6 ms·

Disillusioned Businesses Discovering That AI Kind of Sucks

73 points by pg_1234 3y ago

wkirby 3y ago
Our agency has been asked to explore AI projects for a half dozen clients over the past 18 months. None of them have actually rolled out to real users. We keep finding the same things: the “AI” backed tool is worse than the people it’s supposed to replace, and too costly to implement and maintain at any real scale. Mix in concerns about PHI (we primarily work with healthcare-related businesses) and it all amounts to the same story: that’s cool, but…
- vundercind 3y ago
  Yeah, the expense of doing it “right” is really high and much of it’s an ongoing cost, while the cases in which it’s better than cheaper options like hiring a few more lowish-wage workers or doing a little training or just… using some normal-ass program that does the same thing but a bit less “smart”, aren’t as common as businesses seem to wish they were.
dools 3y ago
You just have to be a bit more specific. I have had success with AI writing code but I have to drive it. It’s a massive time saver though. I have also had success with classification tasks, like look at this email and then look at this list of topics, and pick which topic this email relates to, or “other” if you can’t see an obvious choice. But you can’t say “hey AI do this person’s job for me”.
- krapp 3y ago
  >But you can’t say “hey AI do this person’s job for me”. Unfortunately, that's exactly what businesses want to accomplish.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  It is closer to a shovel vs hands rather than an automated excavator.
  - svaha1728 3y ago
    And the gems you are trying to excavate might not even be in the training set.
- spamizbad 3y ago
  > But you can’t say “hey AI do this person’s job for me”. If AI needs to steered around by an expert to be effective that's going to limit its appeal.
  - dools 3y ago
    Why? I wrote a regex in 45 minutes the other day that would have taken me days to get right without AI. It’s an enormously underpriced production boost right now.
    - spamizbad 3y ago
      To me this a huge signal that a regex was not the correct approach and that AI just steered you directly into (or passed) Kernighan's Law.
      - dools 3y ago
        No, it’s a very specific regex for parsing a very finicky file format. It’s definitely the best tool for the job, although funnily enough ChatGPT couldn’t get it right in a single regex but Claude could. ChatGPT chickened out and kept giving me functions that looped through applying various filters and regexes.
        daymanstep 3y ago
        How do you know that the AI got it right?
        dools 3y ago
        The the code parses the files correctly.
    - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
      Maybe the LLM prevented an intervention where you were asked why the thing you were working on was taking days, surfacing the need for a better approach.
- mnk47 3y ago
  Yeah, I think we're just at an awkward point where you still have to do some prompting tricks to make it work as expected. Hopefully this all gets smoothed out soon and makes hacky solutions like "prompt engineering" less important.
- atmavatar 3y ago
  > You just have to be a bit more specific. I have had success with AI writing code but I have to drive it. "Computer, in the Holmesian style, create a mystery to confound Data with an opponent who has the ability to defeat him."
andy99 3y ago
So the headline is pretty clearly right, we were coming out of the circa 2016 deep learning bubble and expectations were being adjusted, gen AI came in and the hype roared back up, now we're peaking, the same problems from before are still there even if the demos are cooler, and expectations need to be tempered again. But instead of that, the article starts with The tech's drawbacks are hard to overlook. Large language models like ChatGPT are prone to hallucinating and spreading misinformation. Both chatbots and AI image makers have been accused of plagiarizing writers and artists. And overall, the hardware that generative AI uses needs enormous amounts of energy, gutting the environment. None of those (hallucination maybe) are relevant, if it's good at automating misinformation, surely it can do useful work as well. This is more just a list of random criticisms. Then Perhaps most of all, according to Gary Marcus... No point in continuing to read.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  AI giving wildly incorrect answers is incredibly relevant. And if it can "surely" do useful work... why isn't it? That's like saying, "Sure, this car burns oil, but if it can do that, it can surely do more than that and be my daily driver."
  - ben_w 3y ago
    AI does do useful work. It's also being treated as magic, with all the same unrealistic expectations. To treat it as more than it is, is as much a mistake as to treat it as less than it is. I'm glad it's "only" at the level of an intern (sometimes you're willing to hire them, sometimes you're not); but conversely I think this means I can't risk changing career.
- Agingcoder 3y ago
  No - these are exactly the issues being brought up where I work. They make mistakes, carry potential legal liabilities and cost a fortune ( dollars or carbon ) to run. The only difference with before is that they now look a lot closer to being able to replace people for real, and that’s a significant difference. Now, replace ‘ai’ with ‘employee’ and the profits must be very clear to hire such an unreliable person. Some companies worry about these things. In my view if the amount of mistakes could be acceptably low, this would change the game ( both ‘ acceptably’ and ‘low’ are valid directions).
gedy 3y ago
With LLMs at least, it feels like it's best to just treat "AI" as another type of user interface. If your business/idea can use an interface like this, cool, it might be a nicer way to interact. But it's not there yet for replacing most employees, and honestly feels like it's being used as a scape goat for a crappy economy or monetary policy driven layoffs.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Actual article: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/27/ai-chatbot-letdown-hype-reality https://www.axios.com/2024/03/27/ai-chatbot-letdown-hype-rea...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
