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China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

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Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#51

Post by _dps »

aianus wrote: post #47
singularity2001 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about: I send someone an email, he answers, his answer is classified as spam. That's as broken as it can get! (presumably because google doesn't like 'free' servers)

Maybe your friend's email server is misconfigured? Incorrect SPF records, etc?

I think the point was that initiating communication with an address is an extremely strong signal of willingness to receive (vs clicking a link, or replying, etc.). I think it's reasonable to expect to receive responses to proactively-initiated threads even if your correspondent isn't optimized for deliverability.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#52

Post by Barrin92 »

candiodari wrote: post #46
Barrin92 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that ML is a talent game at all. I think ML is a data and policy game. There's a lot of talk about AI braininess but from a theoretical standpoint there isn't much new to the currently commercially used ML products. The only thing that's changed over the last five years is data. Backpropagation is decades old. And on the data and policy side China has hugely favourable conditions. I think we're making…

I disagree. Time and time again data advantages and computing power advantages are clobbered by algorithm advances. For instance, there is no amount of cluster power that'll let you best resnet with a non-residual network. Well perhaps there is, but even Google's mighty clusters can't make up the difference. In audio, end-to-end models that take 2 weeks to train on a dual GTX 1080 machine, and take > 1 week to train…

>The same goes for data. We can outperform VGGNet trained on all of imagenet (~ 15 million images) using resnet trained on a 1% random sampling of imagenet. We have papers putting forth statistics on specific model architectures outperforming with okay granted, but isn't this largely part of the academic field, openly accessible and transferable? People at Baidu and Tencent are likely up to date on the state of the art.

Contrast this for example with the American military edge or the economics of the German Mittelstand. There's a degree of ingrained knowledge that gives countries decades of advance, but academic research can often be transferred. Understanding in ML to me seems to fall mostly in the second category, and when that category dominates then data and policy really does become relevant.

I'm not sure we have seen an ML intellectual arms race yet. For the most part techniques seem to spread fast and as a result data functions like oil of sorts and gives the biggest players the largest advantage.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#53

Post by dyoo1979 »

nopinsight wrote: post #41

To give additional evidence why Eric Schmidt's comment has a basis in reality (and to reply to many sceptical comments here): * 9 out of the top 10 algorithms for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset are by Chinese teams, backed by HIT & iFlLYTEK, Alibaba, Microsoft Asia (in Beijing), NUDT & Fudan University, and others. They beat out teams by Samsung, Salesforce, CMU, and Facebook, for example. https://rajpurkar.…

Another point: the documentary about FineArt from Tencent makes it very clear that folks there consider the race for AI analogously to the race to the atomic bomb. https://www.reddit.com/r/cbaduk/comments/7ryw0q/7_fine_art_d...

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#54

Post by mkstowegnv »

joshuamorton wrote: post #31
yusee wrote: post #7

GMail still can't effectively distinguish between real communication and spam. If China overtakes the US in AI, Schmidt and co. are the folks to blame. They are in the drivers seat of intelligence development, yet their efforts are increasingly scattered, and their only consistent focus is on lobbying government. Dear Alphabet, Please make your products and services work before worrying about geopolitical balance of…

(While I work on Gmail, this is a curiosity) What issues do you have with spam? Personally, I get maybe 1 false-positive spam email per year with Gmail, and maybe a few false-negatives (which are less of an issue anyway), for an accuracy rate in the 3-4 9s range. So I'm intrigued as to what you're doing or where you encounter the inability for gmail to distinguish between real communication and spam.

