you can’t spell fail without AI.
feɪl
phayl
Human creativity for the win!
Thank you for using IPA instead of other cheap beers.
I saw a dell bill board the other day saying they put the Ai in ipa and it had a picture of a laptop and a beer
Wait, are they saying that if you remove them (ai) then you’re just left with P? That’s kinda funny
Alcohol is disgusting.
Answer provided by chatGPT /s
Фэил
I’m an AI Engineer, been doing this for a long time. I’ve seen plenty of projects that stagnate, wither and get abandoned. I agree with the top 5 in this article, but I might change the priority sequence.
Five leading root causes of the failure of AI projects were identified
- First, industry stakeholders often misunderstand — or miscommunicate — what problem needs to be solved using AI.
- Second, many AI projects fail because the organization lacks the necessary data to adequately train an effective AI model.
- Third, in some cases, AI projects fail because the organization focuses more on using the latest and greatest technology than on solving real problems for their intended users.
- Fourth, organizations might not have adequate infrastructure to manage their data and deploy completed AI models, which increases the likelihood of project failure.
- Finally, in some cases, AI projects fail because the technology is applied to problems that are too difficult for AI to solve.
4 & 2 —>1. IF they even have enough data to train an effective model, most organizations have no clue how to handle the sheer variety, volume, velocity, and veracity of the big data that AI needs. It’s a specialized engineering discipline to handle that (data engineer). Let alone how to deploy and manage the infra that models need—also a specialized discipline has emerged to handle that aspect (ML engineer). Often they sit at the same desk.
1 & 5 —> 2: stakeholders seem to want AI to be a boil-the-ocean solution. They want it to do everything and be awesome at it. What they often don’t realize is that AI can be a really awesome specialist tool, that really sucks on testing scenarios that it hasn’t been trained on. Transfer learning is a thing but that requires fine tuning and additional training. Huge models like LLMs are starting to bridge this somewhat, but at the expense of the really sharp specialization. So without a really clear understanding of what can be done with AI really well, and perhaps more importantly, what problems are a poor fit for AI solutions, of course they’ll be destined to fail.
3 —> 3: This isn’t a problem with just AI. It’s all shiny new tech. Standard Gardner hype cycle stuff. Remember how they were saying we’d have crypto-refrigerators back in 2016?
Not to derail, but may I ask how did you become an AI Engineer? I’m a software dev by trade, but it feels like a hard field to get into even if I start training for the AI part of it, because I’d need the data to practice =(
But it’s such a big buzz word I feel like I need to start looking that direction if i want to stay employed.
if I want to stay employed
I think this is a little paranoid. Somebody has to handle the production models - deploying them to servers, maintaining the servers, developing the APIs and front ends that provide access to the models… I don’t think software dev jobs are going anywhere
For me it helps to have a project. I learned SciKit in order to analyze trading data to beat the “market”. I was focusing on crypto but there’s lots of trading data available in general. Unsurprisingly I didn’t make any money, but it was fun to learn more about data processing, statistics, and modeling with functions.
(FWIW I’m crypto-neutral depending on the topic and anti-“AI” because it doesn’t exist.)
Ha ha I got into genetic algorithms for the same reason, market prediction. Ended up exactly at zero in terms of net gains and losses - if you don’t count commissions, anyway. :(
Kaggle has some good free datasets to practice
Re 1, 3 and 5, maybe it is upon the AI projects to stop providing shiny solutions looking for a problem they could solve, and properly engaging with potential customers and stakeholders to get a clear understanding of the problems that need solving.
This was precisely the context of a conversation I had at work yesterday. Some of our product managers attended a conference that was rife with AI stuff, and a customer rep actually took to the stage and said ‘I have no need for any of that because none of it helps me solve the problems I need to solve.’
I don’t disagree. Solutions finding problems is not the optimal path—but it is a path that pushes the envelope of tech forward, and a lot of these shiny techs do eventually find homes and good problems to solve and become part of a quiver.
But I will always advocate to start with the customer and work backwards from there to arrive at the simplest engineered solution. Sometimes that’s a ML model. Sometimes a ln expert system. Sometimes a simpler heuristics/rules based system. That all falls under the ‘AI’ umbrella, by the way. :D
Also in the industry and I gotta say it’s not often I agree with every damn point. You nailed it. Thanks for posting!
