you can’t spell fail without AI.
feɪl
phayl
Human creativity for the win!
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.
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
Also in the industry and I gotta say it’s not often I agree with every damn point. You nailed it. Thanks for posting!
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.
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.
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.
It’s a circle jerk, don’t get fooled into thinking this is some new version of trickle down economics
It’s not trickle down at all. Definitely not what I was trying to say. Just rich people trading money among themselves in hopes of getting richer.
Imo it’s wasted in the sense that the money could have gone towards much better uses.
Which is not unique to AI, it’s just about the level of money involved.
What’s better than paying someone’s salary?
New renewable energy installations.
Research into vaccines.
Malaria distribution.
Higher education endowments.
Heck, just paying the salaries of people working in those fields. Sure, spending money stimulates the economy so I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s totally wasted, it’s definitely being put to a much better use than just sitting in someone’s bank account. But it could be put to a lot better uses. The software engineers could be developing a new program for balancing energy loads, or managing the maintenance of wind turbine fields. The hardware engineers could be optimizing a better autoclave or building a machine that automatically dispenses medicine when fed a script. The PMs could be managing a team distributing aid in Ukraine or designing a new blood drive initiative. Jobs that have positive societal impact, instead of - at best - neutral societal impact.
It makes rich guys even richer. At the expense of other rich guys and just fools attracted.
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.
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…
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Yeah, the brightest minds instead of building useful tech to fight climate change, spend their life building vanity AI projects. Computational resources instead of folding proteins or whatever are wasted on some gradient descent of some useless model.
All while working class wages are stagnant. And so your best career advice is to go get a random tech degree so you could also work on vanity stuff and make money.
This is cryptocurrency equivalent. It’s worse than CEOs buying yachts. The latter actually leads to some innovation.
Succesfully creating an actual AGI would be by far the biggest and most significant invention in the human history so I can’t blame them for trying.
A bunch of people fine-tuning an off-the-shelf model on a proprietary task only to fail horrendously will never lead to any progress, let alone AGI.
So, nobody is trying AGI.
If all those people would actually collectively work on a large-scale research project, we’d see humanity advance. But that’s exactly my point.
“Nobody is trying AGI” is simply just not true. If you think what they’re doing will never lead to AGI, then that’s an opinion you’re free to have, but it’s still just that; an opinion. Our current LLM’s are by far the closest resemblance of AGI that we’ve ever seen. That route may very well be a dead end but it may also not be. You can’t know that.
Oh gosh, look, an AI believer.
No, LLM will not lead to AGI. But even if they did, applying existing tech to a new problem only to fail cuz you’re dumb at estimating the complexity does not, in fact, improve the underlying technology.
To paraphrase in a historical context: no matter how many people run around with shovels digging the ground for something, it will never lead to an invention of the excavator.
Ad hominem and circular reasoning isn’t a valid counter-argument. You’re not even attempting to convince me otherwise, you’re just being a jerk.
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.
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.
Ooh ooh now do restaurants!!!
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restaurants provide a service the same way landlords do. just bc you privatized an essential commodity does not immediately make your privatized entity a useful or essential service, and i detest the notion that it does. it’s circular logic.
EDIT: i’m getting downvoted but idc. i still think im right. weep all you want, but at its core, the buying and selling of goods/services represents an ethical dilemma at best and an atrocity at worst. the argument that restaurants are entirely a choice to go to is both overly broad and a straw man. restaurants often do impact people’s budgets and lifestyles, believe it or not. you can’t just blanket say they have no culpability in this arena because reasons. it is the mechanisms of the market and economy themselves that oppress us. it is not inherently human. it is not the only way to organize ourselves. we can do better, and we deserve better. who the fuck cares how much “value” literally anything has? i’ll trade you five smogels for a smilji. yay, everyone magically gained bc of the incantation! grow the fuck up. outdated ideas have no place in modern, civilized society. any imagined net benefits of money you can come up with are a drop in the bucket compared to its power as a stupid fucking thoughtworm
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Very weird comparison
Very different. Restaurants don’t buy up every food resource out there or cause artificial scarcity to make them the only option. Groceries are still a cheaper and healthier option 95% of the time.
that’s a monistic point of view. you clearly have never lived in or near a food desert, or somewhere where fast food is the only option, because oftentimes at a local scale restaurants do buy up all available food resources. sure. these people could subsist off of wild fucking berries outside instead. why not. the choices of large restaurant megacorps weigh heavy on millions.
And honestly any business venture.
Everyone knows 4 of 5 restaurants will fail, and soon.
