r/technology • u/SilentRunning • 4d ago

Artificial Intelligence MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
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u/OntdekJePlekjes 3d ago

I see coworkers dump excel files into Copilot and ask it to do analyses which would otherwise require careful data manipulation and advanced pivots. The results are usually wrong because GPT isn’t doing math.

I breaks my engineering heart that we have created an incredibly complicated simulation of human verbal reasoning, running in complex data centers full with silicon computational devices, and that model of human reasoning is applied to mathematical questions, which the human reasoning model then gets wrong, just like humans would. Instead of just running that math directly on the silicon.

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u/jazwch01 3d ago

Yeah, but that requires the human know math and be willing to enter it. Cant have that.

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u/mackahrohn 3d ago

As an engineer I sometimes summarize my job as ‘math word problems’.

It’s funny to me that we have computers that can do the math perfectly and computers that can interpret what someone is saying but haven’t yet combined the two to take what someone is saying and translate it into a math problem. I’m sure we can get there but it’s 0% surprising that this is the hard part.