Live data from Hacker News

The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

medium.com

51–60 of 166 posts

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#51
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.

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…

it's not for the lack of trying however. in fact if it wasn't for people trying out random stuff they wouldn't have the leaps of 2010s in neural networks - that leap was not informed by some mathematical model. i don't see why trial-and-error cannot coexist with theory-building

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#52
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.

for the sake of argument i will go with the opposite idea - why not? Do you have evidence that scaling up will fail to produce more intelligence? We already know that the current deep networks (small,compared to the brain) produce fragments of intelligent behavior. we also have evidence that the brain is a connectionist system much much larger than the current ANNs. It would follow logically that intelligence could arise by simply scaling up.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you think it will continue to progress?

I am of a similar opinion. There was a real revolution in ~2011-2013 with deep learning. These have achieved much better results in image/speech tasks. These gains have leveled off, and we're seeing some limitations. At current trajectory, we're not headed towards a general intelligence. Progress has been made, but there are big gaps. Smart home devices are a great case in point. They are somewhat flexible in the voi…

Well, reinforcement learning should also be given a mention and revolutions there (e.g AlphaGo to AlphaZero) were much more recent

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#54
post #14

I’ve been finding it difficult to find concrete examples of where AI is useful. Suggestion engines? Alg optimization? What would be something my parents would recognize that is being helped by AI?

I like the category of "augmenting human skills". Google's Quick Draw is an example of augmented drawing, but you could use the same concept for writing, creating music, even programming. DeepFakes are basically the beginning of augmented video production. Imagine if you didn't need a green screen and body tracking suits to replace any person or scene in a movie with whatever you want. The whole field of generative deep learning is interesting and, to me, a really unexpected result of AI research.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#55
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…

What's special about 2018 computing power? Neural networks have been declared dead several times in the past. Because they couldn't do anything interesting with the measly computing power available at the time. Currently the biggest RNNs have a few thousand neurons. Which is absolutely puny compared to even animal brains.

Of course this is defending a strawman. I don't know anyone that said it was just a computing power issue. In fact I think most people vastly underestimate the role of computing power. Even algorithmic improvements are enabled by computers letting researchers do experiments that would have been impossible before. And by doing lots of experiments they gain intuition about the problem, that they wouldn't develop in a vacuum.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#56

Michael Jordan is just mad he missed the boat on deep learning. Must be tough being that brilliant and at the same time get left in the dust by algorithms from the 90's and just sheer brute force. The AI revolution is here, from Google search to Uber pool to auto correct to recommendation engines, it is just a slow process.

Lol Michael Jordan is at the forefront of ML, Stats, and yes, deep learning. He's not missed any boat.

Michael Jordan is a mathematician far more than an engineer. I've never heard of any deep learning papers or open source software coming from his lab. Like a lot of mathematicians though working in stats and ML, he's been forced to adapt. There is lots of resentment amongst mathematicians about the current AI revolution, to me this reeks of that. I could be wrong!

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#57

Michael Jordan is just mad he missed the boat on deep learning. Must be tough being that brilliant and at the same time get left in the dust by algorithms from the 90's and just sheer brute force. The AI revolution is here, from Google search to Uber pool to auto correct to recommendation engines, it is just a slow process.

Lol Michael Jordan is at the forefront of ML, Stats, and yes, deep learning. He's not missed any boat.

And also Michael Jordan is definitely _not_ at the forefront of deep learning or deep learning research (he definitely is in stats, no question). His lab is not even in the top 20 labs in the country for deep learning research. Also IMO nearly all the people at the forefront of deep learning are in industry right now.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#58
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm specifically talking about the strategies used in Deep / Machine learning to approximate intelligence through probability.

Wait, how is that actually different than what our brains do? From what I know, our cognitive system is built in quite a similar fashion of probabilistic pattern matching with backpropagation, coupled with some "ad-hoc" heuristic subsystems.

Eh no. Our brains and how human mind works are actually very poorly understood. To claim we have a good idea how our cognitive systems work under the hood is an incorrect statement.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#59
...AND IT WON'T for a VERY LONG TIME. Those of us who know the origins of Ray Kurzweil, knew back then he was nothing special, and his ideas were derived from much smarter people around him.

As I recall, the article in WIRED from like 20 years ago, talked about how he missed his dad, and how in the future you would be able to take a room full of all his dad's old crap, and AI would be able to recompile his dad into dad 2.0 in the cloud!

(he didn't use these terms but that was the gist of the ridiculous and absurd WIRED article interview with him.)

Why do I bring up Ray? It's because circus acts like Ray and the Singularity University, sold a bunch of people certain goods, which were VASTLY overestimated in terms of delivery times, and in terms of the good themselves.

First of all, many folks don't want to admit this, but WE MAY NEVER BE ABLE TO CREATE A SYNTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS! I think we will eventually, but it's definitely not a certainty. It just may not be possible for a completely synthetic 'consciousness' to exist.

This type of hype has become almost religious in nature, just like the folks who really think Moore's Law is an actual scientific law and not just an observation and prediction based on very limited data.

In conclusion, you'll get your AI just like those folks in the 50's, or was it 60's? ...well anyway, back when they had those world's fairs and predicted flying cars.

We're just not there yet. We don't even have basic foundations to build this yet. There is always a possibility of a brilliant individual, who may leapfrog humanity, but for right now, it's just vaporware.

AND YES. Even IBM's Watson and Google's GO winning "AI" are just vaporware machine learning and big data sets, it's not AI even a little bit.

Sorry folks, I love futurizing, and inventing words ;) , just like everyone else, but... if AI is in the stadium, we aren't even in the parking lot.

---

And now, after my rant, I shall read this article since it looks really interesting. I'm surprised it's on Medium.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#60
post #52
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.

for the sake of argument i will go with the opposite idea - why not? Do you have evidence that scaling up will fail to produce more intelligence? We already know that the current deep networks (small,compared to the brain) produce fragments of intelligent behavior. we also have evidence that the brain is a connectionist system much much larger than the current ANNs. It would follow logically that intelligence could a…

>we also have evidence that the brain is a connectionist system much much larger than the current ANNs. It would follow logically that intelligence could arise by simply scaling up.

the little problem here is that it took 4 billion years of computing and a computer the size of a planet to come up with the nifty machines that are our brains. So unless you have brought a lot of tea and biscuits I think we should really think twice if just throwing more training and power at overly generalised algorithms is a good and realistic path forward.

It's not so much that the idea of "throw more things at it" is impossible, it's that it's a questionable path towards human intelligence. If you just want human intelligence without any further understanding of how to make it there are cheaper ways already

Post reply on HN