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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#181

Post by saidajigumi »

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

Back in the early 90s, my grad AI class referred to AI as the "incredible shrinking field". The class kicked off with a black-and-white newsreel style interview from the 1950's with an MIT professor[1] who says, to eternal breathless infamy, something along the lines of "we'll have machines that can think within five years!"

Part of the challenge is/was the line of thinking "surely if we can solve Hard Problem X, we'll have intelligence!" This turned out to be entirely wrongheaded, since a vast litany of Hard Problems X turned out to have plain old algorithmic solutions.

[1] I keep hoping this shows up online somewhere. It was shot using a machine room as the set, where mid-century modern furniture had been brought in for guest and host!

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#182

Post by iamcurious »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #173
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, the similarities are profound. They both confront the limit of consciousness and what counts as knowledge.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#183

Post by esoterica »

correlator wrote: post #180
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 th…

Machine learning is AI.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#185

Post by jointpdf »

mywittyname wrote: post #135
h91wka wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's much easier to build a rec-engine that uses user data to make recommendations than it is to design one that analyzes intrinsic properties of items to build recommendations. Think how Spotify recommends music based on what other people who listen to this song like. This favors popular music. They could build an engine that analyzes musical characteristics to make recommendations, which would eliminate the popular…

Actually Spotify does more than collaborative filtering. Here’s a superb blog post on using convolutional filters on the spectrograms to build content-based recommendations: https://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#187

Post by nostrademons »

MattGaiser wrote: post #54
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…

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.

The big tech companies all deal with this issue as well. One of the big problems when I started at Google in 2009 was that an experiment would show a mild negative effect on click-throughs when what was actually happening is that it was a mild positive effect for users but broke logging on IE6, hence resulting in a 0 CTR for that population. They solved this by building a system that automatically sliced results by population, alerted immediately if any one population was a serious outlier, and displayed sliced results on the experiment dashboard.

The big old-line brick & mortar chains just didn't think it worthwhile to build this sort of granularity into their systems, and are paying the price for it. I suspect that many executives who grew up in the 50s-70s think in terms of "Is this change good or bad?" vs. "Why is this change good or bad?" (Note that brick & mortar retailers who have embraced extensive data operations - notably Walmart, Target, and Safeway - are doing great. It's the Sears & JC Penneys of this world that are failing.)

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#188

Post by legolas2412 »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #178
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.

N-gram based grammar rules for spell checking are by definition machine learning

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#189

Post by mcguire »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #178
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.

"Where's AI in route planning?"

Should we consider the "if it works, it's no longer AI" point made now?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#190

Post by riantogo »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #173
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know what qualifies as alternative medicine? Anything that is not medicine.
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