Live data from Hacker News

The AI Misinformation Epidemic

approximatelycorrect.com

1–10 of 286 posts

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#7
I'm very interested in this topic, but I'd hold off on discussing until the other posts are out. The current post is largely just a summary of what future posts will say, and doesn't cover much by itself.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#8
Yeah, terms like "machine learning" and "AI" have basically become buzz words which, to most laymen, probably encourage the idea that we're on the cusp of creating Data from Star Trek.

Unfortunately, the reality is that.... sorry... it's mostly just statistical algorithms based around regression and intermediate calculus. State-of-the-art "deep" neural networks are not really anything like the absurdly parallel, asynchronous biological networks that power our neo-cortex - rather, they're basically an application of matrix multiplication designed to "learn" a function by iteratively minimizing an error value using gradient descent. It's still very unclear what, if anything, this algorithm has in common with how a human brain actually operates. It turns out that these kind of statistical algorithms can work pretty well when you have petabytes of data to learn from. But we're still not anywhere near the unsupervised learning capabilities demonstrated by a human infant.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#9

Some strident Singularitarians joined the comment thread.

The singularity cult is real. The geek rapture will occur when they blog about someone else making God in a Box hard enough to drown out the normal charlatans. Please fund their blogging, it is the most impactful way you can spend your money.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#10
Remember those AT&T commercials "You Will..."?

They won a bunch of awards for them but most of the technologies, if they came to be, were brought to you by people other than AT&T.

Same thing with the next steps in AI. They might happen, but they aren't going to come from the companies who currently have large marketing departments looking for something to hype.

Post reply on HN