My thoughts on AI

AI or artificial intelligence is the new hotness in town. If you work in any data or programming role, I am sure somebody has tried to talk to you about AI at some point. It has been annoying for me as so many people have been using it as a kind of catch all, a miracle drug if you will. However, now that I have attended a couple of conferences that have had informed people talk on the matter and seeing some use cases, I want to talk about it.

Your mileage may vary

The first thing that I want to say is that AI is not for everyone. It’s not easy to implement or at least implement well. Implementing an AI model is not a simple affair and while companies like open AI are making it easier there still needs to be serious consideration about how such a technology will return value to a business. There also needs to be governance and feedback loops to ensure that models are accurate, correct and ethically used. An example of this is simple bias, if the data that the model is being trained on has bias (even if we don’t know) in it then the model will have bias.

It’s a tool, an impressive one.

Some of the use cases that I’ve seen are ingenious, for example when at the data and AI summit this year in London, I was introduced to a company that had trained a large language model on their contracts with their suppliers. This gave the supply chain management team a way to quickly get information on a contract using a chat bot. I have my concerns about such an implementation, but I still think it’s a brilliant use of the technology.

There have also been multiple instances of the healthcare industry looking to use AI and machine learning to help with diagnosis. I have used AI in the creation of this website (chat GPT suggested the name) as well as assisting in the refinement of the articles. WordPress (the company that hosts this site) has an AI post reviewer built in.

I haven’t used the various ‘assistants’ or ‘co-pilots’ in different programs like Microsoft Excel but I can see their appeal. I am sure we have all gone to the likes of Stack Overflow for advise on how to do something. Having a bot right there ready to help you with that kind of knowledge is a tempting proposition.

It’s a tool, and expensive one

The thing with all of this is that you need to run it on cloud systems due to the computational requirements to train and deploy AI models. The cloud is not free so these costs will need to be carefully watched. Business Insider reported that the cost to run Chat GPT could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.

Custom development work also has data costs associated with it. I have spoken with other Data Professionals and I have rarely heard of a company that has a high quality training data set waiting in the wings for its big moment. The data is mess and needs improvement and that needs people and processors.

The gears of government turn slowly, but they do turn

Then you also get to the regulatory concerns. As ever, governments and lawmakers are struggling to keep up with the pace of technology, but they will catch up. When they do there is going to be a need for people to change how they are using these tools especially in industries such as say medicine or finance.

We have already seen instances where these tools have been used to disastrous effect in the American legal system. This will happen again because tools like Chat GPT are easy to access and what they produce looks like the real deal. Much like the AI image generators it is not until you pay attention to the details that you start to see the mistakes.

Then there are going to be the fights that happen in other industries between the workers and management. We have already seen this with the recent strikes in Hollywood as the use of AI was a contentious topic between the unions and studios.

Current outlook: sunny

Overall I am looking forward to what people and companies do with these tools. I think we are going to find some more interesting use cases as people gather experience with them. If nothing else I am looking forward to some more hilarious stories of people using the technology inappropriately.