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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever.

If, however, AI ended up delivering and they missed the boat, they’re going to be held accountable.

It’s much less risky to just follow industry trends. It takes a lot of technical knowledge, gut, and confidence in your own judgement to push back against an industry-wide trend at that level.

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I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos, but will fail pretty badly when deployed.

If it works 99% of the time, then a demo of 10 runs is 90% likely to succeed. Even if it fails, as long as it's not spectacular, you can just say "yeah, but it's getting better every day!", and "you'll still have the best 10% of your human workers in the loop".

When you go to deploy it, 99% is just not good enough. The actual users will be much more noisy than the demo executives and internal testers.

When you have a call center with 100 people taking 100 calls per day, replacing those 10,000 calls with 99% accurate AI means you have to clean up after 100 bad calls per day. Some percentage of those are going to be really terrible, like the AI did reputational damage or made expensive legally binding promises. Humans will make mistakes, but they aren't going to give away the farm or say that InsuranceCo believes it's cheaper if you die. And your 99% accurate-in-a-lab AI isn't 99% accurate in the field with someone with a heavy accent on a bad connection.

So I think that the parties all "want to believe", and to an untrained eye, AI seems "good enough" or especially "good enough for the first tier".

Agreed, but 99% is being very generous.

And that's for tasks it's actually suited for

A big task my team did had measured accuracy in the mid 80% FWIW.

I think the line of thought in this thread is broadly correct. The most value I’ve seen in AI is problems where the cost of being wrong is low and it’s easy to verify the output.

I wonder if anyone is taking good measurements on how frequently an LLM is able to do things like route calls in a call center. My personal experience is not good and I would be surprised if they had 90% accuracy.

I think these kinds of problems were already solved using ML and to a pretty high accuracy.

But now everyone is trying to make chatbots do that job and they are awful at it.

>I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos

Sort of a repost on my part, but the LLM's are all really good at marketing and other similar things that fool CEO's and executives. So they think it must be great at everything.

I think that's what is happening here.

> if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever.

Understatement of the year. At this point, if AI fails to deliver, the US economy is going to crash. That would not be the case if executives hadn't bought in so hard earlier on.

And if it does deliver, everyone's gonna be out of a job and the US economy is also going to crash.

Nice cul-de-sac our techbro leaders have navigated us into.

Yep, either way things are going to suck for ordinary people.

My country has had bad economy and high unemployment for years, even though rest of the world is doing mostly OK. I'm scared to think what will happen once AI bubble either bursts or eats most white collar jobs left here.

Race to "Too big to fail" on hype and your losses are socialized

There’s also a case that without the AI rush, US economy would look even weaker now.

> Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

At this point I think it might actually be both rather than just one or the other.

> Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

This discourse needs to die. Incompetence + lack of empathy is malice. Even competence in the scenario they want to create is malice. It's time to stop sugar-coating it.

I keep fighting this stupid platitude [0]. By that logic, I fail to find anything malicious. Everything could be explained by incompetence, stupidity etc.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147328

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” - Keynes.

Convention here is that AI is the next sliced bread. And big-tech managers care about their reputation.

It's pretty pathetic that they can build a brand based on "doing the exact same thing everyone else is doing" though

> At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics

Isn't that the whole mythos of these corporate leaders though? They are the ones with the vision and guts to cut against the fold and stand out among the crowd?

I mean it's obviously bullshit, but you would think at least a couple of them actually would do something to distinguish themselves. They all want to be Steve Jobs but none of them have the guts to even try to be visionary. It is honestly pathetic

What you have is a lot of middle managers imposing change with random fresh ideas. The ones that succeed rise up the ranks. The ones that failed are forgotten, leading to survivorship bias.

Ultimately it's a distinction without a difference. Maliciously stupid or stupidly malicious invariably leads to the same place.

The discussion we should be having is how we can come together to remove people from power and minimize the influence they have on society.

We don't have the carbon budget to let billionaires who conspires from island fortresses in Hawaii do this kind of reckless stuff.

It's so dismaying to see these industries muster the capital and political resources to make these kinds of infrastructure projects a reality when they've done nothing comparable w.r.t to climate change.

It tells me that the issue around the climate has always been a lack of will not ability.

It's mass delusion

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