This AI Boom Will Also Bust • Hacker News Board

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#161

Post by logicallee » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

jpatokal wrote: post #149

logicallee wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not suffering from hype. There is too little hype. People are vastly underestimating what is about to happen. See my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079598 under our recent article " Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song". Basically, if there is no pixie dust that makes humans intelligent, and instead it is a matter of the architecture of the brain and the first few years of sup…

I didn't downvote you, but the TL;DR of the article is that most ML demonstrations to date have been toys and there are no known real-world applications that would justify the "40% of jobs lost!" hype. And you're trying to rebut this by referencing an AI-generated Christmas jingle . I think the author rests their case...

No, I just meant to reference my discussion from there (i.e. for people to read through my comments there, after clicking.)

IOW I meant to transclude that discussion here. (Perhaps within that comment thread a good specific summary comment is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13090869)

Obviously it is hard to know when that magic moment will happen that some kind of general AI is created that can learn in some sense similarly to how humans do. My every indication and astonishment at the results that are being produced strongly suggests "at any moment". The results are absolutely astonishing every day and we have vastly more than enough firepower.

You might also be interested in this separate thread where I dealt with questions of consciousness and pain. I again reference it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13026020

and you can click through at the top to follow my reference.

We are way past the point of no return here, and in my estimation it is a question of years or at the most decades - not centuries.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#162

Post by dwaltrip » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

_fh5n wrote: post #141

I understand that most people working with deep learning wouldn't want this type of thinking to spread amongst the public, and I surely don't want it either. But you have to be totally unaware of reality to think that DL is the definitive tool for AI. Most impressive results in DL in the past 2 years happended like this: >deepmind steals people from the top ML research teams in univerisites around the world >these pe…

I can't speak of their other work, but as someone who plays go and follows go bots, the AlphaGo project was a phenomenal piece of work that shouldn't be discounted. Go is a very difficult game that requires great intuition and a deep understanding of the patterns.

Sure, maybe their timing was fortunate and it might have happened a year later anyways. But this is definitely not a guarantee, and they were still the ones to do it.

P.S. For anyone who is interested, another very strong bot is out in the wild now. It has been playing on the KGS go server the past week under the name Zen19L, and has a rank of 9d. Some great games have resulted as people challenge it.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#163

Post by ma2rten » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

sidlls wrote: post #110

ma2rten wrote: post #101

I think this field is suffering from some confusion of terminology. In my mind there are three subfields that are crystallizing that each have different goals and thus different methods. The first one is Data Science. More and more businesses store their data electronically. Data Scientists aim to analyze this data to derive insights from it. Machine Learning is one of the tools in their tool belt, however often they…

It's also suffering from hype. And the criticism you note isn't one-directional in the field at large. I'm finding that ML/AI researchers deriding ML/Data engineers and "scientists" as not doing "real" ML or AI is becoming a thing, similar to how some computer scientists deride engineering as not doing real computing.

It's also suffering from hype.

If you mean hype in media and general public, I agree with you. Research is inherently risky and uncertain, often that is not conveyed correctly. Also research results are often oversold.

If you mean that big tech companies are overinvesting in Machine Learning then I have to disagree. It's not a coincidence that the companies that invested the most in Machine Learning (Google and Facebook) are companies that have a lot of data and already use Machine Learning in their products. It provides things like better feed ranking and better signals for search. These "invisible" improvements to existing products are often overlooked.

And the criticism you note isn't one-directional in the field at large.

Yes, like I mentioned I think there is confusion about terminology. Many ML Engineers (in my definition) call themselves Data Scientists. This leads to misunderstandings, when people don't recognize that others have different goals.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#164

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:15 PM UTC

BeingIncubated wrote: post #104

goatlover wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, as presumably rational agents, is there so much hype with certain technologies, even though past history should have taught us otherwise? Is it all for the VC? Is it the media just needing to sell stories? Usually there are smart, knowledgeable people involved in the hyping. They should know better.

There is no such thing as complete rational people, every person goes through bouts of rationality and irrationality, some are just more often rational than others. With that said nobody is immune from irrational emotion sometimes, for example have you been angry from something that wasn't worth it?

[deleted]

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#165

Post by walrus1066 » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:19 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #97

bunderbunder wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you'll get that, because nobody thinks that progress in machine learning will stop. An AI winter doesn't mean that progress stops. It means that businesses and the general public become disillusioned by AI's or ML's failure to live up to the popular hype, and stop throwing so much money at it. The hype then dies down. Research continues, though, until enough progress is made that machine learning starts to pr…

Why, as presumably rational agents, is there so much hype with certain technologies, even though past history should have taught us otherwise? Is it all for the VC? Is it the media just needing to sell stories? Usually there are smart, knowledgeable people involved in the hyping. They should know better.