silverquiet 3y ago
A friend of mine’s mother came down with a rare form of dementia at a sadly young age for that to happen. It was a strange experience talking with her because in most ways she was very lucid, but sometimes she would just veer off into stories that were obviously delusional. Conversing with the LLMs rather reminds me of that sometimes. But she was not able to work because of this disability.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Likewise, I had similar vibes between early versions of ChatGPT and my mother's Alzheimer's. Not had that vibe for a while now, but I definitely noticed it.
phkahler 3y ago
If you watch Sam Altman talking on the Lex Friedman podcast, he clearly thinks ChatGPT 4 is kinda cool and that 5 will be better. But he really dropped the hype and sounded more like this article.
zdragnar 3y ago
The real question, to my mind, is "is the current generation of AI yet another dead end?", because whether or not the tech can improve upon its flaws will determine whether or not it is worth a business investing in. We've gone through AI winters before, where the actual techniques and hardware simply had a terminal point of usefulness beyond which it was unlikely to grow. If hallucinating bad information is to be regularly expected / intrinsic to the tech, then it's basically Clippy 2.0 and a dead end. On the other hand, if we can expect lower power costs and higher trust in the output (i.e. needing less human intervention) then it makes sense to start finding places where it can fit into the business and grow over time. I'm personally in the camp that it is a fun toy but with limited applicability for most businesses, and unlikely to grow beyond that. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
- andy99 3y ago
  FWIW, I think inaccuracy - what people call hallucination - will probably be limiting in some applications, like public facing broad based chat applications with stringent requirements on factuality. There are lots of other applications - in particular I'm thinking about turning unstructured data into structured data for aggregation and analysis, where you can tolerate some level of error and LLMs can work quite well to automate it. Beyond that, obviously copilot or assistant type stuff is already something people use. It doesn't have to be flawless for that, the main use case for chatGPT is not making high stakes decisions blindly based on the answers it gives out. It makes mistakes and does dumb stuff sometimes but it's also helpful, the flaws aren't a dealbreaker even if people would like them to be. At the same time, I don't expect it to get much better, it's going to be about getting useful work out of what we have.
  - onthecanposting 3y ago
    The criticism in the article seems pretty weak. If the goal was an omniscient oracle, then, yeah, probably not the god you were expecting. However, I don't see how this is not more cost effective than an outsourced call center. Speaking to a person in another country who barely understands my language and has 5 scripted responses can't be an improvement. The article does not even speak to error rates for humans performing the same task.
geor9e 3y ago
AI doesn't suck any more than a socket wrench sucks in the hand of a bad mechanic. But ask a world class mechanic if they'd ever give up their socket wrench. Some businesses just aren't competent at taking advantage of new things, and competition is fierce. Just like the dot-com era, everyone wants a piece of this new pie, even less competent folks, and most will fail, but many will get rich. Plenty of businesses are already making gobs of income, with just some public model off civitai and a well crafted prompt, wrappered into a slick subscription website. Personally I find AI a godsend and have duct taped dozens of HTTP POST API calls with huge custom prompts to anthropic/openai/groq/etc all over my mac hotkeys and phone voice assistants (via Tasker tasks) etc. Anything that an LLM can do to make my life a little easier, I turn it into a HTTP request and tie it in to some automation.
- foinker 3y ago
  I don't entirely disagree with you, but I think your wrench analogy only really works if the wrench sometimes thinks it is a screwdriver or a piece of wood for the majority of users, and only experienced highly technical mechanics can consistently guide it to remembering that it is a wrench. The problem is that the toothpaste is already out of the tube in terms of what it's been hyped to be for the average person, and they are disappointed to learn that it doesn't really work that way. And there are many people who have not yet realized, or realized too late, that it's not appropriate for the work they're doing and its "assistance" is ending up in finished products in any case.
- Nullabillity 3y ago
  A socket wrench won't randomly decide to turn the wrong direction every os often.
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
No, businesses are discovering that the uses that it is being sold to them for are inappropriate. It may not be factually accurate. It may say disturbing things. It is not a reliable company representative. This does not mean AI sucks, it means you are trying to use it for things it is not appropriate for. On the other hand, it can be a massive time saver for staff who know what they're doing and can interpret it's output. It's a tool that can boost output, not a replacement for people.
GolDDranks 3y ago
We are just a month away from releasing an internal tool for our sales dept that combined LLM and old fashioned statistical models to generate draft sales speeches. (We are a selling to businesses on a specific field, and our sales speeches are usually highly data-driven and customised per client, placing emphasis of how much additional revenue would the client get out of the purchase according to our analysis.) It seems to work pretty well for this scenario. The usage is company internal (only draft generation) and the sales reps are augmented by the AI, not replaced by it.
- sirspacey 3y ago
  That sounds really cool. We’ve been doing call mapping to account plans and it’s pretty useful so far.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ashildr 3y ago
LLM are not “AI”.
- lardo 3y ago
  What is?
  - ashildr 2y ago
    Nothing, for now.

