for the problems it has solved, I guess because by definition those problems seem easy. Think how much Microsoft Office and competitors have amplified business productivity over the last 20 years (yeah yeah, make your jokes too). Word and Powerpoint and Excel are full of AI whether it's spellcheck or a…

Because laymen, movies and nowadays even tech consultants don’t know (or don’t want to know, in the case of the latter, for financial reasons) what AI is and picture advanced ML, fancy neural networks, acrobatic talking robots, Skynet, GAI, etc. instead.

Which is way more cool and gives you more dreams (or money).

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#170

Post by nova22033 »

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…

An automated process only has to be wrong once to compel human operators to double or triple check every other result it gives.

Wouldn't this itself be error prone? The operator is, after all, human.

Post reply on HN