Participating in hype may be very rational.

Putting 'AI' on a startups prospectus will do it no harm. It may help sway lazy investors, or at least make the company appear more cutting edge.

Same goes for the investors, they want to be seen to be investing in cutting edge, buzzword compliant startups.

It is just human nature, following the herd is always going to be the safest option.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#166

Post by dwaltrip » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

RushAndAPush wrote: post #109

bunderbunder wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you'll get that, because nobody thinks that progress in machine learning will stop. An AI winter doesn't mean that progress stops. It means that businesses and the general public become disillusioned by AI's or ML's failure to live up to the popular hype, and stop throwing so much money at it. The hype then dies down. Research continues, though, until enough progress is made that machine learning starts to pr…

> I doubt you'll get that, because nobody thinks that progress in machine learning will stop. Robin Hansen is notoriously skeptical about the possibility that Deep Learning can make real gains. He for some reason thinks brain emulation is more likely to make large progress in AI. >An AI winter doesn't mean that progress stops. It doesn't completely stop, but progress would be at a snails pace. > The hype then dies do…

Brain emulation? I didn't realize people seriously thought that could be good for anything other than research and investigation.

If we can successfully emulate the brain, it seems we would have necessarily acquired the knowledge needed to build models that are very powerful without having to exactly mimic the brain.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#167

Post by shmageggy » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:27 PM UTC

taeric wrote: post #60

shmageggy wrote: post #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 inc…

If there is a curse of our industry, it is almost willful ignorance of just how hard the physical engineering fields are. The simple things with pipes are simple. Yes. However, to think we haven't made advances, or have no more to make, is borderline insulting to mechanical engineers and plumbers. Ironically, deep learning will likely help lead to some of those advances.

> However, to think we haven't made advances, or have no more to make

Not what I was saying at all. My point was that pipes are used to transport something from point A to point B, and that regardless of what advances we make, they are still going to be used for that purpose, and that this is unlike the situation with AI.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#168

Post by sgt101 » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #61

sgt101 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be being really subtle about python there ! I realize that one can create lines of code like :_ = ( 255, lambda V ,B,c :c and Y(V V+B,B, c -1)if(abs(V) abs(V) -0.4)/i ) ;v, x=1500,1000;C=range(v x );import struct;P=struct.pack;M,\ j =' x 3+26,26,12,v,x,1,24))or C: i ,Y=_;j(P('BBB', (lambda T:(T 80+T 9 i-950 T 99,T 70-880 T 18+701 T 9 ,T i (1-T 45 2)))(sum( [ Y(0,(A%3/3.+X%v+(X/v+ A/3/3.-x/2)/1j) 2.5 /x -2.7…

You might want to do code formatting for that. Look at the help[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Yup, sorry timed out on edit...

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#169

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #61

sgt101 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be being really subtle about python there ! I realize that one can create lines of code like :_ = ( 255, lambda V ,B,c :c and Y(V V+B,B, c -1)if(abs(V) abs(V) -0.4)/i ) ;v, x=1500,1000;C=range(v x );import struct;P=struct.pack;M,\ j =' x 3+26,26,12,v,x,1,24))or C: i ,Y=_;j(P('BBB', (lambda T:(T 80+T 9 i-950 T 99,T 70-880 T 18+701 T 9 ,T i (1-T 45 2)))(sum( [ Y(0,(A%3/3.+X%v+(X/v+ A/3/3.-x/2)/1j) 2.5 /x -2.7…

You might want to do code formatting for that. Look at the help[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

[deleted]

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#170

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #61

sgt101 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be being really subtle about python there ! I realize that one can create lines of code like :_ = ( 255, lambda V ,B,c :c and Y(V V+B,B, c -1)if(abs(V) abs(V) -0.4)/i ) ;v, x=1500,1000;C=range(v x );import struct;P=struct.pack;M,\ j =' x 3+26,26,12,v,x,1,24))or C: i ,Y=_;j(P('BBB', (lambda T:(T 80+T 9 i-950 T 99,T 70-880 T 18+701 T 9 ,T i (1-T 45 2)))(sum( [ Y(0,(A%3/3.+X%v+(X/v+ A/3/3.-x/2)/1j) 2.5 /x -2.7…

You might want to do code formatting for that. Look at the help[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

[deleted]