73 points by pg_1234 3y ago

Our agency has been asked to explore AI projects for a half dozen clients over the past 18 months. None of them have actually rolled out to real users. We keep finding the same things: the “AI” backed tool is worse than the people it’s supposed to replace, and too costly to implement and maintain at any real scale. Mix in concerns about PHI (we primarily work with healthcare-related businesses) and it all amounts to the same story: that’s cool, but…

vundercind 3y ago
Yeah, the expense of doing it “right” is really high and much of it’s an ongoing cost, while the cases in which it’s better than cheaper options like hiring a few more lowish-wage workers or doing a little training or just… using some normal-ass program that does the same thing but a bit less “smart”, aren’t as common as businesses seem to wish they were.

dools 3y ago

You just have to be a bit more specific. I have had success with AI writing code but I have to drive it. It’s a massive time saver though. I have also had success with classification tasks, like look at this email and then look at this list of topics, and pick which topic this email relates to, or “other” if you can’t see an obvious choice. But you can’t say “hey AI do this person’s job for me”.

krapp 3y ago
>But you can’t say “hey AI do this person’s job for me”. Unfortunately, that's exactly what businesses want to accomplish.
MattGaiser 3y ago
It is closer to a shovel vs hands rather than an automated excavator.
- svaha1728 3y ago
  And the gems you are trying to excavate might not even be in the training set.
spamizbad 3y ago
> But you can’t say “hey AI do this person’s job for me”. If AI needs to steered around by an expert to be effective that's going to limit its appeal.
- dools 3y ago
  Why? I wrote a regex in 45 minutes the other day that would have taken me days to get right without AI. It’s an enormously underpriced production boost right now.
  - spamizbad 3y ago
    To me this a huge signal that a regex was not the correct approach and that AI just steered you directly into (or passed) Kernighan's Law.
    - dools 3y ago
      No, it’s a very specific regex for parsing a very finicky file format. It’s definitely the best tool for the job, although funnily enough ChatGPT couldn’t get it right in a single regex but Claude could. ChatGPT chickened out and kept giving me functions that looped through applying various filters and regexes.
      - daymanstep 3y ago
        How do you know that the AI got it right?
        dools 3y ago
        The the code parses the files correctly.
  - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    Maybe the LLM prevented an intervention where you were asked why the thing you were working on was taking days, surfacing the need for a better approach.
mnk47 3y ago
Yeah, I think we're just at an awkward point where you still have to do some prompting tricks to make it work as expected. Hopefully this all gets smoothed out soon and makes hacky solutions like "prompt engineering" less important.
atmavatar 3y ago
> You just have to be a bit more specific. I have had success with AI writing code but I have to drive it. "Computer, in the Holmesian style, create a mystery to confound Data with an opponent who has the ability to defeat him."

