Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Almost Timely News: πŸ—žοΈ The DROID Framework for AI Task Delegation (2024-10-27)

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Christopher S Penn
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What’s On My Mind: The DROID Framework for AI Task Delegation

This week, let’s talk about identifying whether a task is suitable for generative AI or not. This is a topic that has come up over and over again; this past week, between meetings with clients, interviews on shows, interactions on Slack groups (like our free Analytics for Marketers Slack, which is increasingly about AI too), and classes I taught, the question of whether or not AI can do a task came up dozens and dozens of times.

The answer to this question – or lack thereof – is holding back a lot of people and organizations who want to make use of generative AI, so let’s work through a process to better understand our tasks and where, if at all, AI fits in.

Part 1: Deterministic Versus Probabilistic

There are two fundamental classes of problems we want to solve – deterministic and probabilistic (or statistic). Deterministic problems are problems that have clear, defined answers. 2 + 2 is a deterministic problem. There’s no answer other than 4. Screwing a lightbulb into a standard E26 socket base only goes one way.

We are surrounded by deterministic problems in our daily lives. Things like generally accepted accounting principles or laws about speeding are clear (even if they’re not enforced evenly, there is no contesting that going 80 KPH in a 60 KPH zone is speeding).

Deterministic problems are largely not suitable for generative AI for two reasons. First, it’s massive overkill, and second, it’s the wrong problem type.

That brings us to our second category, probabilistic (or statistical). These are problems where there isn’t certainty in the answer. Instead, the answer or solution is probability-based. There’s always some level of randomness in the process, which means we’re unlikely to ever get a sure answer.

Forecasting the stock market, for example, is a probabilistic exercise. Same for forecasting the weather. Trying to guess which email subject line will work best is a probabilistic exercise.

Even, very uncomfortably, medicine is probabilistic. If medicine were a pure deterministic science, there would be no such thing as a second opinion. There would be little to no wrong diagnosis. But that’s not reality – there’s a reason we refer to medicine as both an art and a science.

In fact, if you look at the evolution of problem complexity, most problems begin as deterministic problems in their basic forms, and as problems get more and more complicated, more randomness sneaks in. As soon as randomness sneaks in, the problem begins to evolve into a probabilistic problem.

We deal with probabilistic problems all day long. How much beef should the chef buy for next week at the restaurant? We can try to forecast demand, but there’s a lot of randomness. Which plane ticket should you buy? Flying earlier in the day means less turbulence generally (the air hasn’t heated up as much) and less risk of cascading delays (because the air transit system is brittle, and a failure one place spreads throughout the system), but just because you book for the first flight of the day doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed a smooth, on-time flight.

Okay, so what does this have to do with generative AI? Generative AI is inherently probabilistic. Its very nature – trying to predict the next part of a word – means that it is probabilistic in nature and thus well suited for probabilistic problems. It means it is equally poorly suited for deterministic problems.

Can ChatGPT answer 2 + 2? Yes, of course. But it’s both a waste of resources to do that, and fundamentally wrong in that it’s predicting, based on answers it has seen in its training data, that the answer is 4. It is not doing the actual computation.

Here’s an example, looking behind the scenes as we ask the Mistral Nemo model a question:

Solve this problem: 5 * (3^2 + ((10 – 4) Γ· 2) – 8) + √16

Here’s the answer it gives:

First, let's solve the innermost parentheses:
1. Subtract 4 from 10: 10 - 4 = 6
2. Divide by 2: 6 Γ· 2 = 3
Now we have:
5 * (3^2 + 3 - 8) + √16
Next, calculate the exponent and then perform multiplication and subtraction inside the parentheses:
1. Square 3: 3^2 = 9
2. Subtract 8 from 3: 3 - 8 = -5
So now we have:
5 * (9 + 3 - 5) + √16
Combine like terms:
1. Add 9 and 3: 9 + 3 = 12
2. Subtract 5: 12 - 5 = 7
Now we have:
5 * 7 + √16
Multiply 5 by 7:
5 * 7 = 35
Next, calculate the square root of 16:
√16 = 4
Finally, add the results of the multiplication and the square root:
35 + 4 = 39
Therefore, the solution is: 39.

