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Showing posts from July 24, 2021

AI's 99 percent is not good enough

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 An AI that is 99% accurate is not good enough. Think of having to digitize some handwritten document with important end-customer data. Does it make sense to use machine learning if on top of that you need human operators? Think of how many times Alexa gets you wrong? Even when it comes to playing the same song you have requested many times before. But Alexa is not a mission-critical system. You don’t care if it’s 90% accurate that alone 99%, but for critical systems, it seems that AI isn’t delivering the value it is supposed to (how far are we from the promised self-driving dream?). How much effort will be saved by a human quality controlling every document vs if a human operator digitized them from scratch? I remember a project I was tangentially involved in years ago in the pre-AI area (in fact over 20 years ago), the project manager decided to use three people to digitize the data and then use text comparison so that if two documents match then an algorithm would drop the third. It