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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#381

Post by jacquesm »

muldvarp wrote: post #270
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

That effect is explained by the fact that the problems in AI research are thought to be solvable only by intelligent agents. This can often turn out to be false. Many problems that seemingly require intelligence don't actually require it. Nick Bostrom wrote the following few lines in his book "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" (which I absolutely recommend reading): > There is an important sense, however…

But you know what? It could have been solved with general intelligence. But by defining it as some kind of major breakthrough a bunch of money got spent on solving just that one problem and then declaring victory by the players. I predict that this will happen for anything that gets pointed at as 'the' example of what a general AI would solve.

A better benchmark would be that a single piece of software that is not specialized is able to solve two of these problems.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#382

Post by Melting_Harps »

a1369209993 wrote: post #292
Melting_Harps wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Indeed. You got me there. But the point stands, as you mentioned.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#383

Post by angry_octet »

bo1024 wrote: post #377
angry_octet wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the point in the curve we redefine anything successful as using 'AI' because it uses a computer program? Literally the only things you mention using AI/ML techniques are "speech-to-text, asking Siri for answers, translating web pages" and search engines, which are external to business process. Internal search is usually a disaster because processes are document based rather than web/publication based. There a…

AI is much broader and older than machine learning. I suggest the textbook "AI: A Modern Approach".

Dude, AI is not everything that involves an algorithm, even if AI uses algorithms.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#384

Post by angry_octet »

kazinator wrote: post #373
angry_octet wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, plum pudding model of the atom then. It isn't perfect, but we don't throw out the name physics. I don't get this hate for new techniques being classified as AI. Just because they learn distributions instead of using classic prolog?

The techniques aren't that new; all that is new is having the gigabytes upon gigabytes of RAM to run them, not too mention CPU power, and scads of data. I knew what a neural network was, and understood it as part of AI, when Wham! was in the Top 40 charts. The hate isn't for the "new" techniques, I think; just for the posers who claim to be AI experts because they know how to use some Python library or whatnot. You d…

We'll have to disagree. You can be perfectly well credentialled without having years of studying techniques that aren't very successful. It is really rewriting history to pretend that old style NN and backpropagation is the same as modern systems -- implementation techniques matter.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#385

Post by Jommi »

conjectures wrote: post #228
Jommi wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How does insurance work?

Is this not exactly the opposite? They try to bet that they can predict the occurrence of something better than what you can.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#386

Post by outworlder »

mehrdadn wrote: post #236
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

Eh, I think we still have the Turing test, and AFAIK it hasn't had a case where it's passed without raising eyebrows for potentially trying to cover up for deficiencies. I think the threshold needs to be high (maybe "beyond a reasonable doubt"?) and reproducible with high probability: I'd say at least X% (I don't know what X should be, but it should be much higher than 50%) of the adults that engage in or read the co…

Turing test? There are other definitions for 'AI' that are not strong AI. Natural language processing is a subset of AI.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#387

Post by larksimian »

jacquesm wrote: post #381
muldvarp wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That effect is explained by the fact that the problems in AI research are thought to be solvable only by intelligent agents. This can often turn out to be false. Many problems that seemingly require intelligence don't actually require it. Nick Bostrom wrote the following few lines in his book "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" (which I absolutely recommend reading): > There is an important sense, however…

But you know what? It could have been solved with general intelligence. But by defining it as some kind of major breakthrough a bunch of money got spent on solving just that one problem and then declaring victory by the players. I predict that this will happen for anything that gets pointed at as 'the' example of what a general AI would solve. A better benchmark would be that a single piece of software that is not sp…

This is trivial to do right now: Build a software program that recognizes the problem it is being set(limited list of problems it can handle at first, ie. extract text from an image, tell me if an image is a cat or a dog, play a chess game, play a go game) and once it has identified the problem get it to call into a specialized program for that problem(chess playing, OCR whatever).

As you want to support more use cases, you just need to plug in a new subprogram and modify the top level problem recognizer.

A chat bot sitting on top of a bunch of specialized systems, basically.

This is clearly still not general intelligence and probably not super useful, but hey.

The true benchmark for intelligence is a piece of software that is presented with some pattern and told to turn it into some other pattern and then figures out how to do it. This probably requires general and deep language comprehension(ie. get me a list of emails for environmental managers at US public water utilities. system needs to have some idea about google, some idea about the EPA and their web resources as a starting point for getting that dataset, some ability to google, read and understand web page data etc).

Obviously you can cheat by just having a giant database of information, but at some point you have to be able to answer questions that are not in the database.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#388

Post by pathseeker »

bo1024 wrote: post #217
pathseeker wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Finding routes for drivers and deliveries, planning schedules, optimizing store layouts, etc. -- that's AI. If a path-finding algorithm that I can write on paper is AI, AI has completely lost all meaning. Let's not call graph traversal and sorting "AI" please.

Couple issues. (1) Optimization is much, much bigger than graph traversal and sorting. (2) Modern route-finding algorithms are to your on-paper-Dijkstra what a rocket ship is to your bicycle. (3) I think you're under the same misconception I'm talking about: graph traversal is absolutely a fundamental of AI. Ask anyone what the main AI textbook is, they'll tell you it's Russell and Norvig: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu…

>graph traversal is absolutely a fundamental of AI

A is fundamental of B does not mean B is A.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#389

Post by pathseeker »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #356
TeMPOraL wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (2) Modern route-finding algorithms are to your on-paper-Dijkstra what a rocket ship is to your bicycle. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Modern path-finding algorithms are Dijkstra + lots of heuristics piled on top. > graph traversal is absolutely a fundamental of AI. I agree. But being a fundamental of AI does not make it AI itself.

And a rocket is Newton's laws + lots of heuristics piled on top. Sometimes the heuristics ARE the point.

Sure, but they certainly aren't AI. They were written by people and do not learn based on new inputs.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#390

Post by pathseeker »

wutbrodo wrote: post #215
pathseeker wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Finding routes for drivers and deliveries, planning schedules, optimizing store layouts, etc. -- that's AI. If a path-finding algorithm that I can write on paper is AI, AI has completely lost all meaning. Let's not call graph traversal and sorting "AI" please.

No, you're just projecting the modern bar for AI into the past. AI roughly means "things human brains can do that computers can't": when computing was primarily straightforward and analytical ("calculating"), then relatively more sophisticated algorithms that could "solve problems" like mazes absolutely were on the AI frontier. The fact that they've since retreated so far from "things computers can't do" is just a fu…

>AI roughly means "things human brains can do that computers can't"

Ok, then nothing being done today (neural nets, gan, etc) on computers is AI. What a dumb definition.

>claiming something isn't AI because "pft that's such an easy, solved problem"

Nope. It's not AI because instructions were directly written by a programmer of how to path-find. There was no input training where the program learned how to pathfind. It just had one method from day 1 that hasn't deviated since.

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