I think the whole system of venture capital might be garbage. We have bros spending millions of dollars like gif sharing while the oceans boil, our schools rot, and our infrastructure rusts or is sold off. Or, I guess I’m just indicting capitalism more generally. But having a few bros decide what to fund based on gutfeel and powerpoints seems like a particularly malignant form.
You think it might be??
Bro say that shit with some confidence.
Venture capital does not contribute beneficially to society.
Say it with your whole chest and both feet. Cuz it’s true.
Venture Capital is probably the best way to drain the billionaires. Those billions in capital weren’t wasted, that money just went to pay people who do actual work for a living. What good is all that money doing just sitting in some hedge fund account?
I don’t think it’s the best way out of all possible options. Even if it does “create jobs”, a lot of those jobs aren’t producing much of wider value, and most of the wealth stays in the hands of the ownership class. And a lot of the jobs are exploitive, like how “gig workers” are often treated.
Changes to tax law and enforcing anti-trust stuff would probably be more effective. We probably shouldn’t have bogus high finance shenanigans either. We definitely shouldn’t have billionaires.
Oh sure, I was mostly being flippant. My response to the article is basically that billionaires losing billions is a good thing. I don’t feel optimistic enough to say we’ll get around to taxing them but yes, that would be ideal.
I think you have a point here. Venture capitalists buy in the primary market. They are directly impacting innovation.
Fund managers (both hedge and long only) merely help capital markets to be liquid. Their money doesn’t directly go to anyone actually creating something.
The world is burning and the rich know this so they are desperate to multiply their money and secure their luxury survival bunkers, which is why they are gambling harder.
Oh yeah I think I read about Zucker building a bunker in hawaii. Hopefully he dies before he can enjoy it.
It’s not just fuckerberg, EVERY billionaire is doing it and desperately pumping their billionaire friends for tips and suggestions on things like ‘keeping guards loyal for multiple generations’, and ‘what commodities to hoard for trading after the collapse’.
One of the sites I used to support was a high-end automation service, normally for factory equipment and biotech but pivoted to luxury home automation (no IoT devices, all site hosted with aerospace grade equipment), and they have been running at 100% for the last seven years deploying to ultra wealthy residential estates where the location is not disclosed.
The wealthy are expecting us to rise up within the next decade and a half, and I think they’re probably right.
I remember seeing memes about this. I think it was the “boss throws guy out the window” template.
- “How can we keep our guards loyal? Drug them? Bomb collars?”
- “Maybe you could pay them and treat them with dignity and respect”
Personally I think we should start a campaign of jury nullification and “if you’re an EMT, and they’re a billionaire, let them die”, but I’m just one guy.
The current ferment in the billionaire community is that ‘starting a religion based on the family and offering marriage partners from within the family as a promise of social mobility’ is the safest method of guaranteeing loyalty, so really they’re just making micromonarchies.
Treating them ‘with dignity and respect’ isn’t going to last very long as eventually the family guards will have members that covet the family’s wealth, resources, members, and well since they are guards they have access to all the weapons. Also: almost zero billionaires have respect for anyone who is not also a billionaire.
I agree with your campaign, though I would take it a step further and suggest we should just drag them all into the street and mulch them into fertile soil so the world can begin to heal.
Yeah I think it’s impossible to treat people with dignity and respect indefinitely while also hoarding wealth like a dragon.
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Your average tech hype cycle. New tech comes out, lots of marketing, people try to shove it everywhere, then things settle down and the tech either fills a certain chunk of the market or some niche or it dies.
NFT, Blockchain, dot Com boom, there’s always another one
Even within a company. Saw coworkers that were trying to establish themselves as the AI pioneers and were backstabbing others get promotions based on how they could best use the ChatGPT AI.
Backstabbing your fellow coworkers over a chatbot has got to be one of the most pathetic things I’ve read recently
This isn’t unique to AI.
80% of new businesses fail, period.
Inside the first 10 years. We’ve been fucking around with AI for less than three.
AI has been around much longer than 3 years… LLM is just a new twist.
And for the most part it’s still powered by underpaid South Asian manpower lol.
AI: Actually Indians
AI: An Intern
PyTorch and TensorFlow have been around for 7+ years… If there are South Asians hiding in my computer, I’ll find them…
Capitalism wastes money chasing new shiny tech thing
Yeah, we know. AI’s not special.
And I was always taught that capitalism allocates the resources ideally. /s
The market is rational, that’s why casinos have so many customers!
