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The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

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Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#41
post #5

I'm not an AI researcher (although from my internet reading that's not a hard title to claim ;)) but I feel that ML/DL can't go much farther than they already have. The concept of "we just need more power" is an obvious fallacy to me.

Where does the article say "we just need more power"?

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#42
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a trivial statement, unless he can suggest a different way to do things. Should people have held off building any bridges, until the 20th century arrived ? Building things and science have always evolved side-by-side in a feedback loop.

I'm not sure it was intended to be read "Can't win? Don't try." An interesting corollary to that analogy is that some of the things humans built thousands of years ago are still standing... so it's possible some of our systems could also pass the test of time (they can be optimized more easily than a bridge).

he does point elsewhere that machine learning solutions must account for "long tail" data , so it seems to me he 's looking for perfect solutions that will never exist.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are proof that machine intelligence can be improved quite a bit. We are just complicated machines, no?

We're animals who have to worry about surviving and passing our genes on in a variety of social settings. Machines are the tools we make to aid the above.

And your body and worries are just tools that help your genes reproduce.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#45

> The problem had to do not just with data analysis per se, but with what database researchers call “provenance” — broadly, where did data arise, what inferences were drawn from the data, and how relevant are those inferences to the present situation? Plug: I work at a company ( https://www.pachyderm.com ) whose product is designed precisely to track data provenance across pipelines and through a company's larger dat…

You all should really play that up more in your messaging - "provenance" is one of the hardest and least-addressed components of building AI/ML/data science systems that actually have measurable impact (rather than analysts making plots and speculating). In general having a structured, centralized representation of business processes is super valuable I'm sure. If you write a blog post describing how critical that is…

It may be time for a refresh, but our CEO has such a blog post from about a year ago: https://medium.com/pachyderm-data/provenance-the-missing-fea...

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#46
post #5

I'm not an AI researcher (although from my internet reading that's not a hard title to claim ;)) but I feel that ML/DL can't go much farther than they already have. The concept of "we just need more power" is an obvious fallacy to me.

Where does the article say "we just need more power"?

Nowhere, I wasn't really referencing the article directly. Just a related thought I have.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#47
post #33
post #4

Well said: > Thus, just as humans built buildings and bridges before there was civil engineering, humans are proceeding with the building of societal-scale, inference and decision making systems that involve machines, humans and the environment. Just as early buildings and bridges sometimes fell to the ground — in unforeseen ways and with tragic consequences — many of our early societal scale inference and decision m…

that's a trivial statement, unless he can suggest a different way to do things. Should people have held off building any bridges, until the 20th century arrived ? Building things and science have always evolved side-by-side in a feedback loop.

Actually it’s not a trivial statement. He’s saying that we don’t have enough theory guiding us and instead we just spin up a tensorflow library without having any clue what’s going on underneath the hood. And I don’t mean understanding linear algebra in neural networks, I mean we don’t have a good theory of computation for Artificial neural networks like we do for Boolean electronic circuits. There is a little bit of work out there, but no one seems to be interested in the theory and why these work. The fact that we still represent networks as fully connected when many many of those weights w_ij are completely spurious tells me that we don’t spend enough time figuring out what’s going on and instead focus on the result. And this lack of attention will be why we’ll hit another wall. We should be reverse engineering intelligence and comparing that to AI so that we can build up the theoretical equivalent of aerodynamics.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#48

I saw Prof. Jordan give this talk in person, and the 2nd paragraph resonated with me. I wish there was more critical thinking involved in science/research/higher ed/industry but unfortunately most there's a lot of cheap money floating around with "experts" slurping it up without care for outcome. "But the episode troubled me, particularly after a back-of-the-envelope calculation convinced me that many thousands of pe…

Like we have defensive programming: assert this field is not a stupidly large number. Perhaps we can encode our assumption as probabalisic asserts, and defensively encode that our assumptions are not violated. E.g. the current distribution looks like my training data.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#49
post #5

I'm not an AI researcher (although from my internet reading that's not a hard title to claim ;)) but I feel that ML/DL can't go much farther than they already have. The concept of "we just need more power" is an obvious fallacy to me.

Agreed. Throwing more computing power at the problem is a cheap way to make it look like we're making progress; our AI should be efficient enough to run on limited hardware. Not to say that ML/DL isn't useful, but I think that whatever the next revolution is in AI is likely to come from a completely different direction. I'm not a researcher either, so it's difficult for me to articulate exactly what problems I see, b…

It's worth noting that the training-time inference-time distinction matters here. Most of the fancy tech you've heard of recently (Semantic Seg, Pose, Localisation etc) can be pretty easily optimised for fast inference, and indeed it's not really so much of a research focus because it's so tractable (see MobileNets, v2, etc). Training, however, is still quite daunting.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#50
post #6

The biggest challenge yet unconquered is getting your "average" business ($1-100m revenue, zero AI knowledge) using ML to help with literally anything they do . I'd wager less than 1% of businesses outside of SV even have a clue where to begin, or what to use it for, my employer included. "Do we hire some AI guys?" We'll need to crack the 1%-using-it mark for me to consider the revolution "begun"...

I work for an actual tech company, which actually told me to look into a couple of ML projects to improve our operating efficiency, which actually produced good results and had an obvious and short path to being put into production... and which were promptly shelved.

Business people make no sense.

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