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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#311

Post by danieltillett »

ilaksh wrote: post #127
rscho wrote: post #17

I'm at a hospital where someone at long last got authorized to try ML on the clinical database. The ethical committee required that prior to using any data, you have to make a static copy in another database. Their argument is 1. They don't want excel files flying around (which will happen regardless) and 2. To perform any analysis, you "obviously" have to have "structured data", which "obviously" means that you have…

Why is the ethical committee allowed to make technical architectural decisions if they aren't in the technical team? I would resign.

Why are the ethics committees allowed to make any decisions?

When I was on one I would by default let everything through unless I came across something where I thought I could help improve the experimental design. My colleagues on the other hand would go through them like little emperors and cause grief for the applicant just because they could.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#312

Post by StandardFuture »

> No group of researchers can train a "document-understanding" model simply because they don't have access to the relevant documents or appropriate training labels for them

This is because you could rename deep learning as "over-parameterized statistics". And statistics is just about building some model of the data. That is the only thing "training" a model is for: discovering/optimizing a statistical distribution (a distribution is a generalization of a function). This means the entirety of deep learning is simply building highly complicated statistical models of a bunch of data.

It is unlikely that this is equivalent to general intelligence found in biology.

We could probably solve the AI problem if the entirety of all of research was not directed at deep learning. And it would also likely be far more valuable to any organization or individual.

But, that is just the 2 cents of some random HN commenter. So, I will keep dreaming.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#313

Post by z3ncyberpunk »

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…

Might help is there actually was AI... Because currently we just have a lot of people misnomering machine learning, aka glorified brute force pattern recognition, as AI.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#314

Post by akiselev »

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…

I may be off on this but I believe low carb diets as a treatment for prediabetics/diabetics was considered pseudoscience for decades by most doctors [1], largely associated with fad diets like Atkins and keto. Over the last decade or two that has slowly been changing. Holistic approaches in general have been gaining steam and taking back that word from the naturopaths.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1188071/

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#315

Post by gnulinux »

perl4ever wrote: post #293
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?

The classical, as in old fashioned, 70s, 80s definition of AI is solving any problem using heuristics. This is contrasted with algorithmic problem solving; which is impossible to do if your problem is intractable (you can't have an efficient 3SAT solver if you don't use heuristics). The canonical example is CSP (constraint satisfaction problem) solvers: people legit thought, encoding knowledge in a Prolog-like CSP solver will allow us to create AI. AI researchers before the "AI Winter" thought AI is all about encoding the information in a way computers can use heuristic to solve problems like humans.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#316

Post by angry_octet »

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…

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 are ML applications used for business, like speech recog, pricing, marketing and so on, but not so much for business processes. Where are the AI tools for parsing legal contracts? Agents for finding and negotiating prices with suppliers? Filling out regulatory reports?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#317

Post by mark-r »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #308
mark-r wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the alternative medicine is widely known, you won't be able to get a patent on it. Without a patent you won't be able to make a profit. Without a profit there's no incentive to spend the enormous money required for a randomized controlled trial.

But if the alternative medicine is widely known to work, it means the effect is powerful enough that a cheap RCT done at a local medical university should be more than enough to demonstrate it. If it can't, then frankly, you don't really know it works.

The point is that without a monetary payout at the end, you're going to have trouble incentivizing someone to do the study no matter how cheap it is. And don't forget the opposite, if there's a current medical treatment for the condition you're testing they will try to block you at every step.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#318

Post by jkhdigital »

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…

Feels like this is about where problems lie along the closed-world/open-world, fast-thinking/slow-thinking fault line.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#319

Post by TeMPOraL »

mark-r wrote: post #317
TeMPOraL wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if the alternative medicine is widely known to work, it means the effect is powerful enough that a cheap RCT done at a local medical university should be more than enough to demonstrate it. If it can't, then frankly, you don't really know it works.

The point is that without a monetary payout at the end, you're going to have trouble incentivizing someone to do the study no matter how cheap it is. And don't forget the opposite, if there's a current medical treatment for the condition you're testing they will try to block you at every step.

You can pester scientists, they have their own separate set of perverted incentives - academic status - which, in this case, works in your favor.

As for the opposite case - if there was a thing you wanted to test that had a strong effect, then the company that owns the current treatment would happily fund you the tests in exchange for dibs if the tests pans out.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#320

Post by mkl »

bo1024 wrote: post #275
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.

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

I think it's just maths. Otherwise, if not for the absence of calculation-by-machine, Isaac Newton and Archimedes would have been doing AI.
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