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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#291

Post by SkyBelow »

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 they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?...Medicine."

I don't like this quote. It is mostly true, yet it is not completely true. But because it is mostly true so many treat it as if it is completely true and thus miss the edge cases where it is not true.

Take for example certain substances that are deemed by the US federal government to have no medical value. They cannot be medicines. Yet they are alternative medicines and even prescribed by doctors. Their are even states who go against the federal government by saying these substances do have medical value. And if you go back a few decades, you'll find a time where mainstream science largely ignored any medical benefits of these substances, likely due to pressure from the federal government, and yet at that time those substances were alternative medicines that worked.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#292

Post by a1369209993 »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #246
xz0r wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Logistics companies rely on huge amounts of optimization and problem-solving. Having worked at the largest tech based Logistics company in India, I can say, we did rely on optimization and problem-solving, but none of them involved AI, they were mathematical models and not black box.

> Having worked at the largest tech based Logistics company in India, I can say, we did rely on optimization and problem-solving, but none of them involved AI, they were mathematical models and not black box. I was going to say the same thing, but I worked at BMW and VW and spearheaded several initiatives with Corporate partners that relied more on optimizing via mathematical models/data sets within the warrantied pa…

> commonly used phrase 'trial by error'

It's actually "trial and error", although that doesn't speak any better for autocorrupt.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#293

Post by perl4ever »

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…

'drawing algorithms like "fill with color"'

What? You mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill

Who ever called that artificial intelligence?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#294

Post by the_jeremy »

mehrdadn wrote: post #282
biddlesby wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. I think the task is to find a treatment and a point in time where the treatment was considered alternative medicine, was then proven to work, and thereafter was considered medicine. The conclusion then is that there are things we consider medicine today that used to be alternative medicine.

> I'm not so sure. I think the task is to find a treatment and a point in time where the treatment was considered alternative medicine, was then proven to work, and thereafter was considered medicine. That would imply examples from 400 BC would have the same relevance as examples from 50 years ago. I assumed it was obvious that that's not the case, but it seems I was wrong.

One that is relatively modern is everything cannabis, though depending on your perspective the "alternative medicine" or "medicine" stages may be questionable.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#295

Post by thewarrior »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #28
thewarrior wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Unless you’re dealing with ancient data wouldn’t it be easier to have whatever that’s generating the PDF return machine readable data ? This suggests to me that lot of office jobs will be lost just by modernizing systems and making them spit out JSON

PDFs do not solely consist of computer generated files. PDFs also come in the form of paper that have been hand written on or scans.

Those should be replaced by web apps or mobile apps. Its 2020.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#296

Post by closeparen »

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…

Why would we have such a term as AI, if not to distinguish it from algorithmic?

I thought the whole point was to get out of the business of having to write down procedures for everything, to have the computer approach novel problems like a programmer does.

Is this only a contemporary perspective? Seems like that's where the goalposts were at least 15 years ago.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#297

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

mehrdadn wrote: post #230
VBprogrammer wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What're some examples of things that were called "alternative medicine" but that were later proven to work and regarded as "medicine"? Edit: Since people are bringing up ancient examples and kind of missing the point of the question: I'm not looking for examples from the Roman Empire here. Let's stick with the past < 50 years. Maybe something your parents might actually remember being dismissed as "alternative medici…

The Australian doctor who proved ulcers and stomach cancer could be caused by bacterial infection was dismissed until he inoculated himself and cured it with antibiotics.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#298

Post by pnw_hazor »

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…

I have seen a few instances where companies start down the trained models/supervised learning path and then realize it won't work for their use cases. Next, they switch to assisted learning/training using less human labeling, more heuristics, model ensembles (fast learners + slow learners), adversarial models, and so on. Finally they scrap the trained ML classifiers and use other numerical/data science methods.

Basically they discover that training effective models takes too much time or too much data or both.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#299

Post by duckmysick »

leto_ii wrote: post #152
duckmysick wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Optical illusions indeed highlight limitations in human perception. However, the dress illusion seems to me far less of a problem than mistaking noise for an object. More relevant however is that we humans can understand that we're faced with an optical illusion and we can make adjustments accordingly. We have formed the concept of an "optical illusion" and we just place "The dress" in that category. A machine needs…

> More relevant however is that we humans can understand that we're faced with an optical illusion and we can make adjustments accordingly.

Broadly speaking, yes. At the same time that's not what happened in 2015. It produced so much polarizing content with people deeply entrenched in their believes. They might have recognized it as an optical illusion, but they refused to make adjustments.

> A machine needs to be specifically trained on adversarial examples in order to be able to predict them. Once you come up with a different class of adversarial examples it will continue to fail to detect them. There is no understanding there, just more and more refined pattern matching.

Moving away from image recognition examples, isn't that exactly what happens with humans predicting whether an email is a phishing attempt? I remember reading here on Hacker News this week about phishing tests at GitLab. It had a lot of comments about tests and training employees to spot adversarial emails. Some companies are more successful than the others. It is a complicated problem; otherwise we would have solved it already. But it's the same principle because phishers come up with different ways of tricking people. And some people will fail to detect them.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#300

Post by apohn »

hectormalot wrote: post #272
apohn wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 "Do…

Agree. We do something similar: * 1 month (or less) to prove that it makes sense to continue. We do start out with a pretty well defined problem definition though. Outcome is typically a bunch of jupyter notebooks proving that we get at least some predictive value that helps solve the problem. If no proof: no-go * 2 months to upgrade it to something that works well enough to run a real pilot (e.g. shadow run, run wit…

>We do start out with a pretty well defined problem definition though.

One of the things that really helps this happen is when the management structure (on both sides) understands a defined problem statement that both sides agree to is a requirement for a project to have any hope of success.

The above isn't specific to Data Science projects. It's just having a management structure who knows the right time to support things being pushed back.

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