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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#171

Post by Avicebron »

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…

By that same note, people are calling every automated feature AI and it no longer means what the words actually mean.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#172

Post by apohn »

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…

>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.

IME with 8+ years as a Data Scientist in internal and external consulting roles. What I like to do is propose a phase 1, phase 2, phase 3, etc. Phase 1 is almost always a mix of scoping and "Does it even make sense to do this."

Only a fraction of the teams/customers I work like appreciate and have a tolerance for this longer term strategy. Most of those projects are a success and people get value out of using a model in addressing their business problem.

Most people hear this and respond with "No, Phase 1 needs to solve our poorly defined business problem and show massive value in 3 weeks so we can boast about how innovative we are being. You need to AI this problem. AI it now. Do some of that AI stuff. Give me the AI." Most of these fail and I know they are doing to fail, even if any models turn out be useful.

I will say that there there Data Scientist/AI/ML people who really just throw models at stuff and don't think about the value of what they are trying to deliver, but a lot of them are typically inexperienced and just have new toy syndrome. It's not really any different than somebody who reads a bunch of books (e.g. leadership, business) and then gets overly excited about using what they learned. They'll grow out of it or leave the profession when reality hits.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#173

Post by VBprogrammer »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #160
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…

The AI effect: AI gets a bad rap because once something exists and is practical it's no longer called AI. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

This reminds me of the Tim Minchin song Storm. "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?...Medicine."

I've never thought of it that way before but alternative medicine and AI have a lot in common.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#174

Post by nostrademons »

AI has plenty of useful applications for business. Fraud detection, forecasting, enterprise resource planning, logistics - all of these were considered AI at one point.

The specific problem the author cites - digitizing data in PDFs - shouldn't even require AI. It can be solved better by just inputting data in digital form to begin with (like with a web form), and passing it around in a standardized machine-readable data format. But the commercial real estate industry is pretty backwards, and can continue to be pretty backwards because its core competency is ownership of the real estate, and digitization labor is round-off error compared to the profits generated by it. It'll take a major recession (and this current coronapocalypse may qualify) to create selection pressures to weed out inefficient firms, and until that happens there's no incentive for them to upgrade their processes.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#175

Post by ethanbond »

nova22033 wrote: post #170
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.

Yes but you can fire them without dismantling your IT infrastructure.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#176

Post by fatbird »

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 think the point GP was trying to make was that robot control model is likely a process control model, which is an area of math that's already well-explored and involves no AI. Single and multi-variable control systems[0] get into some advanced math but are not obviously mappable to machine learning models--they're much more like heavy calculus.

[0] https://www.controleng.com/articles/exploring-the-basic-conc...

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#178

Post by ComodoHacker »

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…

You can't stretch definition of AI that wide.

Where's AI in Microsoft Office? Where's AI in spellchecking? Where's AI in route planning? Demand planning, maybe.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#179

Post by ssivark »

NalNezumi wrote: post #100
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 would add "AI" produces results that are hard to understand and work with. Sorry but no, this rhetoric is often used as an easy escape of responsibility but I don't buy it. Sure, if you're talking about the neural nets used in Google translate or YouTube recommendation system, or any big tech company domain of problem that is based on vast amount of data with extreme size of state space and variability - fine. But…

The problem is that a lot of AI folks bury their heads under the sand in the name of “PAC learning” and claim that you’re unfair in asking for out-of-sample generalization. They are loathe to accept that the popular algorithms are overfitting. I’ve had this debate with numerous NN/RL researchers, and somehow it always comes to this impasse.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#180

Post by correlator »

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…

Everything you outlined is a use case that is powered by machine learning algorithms. You can discuss all of them without using the phrase "AI." They all likely started with rules engines that solved a real business problem and iterated over time to use more sophisticated back ends.

The thing that I don't appreciate in this field is that companies seem more focused on discussing their "AI" than the actual problems they hope to solve. When I see this, my mind jumps to the assumption that these companies are either: 1) looking for easy valuation multiples. 2) looking for a way to impress VCs/investors. 3) they don't actually understand the problem they are solving. This is admittedly a big stereotype on my part, but this stereotype was built on pattern recognition over time.

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