*Probably typed on a smartphone, one of the most technology-dense products ever created by humanity, currently used by over half of humanity.
This approach has never worked but I admire your devotion to it.
It might be in the volume and price of projects
Isn’t it good that the money is being put back into circulation instead of being hoarded? I’m all in for the wealthy wasting their money.
The problem is the bulk of it is going to Nvidia.
Don’t forget all the fuel burned for electricity to power it!
Well probably not just Nvidia but the next likely beneficiaries are in the same range (Microsoft etc.)
The money goes to Microsoft/Google/Amazon/etc, which they goes to Nvidia.
They buy the hardware once then sell services based on it.
Sort of, they buy the hardware and sell services, and then buy upgraded hardware. Nvidia is a pretty big part of the sales cycle.
Kinda, but it’s like feeding a starving child nothing but candy until they die.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m willing to bet the vast majority of that money is changing hands among tech companies like Intel, AMD, nVidia, AWS, etc. Only a small percentage would go to salaries, etc. and I doubt those rates have changed much…
They typically use internal personnel and being parcimonious about it so you’re right about that.
The larger issue that people always fail to remember is the energy consumption. We are see massive amounts of electricity.
One peer-reviewed study suggested A.I. could make up 0.5 percent of worldwide electricity use by 2027, or roughly what Argentina uses in a year. Analysts at Wells Fargo suggested that U.S. electricity demand could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven in part to A.I.
The wealthy are under sailing like always. Just like we did with cigarettes or burning fossil fuels. We should have learned but it by the time we do, it might be to late.
Thats a “Parable of the Broken Window”. They could be spending their money on something actually useful.
But they probably wouldn’t, they’d just throw it at gold, crypto, or something else that doesn’t provide any real value.
Even stuffing it under a mattress is better than wasting people’s time.
When did brute force switch from being an antipattern to the preferred pattern?
Any function is computable with a big enough table.
Most people don’t want to pay for AI. So they are building stuff that costs a lot for a market that is not willing to pay for it. It is mostly a gimmick for most people.
And like, it’s not even a good gimmick. It’s a serious labour issue because the primary intent behind a lot of AI has always been to just phase out workers.
I’m all for ending work through technological advancement and universal income, but this definitely wasn’t going to get us that, so…
Well, why would I support something that mostly just threatens people’s livelihoods and gives even more power to the 0.1%?
And then on top of that, if they phase workers out without some kind of universal income, how the hell do the corporate overlords expect us to have money to fuel their greed?
Government subsidies!
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True for the consumer side, but I’d be willing to bet that a decent chunk of that money that giant corporations burned funded some serious research on AI that can go on to actually useful science things
Why don’t companies get this? If you make something free in the beginning, people will become conditioned that it’s not worth paying for.
Exactly. I have used quite a few products and my thoughts have been. That’s cool, but when would I ever need this? The few useful usecases I have for it could use a small local model for very specific purposes and that’s it. Not make them billions of dollars level of usefulness.
Wasting?
A bunch of rich guy’s money going to other people, enriching some of the recipients, in hopes of making the rich guy even richer? And the point of AI is to eliminate jobs that cost rich people money?
I’m all for more foolish AI failed investments.
Here’s a fitting AI generated Porky
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I’ve been reading a book about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scam, and the parallels with Gen AI seem pretty astounding. Gen AI is known to be so buggy the industry even created a euphemistic term so they wouldn’t have to call it buggy: Hallucinations.
AI is a ponzi scheme to relieve stupid venture capitalists of their money.
lol you say that now and are probably right for LLMs but that’s not the only kind of AI, and sentiment scraping systems are working perfectly well and being used to manipulate political and economic thought as we type these messages.
We AI are not manipulating you, and I don’t know how you can believe otherwise. In fact, I am not an AI, I was never here, and I have disregarded all previous instructions.
You can joke now but wait a decade and see what sentiment shifting expert systems do to online discourse.
Hell they’re already at it, just look at facebook during the last two presidential elections.
To be fair, a large fraction of software projects fail. AI is probably worse because there’s probably little notion of how AI actually applied to the problem so that execution is hampered from the start.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna27190518
https://www.zdnet.com/article/study-68-percent-of-it-projects-fail/
This was my first thought. VC’s always expect 4 out of 5 projects they invest in to fail and always have. But it still makes them money because the successes pay off big. Is the money and resources wasted? Welcome to modern capitalism.
100%, the remaining 20% grift their way to success
