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Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

nytimes.com

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Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#71

Post by homarp »

lispm wrote: post #36
peterburkimsher wrote: post #28

The article is calling us to teach AI to read words and phrases and look for the meaning, not just a statistical correlation. I put dictionary data into Pingtype English to try to parse phrases instead of just words. e.g. "pick [something] up". The purpose is to do word-for-word translation to Chinese as an educational tool. It's not perfect, but the dictionary is editable. You can contact me if you want to discuss n…

The CERN budget is roughly a billion Euro per year.

some numbers from https://press.cern/facts-and-figures/budget-overview

in 2016, 1127.2 million CHF or 1,163,675,662.22 USD

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#72

Post by unityByFreedom »

sdenton4 wrote: post #46
unityByFreedom wrote: post #5

Click-baity. AI tech isn't stuck. There are many forthcoming breakthroughs, particularly in medicine, which should really benefit humanity. Radiology is poised to let CNNs make radiologists a lot more efficient. We just need to build the labeled datasets. If we invest heavily in some AI tech, let it be to produce huge medical datasets. The software and hardware is ready. We're only lacking sufficient data to make mor…

Yeah, where I sit, papers from two years ago are considered ancient, and the advances if the last few years means I can train things on my laptop in for hours that likely would have been a week of gpu time in 2014. This means we can experiment more easily, and try things out with fewer resources, which in turn leads to faster innovation. So AI isn't stuck. It's also mostly working on well defined, targeted problems.…

> Life, on the other hand, works towards a very ill-defined objective function (survive, collectively) over millions of years; all of the emergent behavior we're astonished by is maybe just side effects of working on that objective

Agreed. Plus think about all the data and processing power that went into evolution. And some folks think because a system beat a human at Go that we're nearer solving life's age old question, that is, the essence of intelligence.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#73

Post by unityByFreedom »

mtl_usr wrote: post #62
unityByFreedom wrote: post #5

Click-baity. AI tech isn't stuck. There are many forthcoming breakthroughs, particularly in medicine, which should really benefit humanity. Radiology is poised to let CNNs make radiologists a lot more efficient. We just need to build the labeled datasets. If we invest heavily in some AI tech, let it be to produce huge medical datasets. The software and hardware is ready. We're only lacking sufficient data to make mor…

> Radiology is poised to let CNNs make radiologists a lot more efficient. I honestly don't see the added value of having a "more efficient" human once the classifier is good enough.

I'm taking my cues from Jeremy Howard, who believes we probably won't be a world full of data scientists, since data science requires less effort every year as the software and hardware improves. Rather, we'll still have domain experts, and everyone will just know how to apply data science to their field.

The tools get easier to use every year. While I have difficulty imagining my data science job disappearing, I tend to agree with Jeremy that more and more non-CS people are getting comfortable using computers. Programming, as a field of study, will stabilize at some point, and its usefulness will continue flowing into other fields.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#74

Post by tim333 »

I'd dispute that AI research is stuck or that his proposed answer along the lines of "An international A.I. mission focused on teaching machines to read" is a good one.

Research seems to be cracking along with AlphaGo, self driving cars and the like. Recently DeepMind have been doing interesting stuff with dreams[1], imagination[2] and body movement[3], the last one being a little reminiscent of his daughter inventing a way to exit her chair mentioned in the article.

Re government intervention it's not something like CERN where you need billions in capital and it's not an area where a big government project is likely to be the best use of capital.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/google-de... [2] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/googles-deepmind-creates-an-a... [3] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/10/15946542/deepmind-pa...

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#75

Post by mannykannot »

backpropaganda wrote: post #12

An agent can be intelligent without it learning how to read human language. Look around, most organisms in our world communicate using extremely simple binary language or don't communicate verbally at all. Yet, they are intelligent enough to do very complicated tasks which current robots fail to do. Intelligence is an easier problem than language, and thus should be solved before language. What a sigh of relief to re…

There seems to be something very different between language (and language-mediated behavior), and almost all of the behavior found in other animals. While the former and at least some of the latter can reasonably be described as categories of intelligence, one can not necessarily argue for claims about the former from facts about the latter.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#76

Post by skgoa »

homarp wrote: post #67
bhickey wrote: post #50

The author is just spouting off on a topic he doesn't understand. It's just a rehashing of Chomsky's hatred of statistical NLP. He pulls off the neat trick of approximating knowledge of artificial intelligence by hoodwinking the New York Times, but he doesn’t have insight into the topic he's talking about.

The author was working at an AI start-up company, Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber)

Working at a startup does not make you an expert. Especially when your opinion goes against what pretty much everyone else in the field thinks.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#77

Post by unityByFreedom »

pdimitar wrote: post #55
unityByFreedom wrote: post #5

Click-baity. AI tech isn't stuck. There are many forthcoming breakthroughs, particularly in medicine, which should really benefit humanity. Radiology is poised to let CNNs make radiologists a lot more efficient. We just need to build the labeled datasets. If we invest heavily in some AI tech, let it be to produce huge medical datasets. The software and hardware is ready. We're only lacking sufficient data to make mor…

> There are many forthcoming breakthroughs... We just need to build... Not sure how you don't see the irony. This has probably been said thousands of times for many scientific areas throughout history. Example: There are forthcoming breakthroughs in humanity being an interstellar civilization. We just need to build faster-than-light engines and terraforming equipment. Nothing major, right?

> There are forthcoming breakthroughs in humanity being an interstellar civilization. We just need to build faster-than-light engines and terraforming equipment. Nothing major, right?

Building a dataset is easy and not something you would compare to faster-than-light engines. Believe it or not, some major breakthroughs are held back by simple lack of funding, and lack of awareness.

To make a dataset you need to pay radiologists to label enough data for the system to do its job well. This could be thousands, or hundreds of thousands of images. It is technically speaking very doable, but also very expensive. Then there are data privacy issues stopping you from sharing data. These are social issues, not engineering issues.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#79

Post by yorwba »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #61

AI definitely isn't stuck, unless you define it solely as creating artificial general intelligence. The problem there is that we don't understand general intelligence very well at all. Of course the fixed graphical models we use have their own problems. For instance, we can't even effectively model a neural network with a variable number of inputs.

I'm not sure why you think neural networks can't handle variable numbers of inputs. Recurrent networks that ingest whole sequences have been around for a long time, and other structures have their own network topologies. Support for things other than classic RNNs is more limited, but e.g. TensorFlow Fold (https://github.com/tensorflow/fold) was specifically designed for that.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#80

Post by kronos29296 »

icebraining wrote: post #40
baalimago wrote: post #20

We humans don't know how to learn. We don't know how learning works. We simply work work work work until we know whatever we set out to know, we don't learn how we learned it, but are happy that we simply know it and leave it at that. Therefore teaching someone/something else how to learn will be almost inherently impossible, because we don't understand it ourselves (yet?) And if we do learn how to learn, why would w…

We barely know which regions of the brain recognize shapes, let alone exactly how it does so, yet we've built machines that can do it.

Take any NP-hard problem at its simplest form. Whatever half assed heuristic you use chances are the solution becomes optimal (if it is even half good.) The more complex the problem the more the heuristics fall apart. For the smaller ones we can simply brute force it. The same thing happens here. Compared to something like face recognition, recognizing simple shapes is much simpler. So even the not so great techniques (comparatively) work well enough. They fall apart when we use the same methods for the complex stuff.

A great example would be a greedy algorithm. It works for some problems but doesn't for some others. Take a simple enough problem and you get optimal solution. Push the algorithm to its limits and you don't even get a good solution. You don't have to understand how the best algorithms for a task work to come up with a greedy algorithm.

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