andy99 3y ago

So the headline is pretty clearly right, we were coming out of the circa 2016 deep learning bubble and expectations were being adjusted, gen AI came in and the hype roared back up, now we're peaking, the same problems from before are still there even if the demos are cooler, and expectations need to be tempered again. But instead of that, the article starts with The tech's drawbacks are hard to overlook. Large language models like ChatGPT are prone to hallucinating and spreading misinformation. Both chatbots and AI image makers have been accused of plagiarizing writers and artists. And overall, the hardware that generative AI uses needs enormous amounts of energy, gutting the environment. None of those (hallucination maybe) are relevant, if it's good at automating misinformation, surely it can do useful work as well. This is more just a list of random criticisms. Then Perhaps most of all, according to Gary Marcus... No point in continuing to read.

pavel_lishin 3y ago
AI giving wildly incorrect answers is incredibly relevant. And if it can "surely" do useful work... why isn't it? That's like saying, "Sure, this car burns oil, but if it can do that, it can surely do more than that and be my daily driver."
- ben_w 3y ago
  AI does do useful work. It's also being treated as magic, with all the same unrealistic expectations. To treat it as more than it is, is as much a mistake as to treat it as less than it is. I'm glad it's "only" at the level of an intern (sometimes you're willing to hire them, sometimes you're not); but conversely I think this means I can't risk changing career.
Agingcoder 3y ago
No - these are exactly the issues being brought up where I work. They make mistakes, carry potential legal liabilities and cost a fortune ( dollars or carbon ) to run. The only difference with before is that they now look a lot closer to being able to replace people for real, and that’s a significant difference. Now, replace ‘ai’ with ‘employee’ and the profits must be very clear to hire such an unreliable person. Some companies worry about these things. In my view if the amount of mistakes could be acceptably low, this would change the game ( both ‘ acceptably’ and ‘low’ are valid directions).

gedy 3y ago

With LLMs at least, it feels like it's best to just treat "AI" as another type of user interface. If your business/idea can use an interface like this, cool, it might be a nicer way to interact. But it's not there yet for replacing most employees, and honestly feels like it's being used as a scape goat for a crappy economy or monetary policy driven layoffs.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Actual article: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/27/ai-chatbot-letdown-hype-reality https://www.axios.com/2024/03/27/ai-chatbot-letdown-hype-rea...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

silverquiet 3y ago

A friend of mine’s mother came down with a rare form of dementia at a sadly young age for that to happen. It was a strange experience talking with her because in most ways she was very lucid, but sometimes she would just veer off into stories that were obviously delusional. Conversing with the LLMs rather reminds me of that sometimes. But she was not able to work because of this disability.

ben_w 3y ago
Likewise, I had similar vibes between early versions of ChatGPT and my mother's Alzheimer's. Not had that vibe for a while now, but I definitely noticed it.

phkahler 3y ago

If you watch Sam Altman talking on the Lex Friedman podcast, he clearly thinks ChatGPT 4 is kinda cool and that 5 will be better. But he really dropped the hype and sounded more like this article.

