6 ms·
> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020 This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many simi
by reading-at-work 6y ago
> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020
This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.
- bob33212 6y agoI have had a couple conversations where a business guy starts off with a decent idea then he says something like "the cognitive AI module will fill out your expense report after watching you do it for a couple weeks". What the fuck? If I had the ability to code a cognitive AI module which could do that I would not be building it for you, I would solve self driving and license the software for billions.
- hieunc229 6y agoBusiness guys usually comes together and brag about their works. Quite often, they start to talk about things they heard but don’t understand much. And the other one hear about it, get excited, but also don’t understand much. Then on the meeting, he brought the idea up and convince everyone to do it. The next you know, you’re pulling your hair out trying to understand what is going on
- pm90 6y agoThis happens way too often. They often read a blog that talks about how X was implemented at company Y and mindlessly cite the blog for their own related-but-different-in-important-ways ideas and it’s upto the engineers to fact check the wackiness. It’s not pleasant. This happened to me recently where a PM shared a blog about someone who had built an “all encompassing multi cloud cost calculator” for their org and had blogged about it. The PM was naturally extremely excited but I asked him to find more details about the tool and if/how that can be used. Turns out even though it was supposedly open sourced it wasn’t really available to just anyone but the author promised he would release it in a month. That was over 6 months ago, no word from the author or PM. These blog fueled hype trains are extremely destructive. It makes engineering appear trivial. Building useful tool might be easier now but it’s not trivial. And if a tool sounds too good to be true it probably is.
- RhodesianHunter 6y agoA few years ago at a small company after a round of golf with some other shmuck, our CEO told us we needed SSO via OAuth, because that's how we can convince people we're secure. How soon could we get it developed? Spare no expense! We had a single website with an already written to OWASP standards login, no external API or plans for any.
- hef19898 6y agoWhat always drives me crazy about instances like this, is that managers and the c-level seem to be much more willing to listen to some "random" guy or blog over their own people. People they hired, people that have a much better understanding of the issue, the processes and so on. This effect is by no means limited to tech. And engineers, regardless of type, are by no means immune to that as soon as they reach higher management positions. I have yet to figure this one out. Which drives me crazy sometimes, because my gut tells me that as soon as I did most "problems" I have regarding managment would be solvable instantly.
- brain5ide 6y agoThey're just seeking some outside the box solutions. If you don't course correct, how do you know/show that you're driving?
- hieunc229 6y agoIn my case, the business guy stubborn and think he know best, many times. Every times, I told him it wasn’t what he think. For a few times, I let it go, part to let he learn about the reality. I thought he would change the evaluation process. But no, he still stubborn. I remember at Microsoft, people would need to win an argument with Bill Gate to get their idea approved. Sometimes, it was a really hear arguments. Maybe some people get inspired by this story too much.
- mercer 6y agoPlus, how else would you create all that synergy.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoI know a guy that works at a company where the CEO will sell something to customers not knowing anything about the technical details, and then come back to the business and "make them do it".
- brain5ide 6y agoI was once being sold that as a partnership advantage - that a guy would sell with a .ppt and then afterwards we'd just have to build it.
- silveroriole 6y agoIsn’t this the norm? I complained that sales were “demoing new features” to customers before the back-end dev team had even heard of these features. I was basically told to stay in my lane. A property developer making design mockups of new highrises doesn’t run it past the bricklayers first, so why should product/sales talk to us digital bricklayers... In one sense, great, I don’t want to bother about what a customer’s priorities are. But it turns out that only works if you TRUST the product team.
- distances 6y agoIn my previous job in a consulting company one of the sales people mentioned how this is the first place where he has to sell the project twice: once for the customer, and one for the co-workers who'll work on it. It was a nice company. Bosses had very limited direct power over the developers and designers, and rightfully so -- it's supposed to be a team of experts, after all.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoBecause he is selling buildings that are too tall to be built with bricks...
- wsc981 6y agoI previously worked for a Dutch fintech company that operated in the same way, but from my understanding they were (probably still are) really quite effective, profits hugely increasing year-on-year. But this Dutch company also makes use of some kinds of SWAT dev teams that help customers on the spot with issues, making sure the product lives up to the clients’ expectations, even if this means modifying a product delivered by the core dev teams. I.e.: if some feature was promised, but not yet part of the current release, the SWAT team might hack something quickly, often on the spot in the clients offices. Later on, such a hack might be replaced with a proper solution.
- fxtentacle 6y agoYes, the best salesperson is usually the one least concerned with reality. Or as one VC put it: Never let facts get in the way of a good story.
- brain5ide 6y agoHim selling you that as an original was an instance of that itself as it's a Mark Twain quote. Funny how that works.
- bigiain 6y agoThis makes more sense when you remember that being "concerned with reality" for a salesperson mostly means "Getting the commission paid and moving to a different role before everything blows up too badly", rather than "delivering software that meets the sales deal's contractual requirements". Salespeople are too rarely judged/punished for the disastrus messes they leave behind, and all too quickly judged/rewarded for being able to convince a customer to sign off on a big number without any care for long term implications of that deal...
