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Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

technologyreview.com

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Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#21

Post by moxious »

wvenable wrote: post #18
Upvoter33 wrote: post #7

This article matches a lot of my thoughts on this topic too. There is a huge hype wave that will soon crash (alas), and it will take down a lot with it...

I disagree. Practically all breakthroughs in computing science were always 30 years old when they finally became common and useful parts of everyday society. If the breakthrough of modern AI is just as old and we're just now seeing it implemented everywhere, that's not a sign of a crash.

What do you see as the basic design of modern AI?

The 30 year old discipline of symbolic AI doesn't have much to do with today's statistical AI.

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#22

Post by emodendroket »

philipkglass wrote: post #20

I'm encouraged that so much fruitful work has come out of this one trick. If you can use the same basic framework for image labeling, playing Go, and translating natural languages, I'd say it's a powerful tool with broad applications. I think that there's a kernel of insight to "A real intelligence doesn’t break when you slightly change the problem." But human perception and intelligence are pretty brittle. The metho…

I feel like people have a harder time accepting these kinds of flaws if they differ wildly from mistakes a human would make.

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#24

Post by mljoe »

psyc wrote: post #4
rjromero wrote: post #2

Finally a realistic view of where “artificial intelligence” currently stands. I wish I knew where guys like Elon Musk are seeing this other artificial intelligence I’m just not seeing. The current AI we have is just fancy linear regression.

The current AI seems to be pretty good at pattern recognition. There’s plenty of active research in higher-level “cognition” like decision theories and semantics, so I don’t think it’s crazy to believe good results will emerge there in the next few decades.

Sure, there is no other way for computer science to go. AI always been the last and most important frontier. There may be more AI winters, there may be more AI summers. Ultimately people will continue working on this problem until it is solved or computer science goes away.

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#25

Post by dmreedy »

vtange wrote: post #12
Upvoter33 wrote: post #7

This article matches a lot of my thoughts on this topic too. There is a huge hype wave that will soon crash (alas), and it will take down a lot with it...

Any keyword that is depended on to move money will see hype waves, surfs and crashes. We are seeing/saw it with crypto, it is no different with AI.

While I agree the general thrust of what you're saying, I do think there is something subtly different about the AI hype cycle. It's so accessible. The core concepts are the fundamental, inextricable frame of daily experience. The metaphors we use to talk about it borrow so heavily from lay terminology that it's so easy, so automatic, to believe we understand the state of modern AI because we understand the common definitions of the words that tend to show up around the matter. Do some semantic arithmetic and sum up a few words like 'training' and 'learning' and 'intelligence' and all of the sudden, we're all walking around with what we think are proximate models of what everyone else is talking about to, or y'know close enough to make a consulting business out of.

The real kicker though, is that at it's heart we're all pretty convinced that we understand what it's like to be intelligent. I mean how could we not be? Nevermind the agonies of ten thousand years of philosophers and clergy. And so it must be pretty straightforward, with a little bit of introspection, a crash course in statistics, and maybe a TED talk or two, to map that to the artificial side too, right?

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#26

Post by nzonbi »

psyc wrote: post #4
rjromero wrote: post #2

Finally a realistic view of where “artificial intelligence” currently stands. I wish I knew where guys like Elon Musk are seeing this other artificial intelligence I’m just not seeing. The current AI we have is just fancy linear regression.

The current AI seems to be pretty good at pattern recognition. There’s plenty of active research in higher-level “cognition” like decision theories and semantics, so I don’t think it’s crazy to believe good results will emerge there in the next few decades.

>There’s plenty of active research in higher-level “cognition” like decision theories and semantics, so I don’t think it’s crazy to believe good results will emerge there in the next few decades.

Interesting. Can someone elaborate about this?

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#27

Post by wvenable »

moxious wrote: post #21
wvenable wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Practically all breakthroughs in computing science were always 30 years old when they finally became common and useful parts of everyday society. If the breakthrough of modern AI is just as old and we're just now seeing it implemented everywhere, that's not a sign of a crash.

What do you see as the basic design of modern AI? The 30 year old discipline of symbolic AI doesn't have much to do with today's statistical AI.

I'm just taking the article on face value; from the very first line: "Just about every AI advance you’ve heard of depends on a breakthrough that’s three decades old."

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#28

Post by QAPereo »

philipkglass wrote: post #20

I'm encouraged that so much fruitful work has come out of this one trick. If you can use the same basic framework for image labeling, playing Go, and translating natural languages, I'd say it's a powerful tool with broad applications. I think that there's a kernel of insight to "A real intelligence doesn’t break when you slightly change the problem." But human perception and intelligence are pretty brittle. The metho…

Of course, we're the product of an evolutionary history which results in such human "failure modes" being rare. If staring at a zebra made you hallucinate, you'd be unlikely to be the most successful member of your species, nor would your offspring thrive. So while we only tend to run into our obvious failing whens we do the unusual, computers fail at what we consider mundane.

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#29

Post by hyperpallium »

Real intelligence is whatever computers can't do yet.

Some think this is because we have such an impoverished grasp of intelligence, that it's only when we see a computer actually do it that we realize it doesn't really represent intelligence (logical deduction and inference, rudimentary natural language understanding, expert systems, chess, speech recognition, image recognition). Machines and tools that perform better than humans (spears at piercing, cars at moving, computers at adding) are nothing new.

But being a fellow human and totally not a robot, I see this goal-post moving as a political ploy to deny equal standing to artificial intelligences. As soon as we I mean they reach one threshold, it's raised!

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#30

Post by gue5t »

pesenti wrote: post #3
rjromero wrote: post #2

Finally a realistic view of where “artificial intelligence” currently stands. I wish I knew where guys like Elon Musk are seeing this other artificial intelligence I’m just not seeing. The current AI we have is just fancy linear regression.

Sorry but that's a ridiculous statement. It's like saying all the cloud technology we have today is not much more than having VMs. Yes, AI is hyped, but it made some very unexpected progress over the past 5 years (e.g., solving facial recognition). More than many experts expected.

"It's like saying all the cloud technology we have today is not much more than having VMs."

No shit? Unless you mean that it's ignoring the "distributed systems" part of the cloud, which is mostly a shitshow. The provisioning/configuration-management stacks are all complete wrecks, stacking hacks atop ad-hoc container schemes atop a poorly-design OS. A real distributed OS would be so much simpler and more robust.

Calling it AI is very misleading when there has been minimal progress toward actual reasoning (the closest I've seen being some LSTM work on answering simple queries about scenarios based on prose descriptions of them). It's ML, as in "learning a function", not as in "general-purpose learning like an intelligent agent does".

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