AI hype train is still going. The difference is people need to eat.
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.
As I said in a project call where someone was pumping up AI, this is just the latest bubble ready to pop. Everyone is dumping $$ into AI, a couple decent ones will survive but the bulk is either barely functional or just vaporware.
My new job even said they are using AI. It usurb every goddamm company shoving AI features on us.
My new job said this aswell. When I got into the position I found out it was actually a machine learning model and they were trying to use it but didn’t have the time to create a clean dataset for the learning so it has never worked. This hasn’t stopped them from advertising that they are using AI.
Every company is using the same thing and calling it AI.
Isn’t that how innovation has always worked?
I feel like all this AI hate is comparable to any other innovation cycle.
Millions of light fabric and dowels wasted on crack pot “air heads” trying to design first ever flying vehicle
I think there’s more AI hate because it’s being pushed onto users that didn’t ask for it and don’t want it from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon. And I think it’s warranted!
But how does that impact you?
Like when is AI being shoved into your day
Google added it to their search by default, I had to change my default search to exclude it. Same with my Android phone, I got prompted to switch from Google Assistant to Bard and declined. Really glad I did since I later read about how awful it is. Yesterday I saw a copilot icon in Teams that I have to use for work. I clicked it out of curiosity and it showed an error and then wouldn’t let me use Teams for 5 minutes. When I finally got in the copilot button was gone lol.
Yea I guess for me Google already sucks without AI and beyond that I don’t have issues or bugs anymore than usual. But I also use chatgpt for things to do I find it useful. Even right now I’m asking if to give me some prompts to code while I learn different design patterns. Like asking it what is a good decorator use case.
It’s massively easier to build a plane than a brain.
Tell that to a bronze age engineer, and they will probably respond that those two are closer to each other than they are to his best efforts. And he would probably be right.
It sure feels like we’re at the peak of the Gartner hype cycle. If so, the bubble will pop, and we’ll end up with AI used where it actually works, not shoved into everything. In the long run, that pop could be a small blip in overall development, like the dot-com bust was to the growth of the internet, but it’s difficult to predict that while still in the middle of the hype cycle.
What I don’t get is the snobby attitude towards it though. I’ve commented else where that it has all the earmarks of being a manufactured outrage. It has all the same earmarks of any other media driven hate fest.
Think of the logic where you are both angry that it’s useless, hateful of tech bros and still mad that they’re wasting money on it.
To me it’s just fun new thing I can play with and potentially might be something bigger might not be. But when I talk to people online it’s like I’m talking immigration or gender with Republicans. It’s all the and talking points, vitriolic statements and hate
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What crypto wall? Isn’t it back up?
I’d rather have all the AI and crypto than any streaming service or social media that everyone who complains about resources seems to use freely.
To me the crypto and AI is innovation which is where I want resources to go. The other crap is recreating things we already have just with extra waste and that goes ignored and makes me feel the outrage is fake or manufactured if the logic steps over a bunch of other things to focus on the new kid on the block.
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I’m not saying that you’re not. I am saying collectively these points about wasting resources is a bit much considering all the other wastes in relation to the anger those other things generate. It’s not proportional. That isn’t me saying people love it. But I am saying they do use a lot of other things that generate tremendous wastes in similar ways without care.
Im pretty confident it is manufactured. Manufactured in the same way the right despise LGQTB and immigrants. If you were too ask them if their hate was driven by other sources they say the same thing. Nobody is immune to it especially if we agree with thing. We all just go with it.
Doesn’t change that we know fox news plays a big part of some people’s opinions and views. Doesn’t mean those people are not racist or bigots to begin with. But there’s a stoking of the flames. Same here.
The interviews revealed that data scientists sometimes get distracted by the latest developments in AI and implement them in their projects without looking at the value that it will deliver.
At least part of this is due to resume-oriented development.
That’s great. Like 5% more fails than regular software projects. Why do people see this as validation for AI failing? Lol
Because they want it to be.
AI isn’t going to fail, LLMs are going to fail and fail spectacularly.
Expert systems are already being very effectively used in medicine and astronomy, political sentiment shifting and HFTs.
Sentiment scraping expert systems are where the real danger and profit is, but everyone is being distracted by fuckdamn chat bots.
It’s like the whole world freaking out about plastic straws when the real problem is microplastics settled in every fuckdamn organism on the planet.
Wow, who could have guessed
Yeah I mean that’s r&d 20% success is pretty strong in a new field.
Yeah. I’d love to see this compared to other R&D success rates.
