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This AI Boom Will Also Bust

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Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think calling linear regression simple is misleading. While the algorithm is simple, interpreting the results and not falling into one of the many traps is quite difficult!

His comment was relative to ML, not an absolute.

Mine was also. I am just pointing out that even with a simple algorithm like linear regression you can run into all kind of issues and it's not always obvious. Sometimes a slightly more complex method is easier to get right in the long run. It depends on many factors.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#302

This article is tries to be right about something big, by arguing about things that are small and that do not necessarily prove the thesis. Notice now you can cogently disagree with the main idea while agreeing with most of the sub points (paraphrasing below): 1) Most impactful point: The economic impact innovations in AI/machine learning will have over the next ~2 decades are being overestimated. DISAGREE 2) Subpoin…

I think a lot of people are young and don't realize what it was like working 20 years ago. When I started working in 1994, most people didn't even have computers on their desk let alone an email address. The web was brand new (we used things like gopher and archie), and only a handful of people had ever used or seen the internet.

Sure, I suppose it's possible that advances we've seen in AI won't be translate into huge productivity gains, but I would think that extremely unlikely.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Better time-of-flight depth cameras will be here soon enough. It's just basic physics. I worked on one for my PhD research. You can get pretty clean depth data with some basic statistics and no AI algorithm wizardry. We're just waiting for someone to take it to a fab, build driver electronics, and commercialize it. You should talk to us at Leaflabs. Commercializing research-level tech in embedded electronics is what…

are you guys looking to hire anyone with compressed sensing/neuro-imaging experience? possibly someone with the username /mathperson lol

Neuro-imaging? Very probably. Send a resume and cover letter.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's not all hype. We are using deep learning to solve real issues in our research, things that might not get done as well due to the representational learning aspect and our relatively small manpower. It's a definite advance when it comes to improving state-of-the-art and will have impact across all sorts of things, particularly small groups who have problems but don't have hundreds of people and ten years to figure…

I think that's a good use case. Such use cases are great and I agree it's not all hype but when everyone and their grandma has an "AI" startup you have to wonder what exactly "AI" means at that point.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#305
post #204

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…

>if there is no pixie dust that makes humans intelligent [...] then neural net breakthroughs [...] have the potential [...] You're assuming neural nets are the right model. Like a 19th century person saying, "if there is no pixie dust ... then eventually Newtonian mechanics will explain these unexpected wobbles we see in the planets' orbits."

I kind of doubt if neural nets have to be the right model.

Any model that gives reasonably similar results to human thinking will be useful. Planes don't have feathers and don't eat bugs, but we say that they "fly" anyway, and they carry far more cargo / passengers (and faster) than birds ever could.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#307
post #123

[Disclosure: I work for a deep-learning company.] Robin's post reveals a couple fundamental misunderstandings. While he may be correct that, for now, many small firms should apply linear regression rather than deep learning to their limited datasets, he is wrong in his prediction of an AI bust. If it happens, it will not be for the reasons he cites. He is skeptical that deep learning and other forms of advanced AI 1)…

>> One-shot learning, or learning from a few examples, is a field where we're making rapid progress, which means that in the near future, we'll obtain much higher accuracy on smaller datasets.

I'm really not convinced by one-shot learning, or rather I really don't see how it is possible to show that any technique used generalises well to unseen data, when you're supposed to have access to only very little data during development.

Even with very thorough cross-validation, if your development (training, test and validation) set are altogether, say, 0.1 of the unseen data you hope to predict, your validation results are going to be completely meaningless.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#308
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The '40% of jobs lost' figure is reachable without any Singularity-style event. That's what you can get just by applying modern automation techniques to low hanging fruit. Self-driving vehicles, automatic checkouts at supermarkets, fully automated fast food places, robotic warehouse storage/retrieval etc. If you used to have 10 people working at a supermarket and you now have 6 with self-checkouts, that's your 40% jo…

Self driving vehicles are not a low hanging fruit. We are far, far away from fully autonomous vehicles that don't need a human backup driver. This is despite massive investment by Google and others.

True, I shouldn't have grouped it in with self checkouts etc. When we do achieve reliable self driving capability it will be arguably the single most impressive engineering feat we've accomplished.

Tesla are describing their 'hardware 2' self driving platform, fitted to all of their new cars, as "full self-driving hardware", and they've posted several videos recently of fully autonomous journeys on public roads. They've said they plan to roll out an OTA update to enable full self driving next year.

Mercedes-Benz have a limited self-driving mode on their 2017 model.

Uber-owned Otto, a company focusing on self-driving technology for trucks, plans to start offering its services next year.

And of course Google is quietly continuing their self-driving project, although they've gone a bit quiet recently.

Now, it does look to me like we've still got a fair few corner cases to straighten out, but either all of these companies are badly wrong, or we'll be seeing self-driving vehicles on sale to the public in the next few years (even if not next year).

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#309
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree generally. Except being unimpressed unless performance is achieved on sub Google scale hardware. Today's Google supermachine is tomorrow's raspberry pie. No need to artificially constrain our bounds. There is, after all, the inevitability of Moores law.

Moore's law has been dead for a while now. Most of the chip in your phone is powered off because otherwise it would burn up. Highly recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9mzmvhwMqw

Really thanks for posting this video. Very cool to see Sophie Wilson talking so elequently and with obvious authority on a subject I and many others deeply care about. Great!

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#310
post #300

Most firms that think they want advanced AI/ML really just need linear regression That's how AI always looks in the rearview mirror. Like a trivial part of today's furniture. Pointing a phone at a random person on the street and getting their identity is already in the realm of "just machine learning" and my phone recognizing faces is simply "that's how phones work, duh" ordinary. When I first started reading Hacker…

> Open the first edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach and there's a fair bit of effort to apply linear regression selectively in order to be computationally feasible. Does the book mention linear regression at all? The term doesn't appear in the index.

Third addition has it [0]. The second does as well, but the first doesn't have an online index.

[0] http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/aima-index.html

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