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My brush with AI snake oil: I interviewed at a startup that seemed fishy. They offer a fully AI powered customer service chat as an off the shelf black box to

My brush with AI snake oil: I interviewed at a startup that seemed fishy. They offer a fully AI powered customer service chat as an off the shelf black box to banks. I highly suspect that they were a pseudo AI setup. LinkedIn shows that they are light on developers but very heavy on “trainers”, probably the people who actually handle the customers, mostly young graduates in unrelated fields, who may believe that their interactions will be the necessary data to build a real AI. I doubt that AI will ever be built, it's just a glorified Mechanical Turk help-desk. I guess the banks will keep it going as long as they see near human level outputs.

sgt101 7y ago
I guess the idea would be to get a few contracts, pull down some money from those and then go bust as the costs of the Mechanical Turk become evident?
- DenisM 7y ago
  > go bust as the costs of the Mechanical Turk become evident I'm afraid you have misspelled "raise a humongous round form SoftBank". It's an easy typo to make, don't feel bad.
  - qnsi 7y ago
    Hugh mongous what?
LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
I once trained a neuralconvo network on irc-logs. You cant answer problems from that- the ai- will just not know what the context is, because it cant follow links- but you can build a pretty solid insult-o-mat from those logs. User-Engagment as a metric for answered questions!
claytonjy 7y ago
I have a feeling I know _exactly_ which company you're talking about...so it's either just that obvious, or there's more than one of these, or both!
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It seems to be the latter. In fact, the trick (should I say, fraud?) is so common that they were even several articles about it in the press over the past two or three years. Even the famous x.ai had (and I guess still has) humans doing the work. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-18/the-humans-hiding-behind-the-chatbots https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-18/the-human...
- GordonS 7y ago
  I was going to say the same thing! A couple of weeks ago such a startup based in London contacted me on LinkedIn - the product really hyped AI, but it all seemed very dubious. My guess was it was really a mix of a simple chatbot with a Mechanical Turk-style second line.
Nition 7y ago
Sounds a lot like Zach: Pt 1: https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/06-03-2018/the-mystery-of-zach-new-zealands-all-too-miraculous-medical-ai/ https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/06-03-2018/the-mystery-... Pt 2: https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/09-03-2018/the-mystery-of-zach-the-miracle-ai-continued-it-all-just-gets-terribler/ https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/09-03-2018/the-mystery-...
sriku 7y ago
I don't think that is in principle problematic (unlike the social problem statements pointed out in the talk). A system which amplifies human resources by filling in for their common activities over time could use sophisticated tech drawing on the latest in NLP. The metric would be a ratio of the number of service requests they handle per day / the number of "trainers" (or whatever name given) compared to the median for a purely human endeavour where every service request is handled by a customer-visible human. In the Mechanical Turk analogy there is no such capability amplification happening.
- classified 7y ago
  My experience with automated "help" desks is that I have to let the automatons fail one after the other until I finally get connected to a real human. Then I can start to state my problem. All that those automated substitutes do is discourage customers from calling at all.
dakial1 7y ago
Very common AI startup. They use some pre made AI tools (e.g. Watson bot) and resell it to specific industries where they already have the "intent trees" made (common questions/actions the user wants). The trainers are nothing more than analysts that will identify an intent not listed on the tree and configure it there. The devs probably are API and frontend devs, not much AI stuff going on.

sgt101 7y ago

I guess the idea would be to get a few contracts, pull down some money from those and then go bust as the costs of the Mechanical Turk become evident?

DenisM 7y ago
> go bust as the costs of the Mechanical Turk become evident I'm afraid you have misspelled "raise a humongous round form SoftBank". It's an easy typo to make, don't feel bad.
- qnsi 7y ago
  Hugh mongous what?

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago

I once trained a neuralconvo network on irc-logs. You cant answer problems from that- the ai- will just not know what the context is, because it cant follow links- but you can build a pretty solid insult-o-mat from those logs. User-Engagment as a metric for answered questions!

claytonjy 7y ago

I have a feeling I know _exactly_ which company you're talking about...so it's either just that obvious, or there's more than one of these, or both!

TeMPOraL 7y ago
It seems to be the latter. In fact, the trick (should I say, fraud?) is so common that they were even several articles about it in the press over the past two or three years. Even the famous x.ai had (and I guess still has) humans doing the work. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-18/the-humans-hiding-behind-the-chatbots https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-18/the-human...
GordonS 7y ago
I was going to say the same thing! A couple of weeks ago such a startup based in London contacted me on LinkedIn - the product really hyped AI, but it all seemed very dubious. My guess was it was really a mix of a simple chatbot with a Mechanical Turk-style second line.

Nition 7y ago

Sounds a lot like Zach: Pt 1: https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/06-03-2018/the-mystery-of-zach-new-zealands-all-too-miraculous-medical-ai/ https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/06-03-2018/the-mystery-... Pt 2: https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/09-03-2018/the-mystery-of-zach-the-miracle-ai-continued-it-all-just-gets-terribler/ https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/09-03-2018/the-mystery-...

sriku 7y ago

I don't think that is in principle problematic (unlike the social problem statements pointed out in the talk). A system which amplifies human resources by filling in for their common activities over time could use sophisticated tech drawing on the latest in NLP. The metric would be a ratio of the number of service requests they handle per day / the number of "trainers" (or whatever name given) compared to the median for a purely human endeavour where every service request is handled by a customer-visible human. In the Mechanical Turk analogy there is no such capability amplification happening.

classified 7y ago
My experience with automated "help" desks is that I have to let the automatons fail one after the other until I finally get connected to a real human. Then I can start to state my problem. All that those automated substitutes do is discourage customers from calling at all.

dakial1 7y ago

Very common AI startup. They use some pre made AI tools (e.g. Watson bot) and resell it to specific industries where they already have the "intent trees" made (common questions/actions the user wants). The trainers are nothing more than analysts that will identify an intent not listed on the tree and configure it there. The devs probably are API and frontend devs, not much AI stuff going on.