If you're confused about how the hell AI is going to make the kind of money needed to turn a profit, I'll illustrate

[AZJonnie]

19. I probably should have made it more clear that my point was more political than technical

Which is to say, in line with your oft-shared views, the only way AI generally is ever going come close to recouping its costs is by replacing millions of good-paying jobs. Like it would have to be able to coordinate pretty large scale projects.

It's funny that you mention fraud though because the only actual implementation I've been part of at my job is a project where we were going to be using AI to detect fraud, specifically it was to be a 'business referrals' system, which are inherently ripe for abuse (and indeed, AI is used to defraud such systems as well) and we got pretty far into developing the implementation before the money dried up and the project was cancelled. It would have been a custom, purpose-driven installation, not trained on the world at large, just the dataset gathered from the referral submission process.

Of course it would've needed months of training in the form of humans flagging the fraudulent submissions so that the AI could observe the patterns and eventually do the flagging on its own, but I will say my boss was pretty confident it could be brought up to about 95% accurate when trained for this purpose. Obviously this is not life or death stuff so 95% accurate would have been pretty damn useful to the client.

BTW Hi HPD, hope you are well these days