- brain5ide 6y agoHm... Vested commision?
- hieunc229 6y agoI don’t have the number but the percentage of success that “best salesperson” is small. Most of the time, the development will be discontinued, or change the direction.
- vxNsr 6y agoSolve self driving? How bout market prediction and just play the market forever. Why would you risk failure when you can just do nothing and make trillions?
- the_af 6y agoWell, to be honest self driving sounds more useful to mankind ;)
- Exmoor 6y agoIf someone offered me AI that drove me to work while I slept or watched movies, or AI that filled out my expense reports, I'd ask if the AI is able to scan the receipts by itself.
- ejolto 6y agoI'd ask the AI to go to work for me, then I'd go hiking in the mountains.
- the_af 6y agoAnd possibly tell the AI to chat with my relatives and help them with their endless computer problems.
- JohnClark1337 6y agoMake an AI that constantly argues with the elderly on Facebook
- petre 6y agoFinancier Martin Armstrong claims to have exactly such a system but it doesn't predict the market, it only makes quite accurate market forecasts.
- deleted 6y ago
- arethuza 6y agoI had a moment like that once where the product manager said something like "at this stage of the process the software will go off and find the documents specifically relevant to this stage" - and I was like pointing out we could do a search but that might bring back irrelevant stuff or fail to find relevant stuff - he insisted that it would automatically find just the exact documents people would need at that stage in the process. It was an "AI complete" feature as up to that point it required someone who knew what they were doing to decide what documents were actually relevant - not "close enough".
- 6510 6y agoOh? So the moment you no longer have people who know which are relevant the AI works?
- retSava 6y agoFire testers and QA, disable bug reporting, et voila, the most perfect software ever to have been created!
- arethuza 6y agoThe product was used for arranging formal approval processes for things like drugs and government contracts - the definition of what documents were relevant was often quite strictly defined in a practical sense but less so in sense that a bit of software could make sense of.
- waltherg 6y agoBeen there so many times. I've been kicked off a project because I couldn't stop talking about training data (they already had) and machine learning algorithms (NLP, text classification) that we could implement right now to start automating a couple of internal processes that are currently pointlessly manual. Think moving incoming e-mail to appropriate downstream support channels. Not enough magical AI / AGI in there. The countless PowerPoint presentations built after my departure described processes along the lines of "the AI will detect when you're about to miss your connecting flight and book you into your favourite hotel with your favourite dinner pre-ordered". Surprisingly, the project survived and now they collect training data and use machine learning for text classification.
- BolexNOLA 6y agoDude I see hilariously absurd ideas for AI implementation in both the film and podcast worlds. There is definitely potential - such as transcriptions - but people are way overselling the efficacy and trying to “disrupt” with AI in ways no industry professional is asking for.
- nikanj 6y agoMost people say they want "speech recognition", but actually mean they want "speech understanding". Think computer from Star Trek, not speech-to-text.
- TomMarius 6y agoIsn't that a given when you're disrupting the industry itself? Of course not every idea is good.
- BolexNOLA 6y agoIt’s only disruptive when it actually disrupts something I guess is my point. I’m not so curmudgeonly as to think “this stuff will never work,” I just see so many folks selling it as if it already does.
- usrusr 6y agoEven transcription is hard when it's used in the way manual transcriptions are used. Whenever there is sufficient value in transcription to bring the manual process close to worthwhile the cost of mistakes will also be high. But lower value applications can have much lower quality requirements, e.g. imperfect transcription could still be used to generate a high level topic log of a conversation that might be useful e.g. for backtracking after a digression. The pinnacle of the low failure cost principle must be ad targeting, it costs nothing besides opportunity to display the wrong ad. And the success metric can even be inverted if the mistake is sufficiently surprising: I'd probably be more likely to deliberately click an ad that is entirely off my beaten path, out of curiosity, than something that aligns with my actual interests. Who wouldn't click on an ad for e.g. curling brooms? Curlers.
- hadlock 6y agoAt least once a month I get contacted by some recruiter contracting with a company like this. They all seem to have a vauge screen reader -> OCR -> AI fill in the blanks, form submission charter. They claim to be profitable and have 10+ customers, but their examples of how their product is used sounds like they are automating Sally in Accounting's job, and she's 2 years away from retiring, so if they could get the software to interface with the 1990s software she's been using for the last 10 years, they won't have to retrain her replacement when she finally retires. I'm sure Boomer Replacement is a market, but does not seem like a 1000x unicorn growth market.
- ashtonkem 6y agoI find that a C suite member talking about AI without a specific goal in mind (“we will use AI to automate X, which will help us do Y better”) is a huge red flag.
- hef19898 6y agoIt also seems to be a main selling point of a lot of logistics and supply chain star-ups these days. I guess it sounds way sexier than "give us millions to build a new forwarder and our own tech because we don't want to use off-the-shelf software and we want to be acquired by DHL one day".
- arcturus17 6y agoArguably most C-suite execs shouldn’t even be dictating the specific techniques used to reach an objective or solve a problem.