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95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

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Re: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

#101
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I ask way more questions now than I used to. Before, I’d sometimes wonder about things, but not enough to actually go and research them. Now, it’s as simple as asking the AI, and more often than not, I get a satisfying answer.

What was the last thing you asked about? What was the answer?

The origin of the word calf.

1. Calf (young cow, young of certain other mammals)

Old English: cealf (plural calfru or later calves)

Proto-Germanic: kalbaz or *kalbaz/kalbazō

Cognates: Old Norse kálfr, Old High German kalb, German Kalb, Dutch kalf.

Proto-Indo-European root: often linked to gel- (“to swell, be rounded”), possibly referring to the rounded shape of a young animal. Some etymologists, however, leave it as “origin uncertain” beyond Proto-Germanic.

2. Calf (back of the lower leg)

Old English: caf, cealf (“calf of the leg”) — likely related to the animal term, but the link is uncertain.

Possible origin: Could be from the same gel- “swell” root, referring to the bulging muscle at the back of the leg, or an independent development within Germanic.

Cognates: Old Norse kálfi (“calf of the leg”), Swedish kalv (leg calf), Icelandic kálfi.

Re: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

#102
post #82

Nobody actually wants half the useless tools companies are coming up with because most of the solutions are not really novel. They are just wrapping an LLM. It's kinda like what I realized with the meta Ray-Bans: I can have these things on my face, they can tell me the answer to virtually any question in 10 seconds or less. But I, as a human, rarely have questions to ask. When you walk in to your local grocery store…

I think those kind of glasses may be really useful for blind people. I have seen similar glasses targeted at blind people, that at least in theory, seemed to me like a good idea. I recall the glasses also can write on the screen inside the lens, which makes me think they may be good for deaf people as well. It's just that these use-cases seem uncool, and big companies seem to have to be cool in order to keep either t…

Yes, there are people working on image recognition glasses for blind people.

Nobody seems to have been successful yet, and I think the focus on applying LLMs instead of dumb UI and mixed dumb and ML image processing is a large reason why.

Re: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

#104

These seems like a glass-is-half-empty view. 5% are succeeding. People are trying AI for just about everything right now. 5% is pretty damn good, when AI clearly has a lot of room to get better. The good models are quite expensive and slow. The fast & cheap models aren't that great - unless very specifically fine-tuned. Will it get better enough so that that growth rate in success pilots grows from 5% - 25% in 5 year…

> 5% is pretty damn good, when AI clearly has a lot of room to get better. That depends if the AI successes depended much on the leading edge of LLM developments, or if actually most of the value was just "low hanging fruit". If the latter, that would imply the utility curve is levelling out, because new developments are not proving instrumental enough. I'm thinking of an S curve: slow improvements through the 2010s,…

I agree it's an S-curve, but it's anyone's guess where on the S we are.

And regardless, I still see this as very positive for society - and don't care as much about whether or not this is an AI bubble or not.

Re: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

#105
post #10

Am I the only one who looked at this shortened headline and wondered why anyone is allowing AIs to fly airplanes?

Why not though? Current autopilot just attempts to keep plane on course/speed/altitude. Some can go further with auto-landing, but extreme emergency use only. I could see the airlines wanting to seek any fuel savings possible by possibly allowing AI to test slight changes to altitude/speed/course to conserve fuel based on some live inputs.

The mathematics that LLMs and machine learning are based on started off being developed for aircraft decades ago. It’s called “control theory”. So we had “AI” on airplanes first. Specifically we had adaptive control algorithms explicitly because of the problems introduced by fuel levels changing during the course of a flight.

In physics, we typically start with mass-spring-damper system representation. Elementary physics and engineering typically has assumptions such as mass being constant. You develop all sorts of dynamical models and intuition with that assumption. But an aircraft burns fuel as it flies, meaning its mass changes during the course of the flight. Thus your models drift and you have to adapt to that.

Pilots would have tomes they'd have to switch between at various points of the journey and adaptive control algorithms alleviated this. They still needed the actual reference guide in the cockpit as a risk mitigation.

The difference between that decades old application is that you don’t need a billion parameter model to do flight control. Most people do not understand the historic development of these techniques. The foundation of them has been around for a while. What we have done with the newest batch of "AI" is massively scale them up.

Re: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the last thing you asked about? What was the answer?

The origin of the word calf. 1. Calf (young cow, young of certain other mammals) Old English: cealf (plural calfru or later calves) Proto-Germanic: kalbaz or *kalbaz/kalbazō Cognates: Old Norse kálfr, Old High German kalb, German Kalb, Dutch kalf. Proto-Indo-European root: often linked to gel- (“to swell, be rounded”), possibly referring to the rounded shape of a young animal. Some etymologists, however, leave it as…

Can you tell me about the one two before that, without looking it up?

Re: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

#107
post #16

I'm arriving at the conclusion that deployments of LLMs is most suitable in areas where the cost of false positives and, crucially, false negatives are low. If you cannot tolerate false negatives I don't see how you get around the inaccuracy of LLMs. As long as you can spot false positives and their rate is sufficiently low they are merely an annoyance. I think this is a good consideration before starting a project l…

I completely agree. These are useful in fuzzy cases but we live in a fuzzy world. Most things are fuzzy and nothing is completely true or completely false.

If I as a human deploy code, it is not certain that it necessarily works - just like with LLMs. The extent is different however.

Re: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

#108
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I, as a human, rarely have questions to ask. Wow. This just does not match my personal experience. I do an hour or so walk around the reservoir near my house 4-5 times a week, letting my mind wander freely -- and I find that I stop on average at least five or ten times to take notes about questions to learn the answers to later, and occasionally decide that it's worth it to break pace to start learning the answ…

Thats super reasonable - I'm a person with ADHD so if I'm asking questions in a grocery store context - I might fully forget things or take way too long to get things done - Going for a walk in nature is absolutely a much better place for questions like that to me though. I think I would prefer to not have tech in the moment to take me out of the space.

As a fellow ADHDer, can confirm. I must aggressively mono-task to ensure things get done. I have to consciously manage which mode I'm in, "Goal" or "Explore". A simple heuristic I sometimes share with others is: "I can either 'think deeply' or 'do/talk/listen'. Doing both modes at once is possible but at reduced throughput and quality of each. Switching modes is laggy." It's not precisely accurate and there are exceptions but it gets the general idea across.

Re: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The origin of the word calf. 1. Calf (young cow, young of certain other mammals) Old English: cealf (plural calfru or later calves) Proto-Germanic: kalbaz or *kalbaz/kalbazō Cognates: Old Norse kálfr, Old High German kalb, German Kalb, Dutch kalf. Proto-Indo-European root: often linked to gel- (“to swell, be rounded”), possibly referring to the rounded shape of a young animal. Some etymologists, however, leave it as…

Can you tell me about the one two before that, without looking it up?

Yes, but I’m not going to. You seem to think I owe you a performance or an explanation. Stop circling around trying to trip me up and just make your point, if you have one.

Re: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me about the one two before that, without looking it up?

Yes, but I’m not going to. You seem to think I owe you a performance or an explanation. Stop circling around trying to trip me up and just make your point, if you have one.

You were the one who raised the subject, but sure, if that's the way you want it. You are making a mistake which I believe you will regret, outsourcing future time binding to a machine in this way. You seem to believe you are learning something and I do not think that is true, except for a habit of intellectual laziness that I expect will prove as corrosive for you as lucrative to others.

You're bragging about your calf strength as you habituate to walking with crutches you don't need. Today? Sure, fair enough. Couple years from now? Thank goodness that's not my problem.

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