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Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

nytimes.com

151–160 of 189 posts

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#151

> Not long ago, for example, while sitting with me in a cafe, my 3-year-old daughter spontaneously realized that she could climb out of her chair in a new way: backward, by sliding through the gap between the back and the seat of the chair. My daughter had never seen anyone else disembark in quite this way; she invented it on her own — and without the benefit of trial and error, or the need for terabytes of labeled d…

I think an engineering based mindset of perfection creates brittle models that get stuck in local maximums. Reverse gravity and you can think of current AI as small cars getting stuck in pits. The desire to maximize leaves no room for the human equivalent of refactoring. Giving up the good and going through pain in order to reach new heights.

Instead of an anti fragile model that can continuously be run, current models need to be scrapped at error states. Hyperparameter tuning is just random guessing. Getting good data also doesn't work because of the high dimensionality of it for non-trivial tasks.

The idea that ctrl+z is good should be re-examined. Perfect memory like block chains have isn't the answer either though. Perhaps something similar to the non forgetting yet imperfect human mind.

Most data is garbage and even more eventually becomes garbage. (unless you exist in a finite defined world like Go) Is there any sort of neural net that that find or creates "core" memories with weaker supplementary memories?

The quintessential experiences would only be dislodged with an influx of contradictory data. Initial cores could be initialized via mother-child like training. The training data would be tiered and weighted. There would be an internal system that passed judgement on new ingestion sources. New data would be a necessity. Old data passed in as new would be like a monotonous life digging in cores preventing them from having meaningful change. Almost all data would be labelled as garbage initially unless vouched for somehow. Pure good data would be bad as well because there isn't enough quality differentiation to see what is core and what isn't.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 is pretty good reason to suppose faster than light travel is impossible. Aside from our current understanding of physics there is also the question of where all the aliens are. If FTL is possible one could see even one intelligent species possessed of such technology spreading over the galaxy over thousands of years. It would also seem decidedly odd to suppose that if faster than light is possible only we are s…

All true.

(My opinion on where are all the aliens is that collectively speaking, we're little more than ordinary jungle beasts with baseball caps (quote by George Carlin) and we're monitored and evaluated on when is a good time for a first contact. Let's just say we're easily at least a millennia away from that point.)

My point in my parent comment was that the overall schema of assertions like "breakthroughs are incoming" and "we just need to do X" are overly optimistic. So I gave an exaggerated example to demonstrate that point.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#153
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because, gods forbid, people judge by real-world results and not by the words of a bunch of narrow specialists patting themselves on the back? The author's points still stand. Robots do fall over trying to open doors and they don't invent new ways to climb a chair. This is a fact. The terrible characterization you speak of is well-founded in observable reality. That is a fact as well.

If this is your attitude towards long-term academic research, there's little hope I could expand your awareness of what the state of the art in AI actually is. I'm reminded of a point Yudkowsky made 10 years ago: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kj/no_one_knows_what_science_doesnt_...

I am sure you misunderstand me but I gladly take the blame for it. I am all for people doing experiments just for the heck of it and being paid for it -- we as a race need a lot more leisure and discovery time. We're being robbed of leisure and discovery time more and more with each passing year, we always owe somebody money, there's always something else that is urgent to do, and in the end we never get to just slack for a year or two, especially after a burnout -- something that was deemed very normal even only 50 years ago. This is an awful period of human history and one I am sure will be remembered with great deal of shame one day. But let me not digress a lot...

I am 100% behind science, experimentation, and even silly / goofy discoveries whose usefulness might come centuries later (or never; I am okay with that). Please don't get me wrong. We need much more of that as a race.

I will also immediately agree that I am oblivious to what is happening in the AI area. But can you blame my cynicism? Everybody, their dog, and its butler are now claiming to do "AI innovation" and in the end 99% of them just swallow investment dollars, figure out a lucrative exit, and some even repeat that a year or two later. Naturally, people get worn out and start putting snarky remarks when they hear the now-meaningless term "AI" -- I am one of them, and I don't feel bad about it. I believe the sarcastic attitude is well justified.

Everybody keeps praising certain, very specifically tuned, NNs when they do certain very specific tasks. Fine. I will grant you that I can't code the algorithms needed to surpass human doctors in recognizing latent cancer or any kind of early signs of a dangerous disease. This is true. But the current way of doing things is like "input heckton of data, go to lunch, expect magic when you return". It definitely feels like it, even if I know that it's not factually true.

