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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#271

Post by mattkrause »

mehrdadn wrote: post #245
zeveb wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISTR that seaweed was a folk remedy for goiter. It contains relatively high amounts of iodine, which prevents thyroid conditions. I also vaguely recall that the doctrine of signatures wasn't a complete and abject failure, but some cursory Googling indicates that maybe it was after all.

Is that an example from the 15th century? Is there nothing more modern?

Seems to me that's the whole point?

Effective treatments as been subsumed into "mainstream" medicine, perhaps with a bit of purification/standardization along the way, while the ineffective and unproven stuff remains "alternative medicine".

If it somehow turns out that homeopathy is an effective therapy for something (besides dehydration), it'll end up with a procedure code, the hospital pharmacy will stock 10x tincture of whatever, and eventually it will be just another mainstream medical treatment.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#272

Post by hectormalot »

apohn wrote: post #172
nnq wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "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 with a few agents, in an A/B test, etc.). If no success: no-go

* Then hopefully in production within another 3 months. We're in a pretty regulated industry, most of this time is _not_ engineering.

The phases help set priorities as well. Doesn't always make sense to spend (much) more time on scalability if we don't know it works yet.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#273

Post by biddlesby »

mehrdadn wrote: post #263
the_jeremy wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren't "finding loopholes in the question". Most "alternative medicine" things that work aren't new information. Humans have had literal millenia to figure out how to deal with ailments. The easiest methods that people can think of to try to solve a problem have been done by someone, and were passed around when they worked. There's things like "gargle with salt water to cure a sore throat". That's commonly done…

The entire premise of this discussion was that modern medicine currently has a flaw/double-standard/whatever about what it considers alternative medicine. Bringing up examples where medicine was flawed a century ago is very much finding a loophole and missing the point of the question.

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.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#274

Post by mark-r »

mehrdadn wrote: post #265
mark-r wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think human nature has changed that much in the last century?

I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything about "human nature".

Human nature is what defines the difference between alternative and regular. It also defines what is a double standard. You didn't need to explicitly mention it for it to be relevant to the discussion.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#275

Post by bo1024 »

xz0r wrote: post #234
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…

> 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.

That's still AI, it's just older-generation AI.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#276

Post by poulsbohemian »

When I think about companies I've encountered over the past few years, it seems to me like the AI problem has been two-fold: 1) They didn't need AI. 2) They would have been better off listening to the human experts they already employed.

That is to say - when you look at business case studies of the kinds of problems that businesses perceive they are going to solve, it's things like supply-chain "We figured out when it's going to snow, we should have snow shovels in stock!" Well, of course, and there are a whole lot of humans in your company that already know this, but they aren't being heard.

A lot of the places where AI has worked out, like spell checkers, various in-app automations - as the article and people in this thread indicate, are exactly the kind of problems more companies should probably instead focus their energy. For example, I think about various gyrations I've watched people do in order to format their data the way they needed for presentations. Not AI in the theoretical sense, but definitely time consuming tasks that exist in every business that would save gobs of time and money if they could be automated away. But, so long as their isn't clear profit motive good luck getting your project green-lighted.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#277

Post by mehrdadn »

mark-r wrote: post #274
mehrdadn wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything about "human nature".

Human nature is what defines the difference between alternative and regular. It also defines what is a double standard. You didn't need to explicitly mention it for it to be relevant to the discussion.

Okay, I won't stop you. Go ahead and bring up examples from Hippocrates's time then. Human nature hasn't changed much on these timescales so you will be making a very strong point about modern medicine with such examples.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#278

Post by lubesGordi »

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…

Basically what it sounds like you're saying is that AI is non-deterministic, and you can't have systems like that running critical applications.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#279

Post by [deleted] »

sobellian wrote: post #111
astrophysician wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 took envelope to mean the operating conditions under which the control system is stable. For many control systems this isn't really a confidence interval except insofar as the parameters of the control system are imperfectly known. For as long as I can remember, AI has been a synonym for "hard CS problem" or even just "hard math problem." It has more use as a marketing term than as a technical term with precise mea…

[deleted]

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#280

Post by aSplash0fDerp »

synthc wrote: post #109

Machine learning requires a large high-quality dataset, which a lot of companies simply don't have. Building one takes a lot of time and money. The gains don't outweigh the costs in many cases. Another problem is that machine learning models are never a 100% correct and not easily interpretable, so they cannot be used for some critical processes. Good luck with explaining a customer why his account blocked due to a f…

By the time you read about it, it`s old news.

They have been flooding many of the outlets with counterfeit emotional capital (social/MSM) and counterfeit intellectual capital (psuedo-science/education/politics) for quite some time now.

As long as the "I" or the "L" in those fancy acronyms know the difference, the quality of the data will not be in dispute.

Even without AI/ML, it`s been obvious how bad data integrity is in the most basic sense of the meaning.

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