This is incorrect. The answer to this particular problem is 24.

If we opened up the model and looked inside as it generated the answer, we’d see this:

Generating (145 / 4096 tokens) [( like 13.49%) ( the 86.51%)]
Generating (146 / 4096 tokens) [( terms 100.00%)]
Generating (147 / 4096 tokens) [(:\n 13.19%) ( inside 57.09%) ( in 19.94%) ( within 9.78%)]
Generating (148 / 4096 tokens) [(1 51.88%) (9 35.02%) (5 13.10%)]
Generating (149 / 4096 tokens) [(. 100.00%)]
Generating (150 / 4096 tokens) [( Add 87.06%) (  12.94%)]
Generating (151 / 4096 tokens) [(  100.00%)]
Generating (152 / 4096 tokens) [(9 68.78%) (3 31.22%)]
Generating (153 / 4096 tokens) [( and 100.00%)]
Generating (154 / 4096 tokens) [(  90.47%) ( - 9.53%)]
Generating (155 / 4096 tokens) [(3 100.00%)]

You can see that it’s guessing the probability of the numbers in its solution, not doing actual math.

This is a critically important example: generative AI (large language models in particular) are not deterministic by their very nature. They cannot do actual mathematics. Instead, they are attempting to solve the problem by predicting the outcome.

If you try to solve a deterministic problem with a probabilistic solution, like generative AI, you introduce randomness where it doesn’t belong – and wrong answers abound.

Likewise, if you try to solve a probabilistic problem with a deterministic solution, you basically have to try predicting every possible outcome and then writing solutions for all of them – an exercise in frustration.

Anyone who deployed a website chatbot in the days before generative AI knows just how frustrating it was to try and guess all the different ways people would talk to a chatbot and how you’d try to build as many decision trees as possible to account for those ways – an exercise in futility.

So that’s the first part of figuring out whether or not generative AI is a good fit to a problem we want to solve: does the problem fall into a deterministic problem or a probabilistic problem?

Part 2: Problem Decomposition

The reality is that most problems aren’t one or the other. Most problems are a combination of deterministic and probabilistic solutions, woven together.

Let’s take a very simple case as an example. Not too long ago, Katie asked me to categorize all our blog posts on the Trust Insights blog. What’s the major topic or topics of each post?

On the surface, this is a probabilistic problem that’s ideally suited for a large language model, right? After all, it’s literally a language problem – what’s the language in a blog post? Language is always probabilistic – there are an infinite number of ways people can write about a topic.

And if we accept the task at face value, solving it would mean copying and pasting blog posts into a tool like Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT and asking it to categorize the blog post.

But when you stop to think about it, the task isn’t purely deterministic or probabilistic. It’s both. Think about it:

  • How are we going to get the blog posts? We have hundreds, if not thousands of them.
  • How are we going to feed each blog post to AI one at a time? We can’t reliably just hand AI a big pile of data and get a solid result in this use case, not for hundreds of blog posts.
  • What are we going to do with the output? Will generative AI’s output be usable as-is?

Once we start to decompose the problem into its components, we start seeing deterministic and probabilistic parts.

  • Downloading blog posts? That’s not something AI does. That’s something traditional code like Python or R or Ruby does.
  • Storing blog posts? That’s not something AI does. That’s something a database does.
  • Feeding blog posts to a language model one at a time? That’s a code task for sure.
  • Analyzing each blog post’s category and focus? That’s 100% generative AI. It’s REALLY good at that.
  • Storing the results back into a database so it can be processed and acted on? Still not AI.

