Molly WhiteI spent a long time experimenting with AI before finally writing about it in depth. It can be pretty useful — but is it worth it?
When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains.
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE@molly0xfff You use AI every time you make or receive a payment. Without it there would be a lot more fraud undetected and a lot more false positives (legitimate transactions wrongly declined).
Simon LucyThe misuse of the term destroys discourse about it. MML about patterns of transactional behaviour hasn't any real overlap with MML using Large Language Models.
There's no intelligence involved in processing the models. There's considerably more precision in financial transactions than loose English language models. That doesn't necessarily mean they're more accurate but the provenance of the data and its mapping is much simpler.
@simon_lucy @molly0xfff Yeah, that was my point really. "AI" as a marketing term covers a wide range of things, some of which are more useful than others.
And I should have used ML, Machine Learning, rather than MML which has all sorts of meanings.
Being able to show the workings out is a necessary requirement, where did the data come from and how were the results produced.
Provenance, 'reasoning' and training sets aren't available for LLM. Making them available wouldn't help users directly but it would enable third party verification.
@simon_lucy @molly0xfff Getting systems to explain *individual decisions* is still, I'm told, a research topic.
It doesn't look as if it's moved on very far in the past 7 years (which is the last time I thought seriously about it) but it is tractable.
It lacks proper incentive and motivation. If the use of results required generating sufficient markers to enable Explain before the product was released then real work would be done.
Right now it's put down as being too expensive, do it later. So it will never be done.
@simon_lucy @molly0xfff I understand it's an active research field because companies in the business expect (or should that be "fear") that financial service regulators will eventually require explainability.
I think it's a lot simpler for financial transactions but they probably think their risk valuation, and the heuristics they apply for fraud are secret sauce.
But the regular kind of disclosure would be audit so controlled not public.
If they were treated as disclosable by someone bringing a well formed suit then that's still manageable and not disclosing would have far worse consequences.
It would help being in a multi-state regulatory authority.
@TimWardCam indeed, and i have a footnote in the first sentence clarifying the terminology i use throughout the piece