I implore you to solicit users who will volunteer their spam folders so that you can improve your algorithm. It has always been badly broken for me and many if not most people I know (worst story my lawyer friend who finds important email from judges in this spam folder). Right now my spam folder is 171 emails that are 80% legitimate. Most of them are messages from political groups and businesses that I don't care about, but about once every other month I curse when I find something that does matter. I move some "spam" emails to my Inbox but I do not have time to train your system by correcting all the mistakes. It is so bad that I would prefer not to have the spam removed and see all my email with some kind of "might be spam" flagging to aid my speedreading of the daily torrent.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#56

Post by otakucode »

Eric Schmidt also thinks that the rich should determine human culture because they're somehow superior to the rest of the human race. He also thinks that if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide (yet he won't post his masturbation fantasies to twitter for unstated reasons that we can only assume are due to him having done something very wrong). He's full of bad ideas, and I can't imagine why anyone would listen to anything he has to say.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#57

Post by otakucode »

polskibus wrote: post #3

It's hard to say how much is this about scaring the government into action (AI-McCarthyism), or about being jealous that China is not constrained like Western countries are when experimenting with AI because of ingrained in society respect towards privacy, human rights, having to listen to the public opinion (democracy), etc. In another HN thread about AI, big corporations and China, someone mentioned that big Americ…

>Why not pay AI-specialist pay to get the best people into healthcare, new material research, etc?

Because that's expensive, and companies are still structured in a manner built and optimized for repetitive manufacturing. They are not built to, and as a result can not, value things like knowledge and skill. Everything from why they have offices, to how those offices are built, to how the organizations are structured is anathema to having a person or persons with valuable domain knowledge as a key component. Read essentially any book on business management written since 1980 up to today. Every single one of them will advise managers to highly prioritize the dispensability of employees and inherently emphasizes accounting ('business') oriented roles over technical ones.

Remember, IT is a cost center. Anything spent on it, or those with skills in it, is pure loss that offers no value. You're a healthcare company, not an IT company, and IT people don't even see patients.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#59

Post by philee »

nopinsight wrote: post #41

To give additional evidence why Eric Schmidt's comment has a basis in reality (and to reply to many sceptical comments here): * 9 out of the top 10 algorithms for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset are by Chinese teams, backed by HIT & iFlLYTEK, Alibaba, Microsoft Asia (in Beijing), NUDT & Fudan University, and others. They beat out teams by Samsung, Salesforce, CMU, and Facebook, for example. https://rajpurkar.…

Counter-example: Geoffrey Hinton (who developed backpropagation), has a self-proclaimed phobia of mathematics. There's plenty more to innovation than solving those IMO problems, Google Code Jams, etc, because they involve very specific practice (and over-fit the needed skillsets).

It's instead the encouraging atmosphere and resultant inflows of capital (intellectual and otherwise) that may put China ahead in the future.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#60

Post by nopinsight »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #20
Barrin92 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the comparison to 'neo tokyo' fantasies is warranted. When people were scared of Japan taking over the world with robots, those fifth generation projects were moonshot technologies without any clear commercial application. The difference is that ML today (at least the kind of technologies where China has and is gaining an edge) are deeply embedded in the commercial sector and public security. We're not…

China has no technological edge in ML yet. Even the most ardent supporter talks about how China will have edges in 2020, but not today. It is still very aspirational. I never said anything about neo tokyo, the fifth generation computing project was never vivid in our imaginations, all most of of us remember about it is the government throwing a bunch of money at AI research and hardware, and that it led directly to t…

What do you think about this? (from part of my other comment)

* 9 out of the top 10 algorithms for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset are by Chinese teams, backed by HIT & iFlLYTEK, Alibaba, Microsoft Research Asia (in Beijing), NUDT & Fudan University, and others. They beat out teams by Samsung, Salesforce, CMU, and Facebook, for example.

https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/

It is not like others do not try. This is a highly commercializable area of research and there is no requirement to publish the technical details of the submitted solution.

* Based on publications from 2015 onward, Peking and Tsinghua University are ranked in the world's top 5 for published papers in top AI conferences (at #3 and #5).

http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2015/toyear/2018/index?ai&v...

See my previous comment for more info & counterpoints about talent and pollution.

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