NNs show bias. Seems like nobody cares, they're like "yeah we know it's a problem, we'll get to it" and yet there are NNs that very likely already deny black families loans due to the inherent bias in the datasets they've been fed with. The concept of implementing a truly explainable AI seems to be very new when it had to be there right from the start and shouldn't have ever been missing; what are you people even thinking?! A driverless car makes a strange decision and what, "the NN worked perfectly"?! Bah.

To me, "AI" advocates are very content to deny very real issues that exist RIGHT NOW and that makes me cynical about that branch of science since you guys always seem to try and sprint into the future while blindfolding yourself about things that need attention here and now.

I admit I got off on a tangent. In any case, these are my collective thoughts on the topic.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#154

> Not long ago, for example, while sitting with me in a cafe, my 3-year-old daughter spontaneously realized that she could climb out of her chair in a new way: backward, by sliding through the gap between the back and the seat of the chair. My daughter had never seen anyone else disembark in quite this way; she invented it on her own — and without the benefit of trial and error, or the need for terabytes of labeled d…

Yes terabytes.... Probably petabytes or more. And all of it is unlabeled data. If you fed video and sensory data to a deep net for 3 years and somehow were able to come up with an activation function that modeled "survival", I still highly doubt that anything at all would come out that remotely resembles human intelligence. There's no way that i'm aware of to label reality in real time.

One way to label is by expectation. If the outcome is what you expected, then it gets one label. If it didn't it gets another label. Deepmind has had some success with this approach.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#155

> Not long ago, for example, while sitting with me in a cafe, my 3-year-old daughter spontaneously realized that she could climb out of her chair in a new way: backward, by sliding through the gap between the back and the seat of the chair. My daughter had never seen anyone else disembark in quite this way; she invented it on her own — and without the benefit of trial and error, or the need for terabytes of labeled d…

Yes terabytes.... Probably petabytes or more. And all of it is unlabeled data. If you fed video and sensory data to a deep net for 3 years and somehow were able to come up with an activation function that modeled "survival", I still highly doubt that anything at all would come out that remotely resembles human intelligence. There's no way that i'm aware of to label reality in real time.

But it is. Pleasure and pain are hardwired.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#156
post #74

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 inventin…

There's a LOT of non-Deepmind research as well, some things that have actually been published before Deepmind. Don't get me wrong, Deepmind puts out a lot of great work, but do look at other research labs as well, especially the ones that aren't as well known. Deepmind markets their research really well, but there's a ton of other labs doing good work as well.

Any tips on how to find the more obscure stuff? http://kurzweilai.net occasionally bubbles up really crazy stuff, but perhaps there is a journal or other curated resource you know of.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#157
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RNNs are a good model for things that are naturally sequential with limited state transfer. They are not so elegant for things with no defined ordering and a large amount of shared state.

Can you give an example of a problem where you have "no defined ordering and a large amount of shared state"? What kind of model is typically used in that domain?

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#158
post #4

We (humanity) have made huge progress to understand images in terms of content and emotions of people. Imagenet is truly a gift to the world. However, that has brought us only a small but important step forward. Clearly expectation has to catch up to reality. However, all these solutions are becoming quickly more accessible to the laymen bringing another boost to operational efficiencies for companies worldwide.

> We (humanity) have made huge progress to understand images in terms of content and emotions of people.

We don't have systems that 'understand' anything, nor do we have anything remotely close. We have systems that can associate an arbitrary tag with an image based on a set of patterns that exist in the image. That's a pretty awesome accomplishment, but it is a tiny fraction of the problem of 'understanding'.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#159

The problem we've always had with AI was that most people were trying to engineer it rather than reverse engineer it. Every time there would be a major advance the computational neuroscientists would say: "we knew that, you should have come talked to us 15 years ago." There's some work out there on this, but it's more basic research on how to use developmental and genetic and evolutionary algorithms to grow neural ne…

What is a good book on genetic algorithms?

It's been about 10 years since I left the field. I believe Rodney Brooks did some work on this. Eggenberger was also doing some interesting work about 15 years ago--not sure where that is today. The computational demands for evolutionary & genetic algorithms are significant but there's no free lunch.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#160
post #96
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well we have the advantage of only copying nature that already works the hardest part is already done the Zero to One. Nost of human technology today is based on replicating nature.

"Based on replicating nature"? Fiber optic cable? Microchips? Mass spectrometers? Atomic weapons? Even humans first technology, sharp stone tools, isn't really a replication of nature. Maybe some examples would help me understand what you mean.

Six ways nature has inspired tech innovations

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34676930

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