Fuck AI

1429 readers

106 users here now

"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"

A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.

founded 8 months ago

MODERATORS

129

80% of corporate AI projects fail — twice the rate of other IT projects (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/2262316

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] lemon 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Just fyi, that’s not entirely true. If we’re just focusing on LLMs, structured and guided generation exists. Combine that with an eval set (= unit tests), you can at least track how well you’re doing. For sure, prompt engineering misses the feeling of being in control. You’ll also never be able to claim 100% coverage (although even with unit tests that’s not something you can claim, as there are always blind spots). What you gain over traditional coding, however, is that you can tackle problems that might otherwise take an infinite number of years to express in code. For example, how would you define the rules for detecting whether an image shows a bird?

It’s just a tool like any other. Overuse is currently detestably rife. But its value is there.

Source: ML engineer who secretly hates a lot about ML but is also in awe at the developments of the last few years.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And how often do you need to detect images of birds with an unknown accuracy?

That's what many tech bros don't seem to understand: much of the software in this world is boring business crap, and that software needs mainly reliability and explainability. You can't just throw a product around that poses an incalculable risk. And often enough the specifications of these apps is an amalgamation of decades of cruft, and needs to be changed and tweaked often in tiny ways.

I mean, there are certainly cases where AI products have their uses, but those seem to be very small niches.

[–] lemon 1 points 2 months ago

I agree with you. I just wanted to share some nuance. The point I wanted to make is that it is in fact possible to incorporate LLMs in a fairly controlled way while calculating (estimates of) the risk of failure as well as the associated social and financial costs. I do it every day, but I’m no tech bro and dislike the ‘AI will fix everything’ types as much as everyone here.