Suddenly it becomes clear that the task – categorize the Trust Insights blog posts – is really a wrapper around a series of tasks – and most of those tasks aren’t best solved by AI.

Let’s put this process into a framework that we’ll humorously call DROID:

  • Discern: Is the overall task we want to use AI for one that’s suited for AI?
  • Refine: Is the task discrete or is it composed of sub-tasks? Refine our understanding of the task until you have the smallest reasonable pieces of sub-tasks from the main big task.
  • Orient: Determine if each sub-task is deterministic or probabilistic.
  • Identify: Identify the right solution for each sub-task.
  • Deliver: Implement the solution, piece by piece.

These are the droids you’re looking for.

Part 3: Bumps in the Road

What do you do if you’ve identified that a task is suitable for generative AI but on further reflection you realize that it’s not, that it’s just a poor fit or not a good use of resources?

In an ideal world, you restart. This happens a lot when you lead with technology, when you make a decision about technology without taking into account the rest of the 5P framework and you start in the wrong place.

In the less-than-ideal world, this often happens because some executive stakeholder is convinced to buy a vendor’s solution and then everyone has to scramble to figure out how to actually use the solution – even when it’s not the right fit.

Amusing side note, at one of the companies I worked at in the past, it was an agency, a professional services environment. The powers that be, comfortable with manufacturing, chose a B2C manufacturing software platform for timekeeping to “maximize productivity”. You can imagine how well software designed for tracking how many widgets per hour an assembly line made did with human beings in professional services. It was a disaster.

If you’re stuck with a solution, then pull out the DROID framework and start decomposing your eligible tasks to see where the solution fits in, if at all.

Here’s a useful twist: sometimes, a probabilistic tool can be used to create a deterministic solution. For example, generative AI tools are very capable of writing software, writing code. Tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT can create entire applications in languages like Python or Java.

If you find that your tasks is mostly deterministic, you can have generative AI build the deterministic pieces. You have to ask it, and you have to have some idea of what you’re asking for, but this is how I solve most of the problems I face on a regular basis. If we revisit Katie’s ask, we see generative AI has a role in every part – but it requires some domain expertise in coding.

  • Downloading blog posts? Generative AI wrote Python code that can connect to the SQL database that hosts our blog and programmatically extract all the blog posts.
  • Storing blog posts? Generative AI wrote Python code needed to talk to a SQLite database and send the downloaded blog posts to the database.
  • Feeding blog posts to a language model one at a time? Generative AI wrote Python code to send each post, one at a time, to the appropriate generative AI API.
  • Analyzing each blog post’s category and focus? That’s 100% generative AI, and the prompt I wrote did exactly that.
  • Storing the results back into a database so it can be processed and acted on? Generative AI wrote Python code to handle the responses from the AI API and put them back into the database.

What we ended up with was a solution that used deterministic code – all that Python code – but made with generative AI because writing (even writing code) is a probabilistic task. That’s the unlock here, the secret to recognize. If generative AI can’t do a given task directly, generative AI can help you craft the necessary tools to do a set of tasks.

Part 4: Wrap Up

The ability for generative AI to craft the necessary tools to solve non-AI problems is what makes the technology so transformational and powerful. It’s like a blender that can magically also create an oven or a frying pan, like a car engine that can help you build the rest of the car.

As generative AI continues to evolve, it will gain greater and greater capabilities, but don’t be fooled: under the hood, it will remain a probabilistic tool by its very nature. Vendors will spend a lot of time and effort building infrastructure around AI that can accomplish deterministic tasks (we see this in ChatGPT when it decides to write code to solve a problem), so the net effect for the end user is that AI will become more well-rounded in the kinds of problems it can solve.

But you know the secret. You understand the nature of AI and when a tool, vendor, or service can’t do what you want it to do, you’ll be able to explain why to yourself and your organization – and perhaps use the 5P or DROID frameworks to build the map towards the outcome you want.

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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.

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