Live data from Hacker News

The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

medium.com

71–80 of 166 posts

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#71

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…

It has to evolve, not revolve. Like cars did (and they're still -far- from perfect).

Our remarkable bodies weren't designed by engineers, they survive now because, earlier, so many didn't. Are we smarter than evolution, because we like to think we are? Time will tell.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#72
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.

Can you go into why they were shelved? Were they normal technology and business reasons - or related to ML directly? I ask so that potentially others can learn to either navigate around those in the future.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#73

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…

It has to evolve, not revolve. Like cars did (and they're still -far- from perfect). Our remarkable bodies weren't designed by engineers, they survive now because, earlier, so many didn't. Are we smarter than evolution, because we like to think we are? Time will tell.

Cars (assuming you mean level 5 autonomous ones) are another one of those things which we won’t really be getting for at least 20 more years. 90% of the problem is solved, the remaining 10% are exponentially harder, so no one has a foggiest clue how to solve them, let alone solve economically enough to make the cars viable on the market.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#75
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.

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

Yes. But two things.

1. We don't know all the mechanisms that a brain employs to achieve intelligence. We see billions of interconnected neurons and we assumes "Yea, this might be generating intelligence".

2. We don't know if we are already at some fundamental limits of intelligence. For example, you can see may instances in nature where a pattern emerged that maximizes some sort of efficiency. (Like Honeycomb pattern). So, the end result of this will be that, even if we transfer the process by which our intelligence work to a machine, it will have the same performance as an average human brain...

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#76

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.

??? that's not his lab, it's a blog site whose sole faculty advisor is Sergey Levine. I don't want to be a hater here, I'm just stating facts that M.J. is first and foremost a mathematician, and that deep learning has been tough for mathematicians in ML / stats.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And your genes are just tools that help the chemical environment they regulate reproduce.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#79
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…

> We should be reverse engineering intelligence and comparing that to AI so that we can build up the theoretical equivalent of aerodynamics.

Well, with a lot of assumptions, if believe they hold in practice, we have a lot of powerful theory for regression analysis, and we didn't get that theory by "reverse engineering intelligence". We got hypothesis tests, confidence intervals, prediction intervals, etc.

So, more generally, we can proceed mathematically: State some assumptions and then use those to prove some theorems. We want the assumptions to be justified for our practical applications and we want the consequences of the theorems to be powerful for the applications. These steps have been followed often enough in math before, back to Euclid's plane geometry, the Pythagorean theorem, trigonometry, spherical triangles, the area of a circle, the volume of a sphere, the wave equation, ellipses, analytic geometry, calculus, differential equations, the stiffness of space frames, etc. For the current applications with no theory, maybe we need to stir up some more theorems and proofs.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to evolve, not revolve. Like cars did (and they're still -far- from perfect). Our remarkable bodies weren't designed by engineers, they survive now because, earlier, so many didn't. Are we smarter than evolution, because we like to think we are? Time will tell.

Cars (assuming you mean level 5 autonomous ones) are another one of those things which we won’t really be getting for at least 20 more years. 90% of the problem is solved, the remaining 10% are exponentially harder, so no one has a foggiest clue how to solve them, let alone solve economically enough to make the cars viable on the market.

I grew up hearing "we will eventually get computers that can play chess, but go is exponentially more complicated." People wee talking a century.

I don't know that cars will happen soon(5-10 years), but I wouldn't want to bet one way or the other past that. We don't need perfection, we just need to equal humans, and humans are actually pretty bad, we are just used to it.

Post reply on HN