Being confidently wrong is holding AI back

Summary

The reason humans are so useful is not mainly their raw intelligence. It’s their ability to build up context, interrogate their own failures, and pick up small improvements and efficiencies as they practice a task- "Why I don't think AGI is right around the corner", Dwarkesh PatelIn this post, based on our recent experiences selling 7-figure AI deals to Fortune 500s and Silicon Valley tech cos alike, I'll discuss how "confident inaccuracy" seems to be at the heart of this problem. Being Confidently Wrong is The Only ProblemAside from the hilarious "Oh I spend $10M on this campaign because our AI assistant told me to" first order problem, confident inaccuracy causes second and third order problems that are far more insidious:a) Imposes a universal verification taxI don't know when I might get an incorrect response from my AI. So I have to forensically check every response. My minutes turn into hours; the ROI disappears.b) Erodes trust asymmetricallyFor serious work, one high‑confidence miss costs more credibility than ten successes earn. I'll revert to my older flow.c) Hidden failure modes kill motivation to improveWithout high-quality uncertainty information, I don’t know whether a result is wrong because of ambiguity, missing context, stale data, or a model mistake.If I don't know why its wrong, I'm not invested in making it successful.d) Compounding errors results in AI being doomed to failThere's been a slew of recent reports on AI adoption is not trending well. Per McKinsey's report 90% of AI initiatives stay stuck in pilot mode. Fortune covered an MIT study that claims 95% of pilots are failing. While the authors of the reports point out several issues, consider another perspective - at the core there are 2 simple facts:A system is either always accurate or its notIf the system is not always accurate even the tiniest percent of the time, I need to know when its not. No amount of solving any other problem (integration, data readiness, organizational readiness et...