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The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

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Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#61

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…

Post-2013 breakthroughs off top of my head are:

* Wavenet, now productionized at Google as text to speech

* Alpha[Go]Zero

* Neural Machine Translation, on production at Google

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#63
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…

You both seem to have really confident opinions given that you admit you have no expertise in the field.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#64

Does anyone who's working/worked in the Healthcare "Intelligence Augmentation" have something to say about the challenges they've faced in setting up an "Intelligent Infrastructure"? Maybe someone who's worked with the DeepMind Streams application?

A lot of people don't think about how hard validation can be. You need a lot of high quality labeled data to confidently say that your algorithm works. I don't see a way around this even if learning algorithms become very data-efficient.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Nice - I went to the blog page on your site and this wasn't there. Good stuff.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#66
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Trial and error is definitely a part of theory building. But with only fuzzing as a vector, we tend to hit a wall sooner or later.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

The real fallacy is calling neural networks the analogue of animal brains. We still have a lot of research to accomplish in this sphere.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#68

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.

I have to assume you're not familiar with his lab at all then:

http://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/?refresh=1

I mean one of their papers on the stuntmen was on the front page of HN recently.

They are most certainly on the forefront.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#69
The main problem with “AI revolution” today is that 95% of things that practitioners tell you it can do are just nowhere close to sufficient accuracy under the range of conditions they’d need to work in in the real world. Easily more than a half of them don’t even work at all outside a demo with hand picked examples. And nobody seems to care. This narrows down the scope of applicability to a tiny sliver where you can tolerate high error rates, and even there it’s a hard slog to get anything done, and AI is relegated to the role of the “cherry on top”, rather than baked into the pie.

There are a few areas where performance is good enough to be practically useful. One of those (facial recognition and tracking) is currently causing a “revolution” in China. I’m just not sure it’s the kind of revolution we want.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#70
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"...

Your average business is probably using ML indirectly via Google and Facebook without knowing it. I they want to find new customers or new suppliers and use those services ML will quite likely be used under the hood.
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