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This AI Boom Will Also Bust

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41–50 of 320 posts

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#41
post #34

This reminds me of the stem cell research boom and bust of the late 90s and 00s. It turns out that the new and shiny toy doesn't work for everything. However, it's not really a bust, as AI, similar to stem cells applications, will continue to do wonders where it is the best tool for the job.

We're not even close to reaping the benefits of stem cell research yet. It's way too early to deem it's success to be just mediocre.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#42
post #28

A little off topic but I think the VR boom will bust much more sooner than AI. I can't think of normal people wearing those heavy gears in their normal life. There will be its use cases in specialized applications like education, industry, games but I don't think it will get popular like an iPhone. AR is still OK since it augments real life but there is a long way before it will become mainstream.

have you tried it? i own an oculus and every family member i've seen has been shocked and loved it. Obviously the oculus is prohibitively expensive but with the release of Playstation VR i think the mainstream is poised to adopt it. I really believe the next game consoles that come out will simply be vr headsets

I have tried it. I owned a PSVR for a month and tried everything available. It was a pretty incredible experience, more immersive than I expected for sure. Most of my family and friends had a great time with it as well.

Ultimately, however, I resold it after a month. There are too few interesting full games available. Nearly every game is mostly a short trial, and most of the games are also very experimental and uninteresting to me in general. As an example, a full 1/3 of games available were musical demos that seemed to be geared toward folks having fun experiences while presumably smoking weed or otherwise in an altered state.

There was never a reason for me to come back to the system, but I would like to see if there are very imaginative useful practical applications that eventually see light. After surveying the other VR options I'm not convinced anything exists yet.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#43
While the article is right that in many situations a linear regression or tree based approach will be more effective, it downplays the real value add of deep learning which has been clearly demonstrated with image data and is likely to have significant impact in other areas (audio, biodata, etc.) where traditional statistical methods have failed.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#44
post #28

A little off topic but I think the VR boom will bust much more sooner than AI. I can't think of normal people wearing those heavy gears in their normal life. There will be its use cases in specialized applications like education, industry, games but I don't think it will get popular like an iPhone. AR is still OK since it augments real life but there is a long way before it will become mainstream.

I reckon someone said the same about the first mobile phones when they were attached to a suitcase. Who would want to carry a suitcase around just to make calls. Now, comparing the current VR to the iPhone is a huge leap, the VR technology is still evolving and I think it will surely get lighter.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#45
post #39
post #11

When I was at Watson this is the first thing I told every customer: before you start with AI are you already doing the more mundane data science on your structured data? If not, you shouldn't go right away for the shiny object. This said I still believe the article is mistaken in its evaluation of potential impact (and its fuzzy metaphore of pipes). Unstructured or semi-structured or dirty data is much more prevalent…

And before you do mundane data science on your structured data, you should figure out if there is a better way to get cleaner raw data, more data, as well as more accurate data. For example, I predict stereo vision algorithms will die out soon, including deep-learning-assisted stereo vision. It's useful for now but not something to build a business around. Better time-of-flight depth cameras will be here soon enough.…

I think the hidden strife in your triplet is a land mine. That is, getting more data is at odds with cleaner data for most folks. Adding accuracy? I hope you remember the difference between precision and accuracy. :)

(None of which takes from your point.)

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#46
post #27

I started question the credibility of the article when the author mentioned "deep machine learning". Not an expert in ML, but it should be "deep learning" referring to a type of neural network based machine learning technique with deep hidden layers.

Yeah,that's weird.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#47
post #33

It seems a little odd that the author is focusing on machine learning not being terribly good for prediction from data to counter the "this time is different" argument. The reason this time is different is we are in a period when AI is surpassing human intelligence field by field and that only happens once in the history of the planet. AI is better at chess and go for example, is slowly getting there in driving and w…

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Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#48
Here's why the pipes metaphor is a bad one: we already are doing everything we can and ever will do with pipes. Pipes have been around for a really long time, we know what they are capable of, we've explored all of their uses.

OTOH, the current progress in AI has enabled us to do things we couldn't do before and is pointing towards totally new applications. It's not about making existing functionality cheaper, or incrementally improving results in existing areas, it's about doing things that have been heretofore impossible.

I agree that deep nets are overkill for lots of data analysis problems, but the AI boom is not about existing data analysis problems.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#50
post #28

A little off topic but I think the VR boom will bust much more sooner than AI. I can't think of normal people wearing those heavy gears in their normal life. There will be its use cases in specialized applications like education, industry, games but I don't think it will get popular like an iPhone. AR is still OK since it augments real life but there is a long way before it will become mainstream.

It's a bit like 3D TV though; that didn't fully succeed or really fail, so it has limped on and people still buy them today.
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