zdragnar 3y ago

The real question, to my mind, is "is the current generation of AI yet another dead end?", because whether or not the tech can improve upon its flaws will determine whether or not it is worth a business investing in. We've gone through AI winters before, where the actual techniques and hardware simply had a terminal point of usefulness beyond which it was unlikely to grow. If hallucinating bad information is to be regularly expected / intrinsic to the tech, then it's basically Clippy 2.0 and a dead end. On the other hand, if we can expect lower power costs and higher trust in the output (i.e. needing less human intervention) then it makes sense to start finding places where it can fit into the business and grow over time. I'm personally in the camp that it is a fun toy but with limited applicability for most businesses, and unlikely to grow beyond that. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

andy99 3y ago
FWIW, I think inaccuracy - what people call hallucination - will probably be limiting in some applications, like public facing broad based chat applications with stringent requirements on factuality. There are lots of other applications - in particular I'm thinking about turning unstructured data into structured data for aggregation and analysis, where you can tolerate some level of error and LLMs can work quite well to automate it. Beyond that, obviously copilot or assistant type stuff is already something people use. It doesn't have to be flawless for that, the main use case for chatGPT is not making high stakes decisions blindly based on the answers it gives out. It makes mistakes and does dumb stuff sometimes but it's also helpful, the flaws aren't a dealbreaker even if people would like them to be. At the same time, I don't expect it to get much better, it's going to be about getting useful work out of what we have.
- onthecanposting 3y ago
  The criticism in the article seems pretty weak. If the goal was an omniscient oracle, then, yeah, probably not the god you were expecting. However, I don't see how this is not more cost effective than an outsourced call center. Speaking to a person in another country who barely understands my language and has 5 scripted responses can't be an improvement. The article does not even speak to error rates for humans performing the same task.

geor9e 3y ago

AI doesn't suck any more than a socket wrench sucks in the hand of a bad mechanic. But ask a world class mechanic if they'd ever give up their socket wrench. Some businesses just aren't competent at taking advantage of new things, and competition is fierce. Just like the dot-com era, everyone wants a piece of this new pie, even less competent folks, and most will fail, but many will get rich. Plenty of businesses are already making gobs of income, with just some public model off civitai and a well crafted prompt, wrappered into a slick subscription website. Personally I find AI a godsend and have duct taped dozens of HTTP POST API calls with huge custom prompts to anthropic/openai/groq/etc all over my mac hotkeys and phone voice assistants (via Tasker tasks) etc. Anything that an LLM can do to make my life a little easier, I turn it into a HTTP request and tie it in to some automation.

foinker 3y ago
I don't entirely disagree with you, but I think your wrench analogy only really works if the wrench sometimes thinks it is a screwdriver or a piece of wood for the majority of users, and only experienced highly technical mechanics can consistently guide it to remembering that it is a wrench. The problem is that the toothpaste is already out of the tube in terms of what it's been hyped to be for the average person, and they are disappointed to learn that it doesn't really work that way. And there are many people who have not yet realized, or realized too late, that it's not appropriate for the work they're doing and its "assistance" is ending up in finished products in any case.
Nullabillity 3y ago
A socket wrench won't randomly decide to turn the wrong direction every os often.

MattPalmer1086 3y ago

No, businesses are discovering that the uses that it is being sold to them for are inappropriate. It may not be factually accurate. It may say disturbing things. It is not a reliable company representative. This does not mean AI sucks, it means you are trying to use it for things it is not appropriate for. On the other hand, it can be a massive time saver for staff who know what they're doing and can interpret it's output. It's a tool that can boost output, not a replacement for people.

GolDDranks 3y ago

We are just a month away from releasing an internal tool for our sales dept that combined LLM and old fashioned statistical models to generate draft sales speeches. (We are a selling to businesses on a specific field, and our sales speeches are usually highly data-driven and customised per client, placing emphasis of how much additional revenue would the client get out of the purchase according to our analysis.) It seems to work pretty well for this scenario. The usage is company internal (only draft generation) and the sales reps are augmented by the AI, not replaced by it.

sirspacey 3y ago
That sounds really cool. We’ve been doing call mapping to account plans and it’s pretty useful so far.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ashildr 3y ago

LLM are not “AI”.

lardo 3y ago
What is?
- ashildr 2y ago
  Nothing, for now.