Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This AI Boom Will Also Bust

overcomingbias.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 320 posts

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#181

Post by kpwagner »

tree_of_item wrote: post #98
kpwagner wrote: post #17

AI is overhyped... sure that's probably true. But data science is here to stay in the same way that computer science is here to stay.

No, I don't think "data science" is nearly as well defined as computer science.

I agree; and it's probably not as deep either.

I meant that computer science has staying power, while particular branches (or JS frameworks) may rise or fall in popularity over time. Likewise, the "trunk" of data science knowledge is not a mere fad.

I'm not a data science academic or practitioner. My opinion is based on a small amount of tinkering and what I've read in various online sources.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#182

Post by jfv »

dwaltrip wrote: post #162
_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 one…

So is image recognition, but I think the main contention is that solving Go required little additional cleverness to what has already existed. The ideas of self-play, Monte Carto methods, and neural networks are not new and not novel for the problem. Not that it's so trivial -- I'm sure it took a while to work out the exact architecture and details, but what of that work actually teaches you something?

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#183

Post by Noseshine »

logicallee wrote: post #161
jpatokal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

  > 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".
As an IT guy with a basic but solid neuroscience education (which isn't even needed for what I'm about to say): Yep, you are on the hype train, and very deeply. I really like reasonable discussions, I have no idea what this is right here. We will see more amazing results, sure - but applications will be specialized narrow subjects. From creating "some kind of general AI is created that can learn in some sense similarly to how humans do" we are still very far away. Your statements remind me of 1960s "future" hype,a nuclear reactor in every car by the year 2000, stuff like that.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#184

Post by dkarapetyan »

_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'll be impressed when they solve Pacman on a Raspberry Pi

I think this is the thing people don't quite get when they buy into the hype. These systems are extremely inefficient. Requiring terrabytes if not petabytes of data and basically a powerplant next to a data center to power the whole thing.

The work is valuable and pushing the boundary on what the hardware can do is great but so far all these things lack any kind of explanatory power and suck up a lot of energy to power the black boxes. DARPA recently put out a research program for making systems more efficient and adding explanatory capabilities to them (http://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intellig...). Ultimately that is the direction these things must be headed if they are to provide real value for the masses. Relying on a clever black box only takes you so far and is not beneficial in the long run because as these systems become more integrated into the institutions that drive large scale decision making they'll need to be held accountable for those decisions.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#185

Post by dwaltrip »

jfv wrote: post #182
dwaltrip wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 one…

So is image recognition, but I think the main contention is that solving Go required little additional cleverness to what has already existed. The ideas of self-play, Monte Carto methods, and neural networks are not new and not novel for the problem. Not that it's so trivial -- I'm sure it took a while to work out the exact architecture and details, but what of that work actually teaches you something?

The combination of the methods was certainly novel as far as I am aware. Also, it was not clear ahead of time that it would actually succeed in defeating the best humans. Demonstrating that it could be done is a grear achievement.

There is also the symbolic value. It was a "coming of age" event to a certain degree. I believe go was the last classic board game that researchers had been longing to conquer.

I haven't looked deeply into this, but my understanding is that image recognition is still somewhat subpart outside of well-curated datasets. Is that not the case anymore?

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#186

Post by ryoshu »

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...

A lot of revolutionary technologies begin as toys. In the 9th century two brothers created a machine called, "the instrument which plays by itself." It uses a rotating cylinder with "teeth" that triggers keys which were encoded to play music. One can say it's a programmable music machine.

Fast forward to the 1700s and artisan engineers in France were creating similar devices that automatically played music. Toys for the entertainment of the aristocracy. Some insightful engineer noticed the use of pinned cylinders to recreate music, and realized the device might also be used to create textiles with a loom. You could program a machine to create textile patterns. While the initial implementations didn't work very well, eventually Joseph-Marie Jacquard created a version that revolutionized textile manufacturing in the early 1800s, relying on punch cards instead of expensive-to-create cylinders.

By the mid-1800s Charles Babbage became interested in Jacquard's work using punch cards to create complex textile patterns. "The major innovation was that the Analytical Engine was to be programmed using punched cards: the Engine was intended to use loops of Jacquard's punched cards to control a mechanical calculator, which could use as input the results of preceding computations." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Analytical_Eng...

Toys are amazing for inspiration and innovation.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#187

Post by guycook »

sherbondy wrote: post #107
blackguardx wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A light source built into the camera is modulated in time. The camera uses this to infer depth. When the modulation is synced up right, the camera can see the light wave "travel" as it illuminates close objects first and then farther ones over successive frames. The camera isn't actually fast enough to capture the light wave traveling, but the timing between the shutter and the light source is shifted by nanoseconds…

Hey, 3D vision system amateur here, but very interested to learn more! Can anybody point me to some literature or reference materials about attempts to combine the inputs from multiple techniques simultaneously? E.g. a device with stereo conventional cameras and infrared cameras & emitters which compares the resulting model from each input source/technique and actively re-adjusts final depth estimate? Is "sensor fusi…

We have a setup that combines ToF, structured light and multiple colour cameras to reconstruct hands from the elbow down. Short version: it's a massive pain in the ass. In fact the setup really only works because we have a preconceived motion model (particular hand gestures) and have carefully arranged the scene to avoid interference. I'm unaware of a general solution where you can just throw more cameras in and get better scene data.

One neat thing though you might want to look at: if all you have is structured light (ie Kinect v1) you can simply attach a vibrating motor to each emitter/receiver to avoid a lot of interference per [0]

[0] https://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~maimone/media/kinect_VR_2012.pdf

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#188

Post by blazespin »

logicallee wrote: post #138
sidlls wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 agree with this. People don't understand or appreciate the potential of generative AI, especially when guided by human hands.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#189

Post by eli_gottlieb »

dTal wrote: post #90
dheera wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Stereo vision is obviously highly effective in biology as it has independently evolved a great many times. Time-of-flight may be poised for a renaissance, but it scales badly and is active, not passive. Stereo vision, and its big brother light fields, are far more general and are certainly not going to "die out".

Human vision is active rather than passive as well. We really wouldn't be able to get around the world if we relied on passive inference from sensory stimuli to model our environment.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#190

Post by master_yoda_1 »

By the way this earth will be bust in millian years, so what.

Please stop wasting your time on these idiotic blog post and do something good for society.

To HN: Please stop encouraging these kind of idiotic blog post there are better content on internet to rank higher on HN.

Post reply on HN