441–450 of 452 posts
We won't know how to build machines that understand until we know what understanding actually is at a biological level. I'm not convinced that we do.
The author's particular gripe is that the Watson advertisements showing someone sitting down and talking to "Watson." They bother me as well (and did so when I was working at IBM in the Watson group) because they portray a capability that nothing in IBM can provide. Nobody can provide it (again to the author's point) because dialog systems (those which interact with a user through conversational speech) don't exist o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you're completely on the right track. People usually judge AI systems based on superhuman performance criteria with almost no human baseline. For example, both Google Translate and Facebook's translation system could reasonably be considered superhuman in performance because the singular systems can translate into dozens of languages immediately more accurately and better than any single human could. Unfortunatel…
This is well said, but one reason this double-standard is rational is that current AI systems are far worse at recovery-from-error than humans are. A great example of this is Alexa: if a workflow requires more than one statement to complete, and Alexa fails to understand what you say, you are at the mercy of brittle conversation logic (not AI) to recover. More often than not you have to start over or worse yet execut…
I don't think any particular human is so general in intelligence. We can do stuff related to day to day survival (walk, talk, eat, etc) and then we have one or a few skills to earn a living. Someone is good at programming, another at sales, and so on - nobody is best at all tasks.
We're lousy at general tasks. General intelligence includes tasks we can't even imagine yet.
For thousands of years the whole of humanity survived with a mythical / naive understanding of the world. We can't even understand the world in one lifetime. Similarly, we don't even understand our bodies well enough, even with today's technology. I think human intelligence remained the same, what evolved was the culture, which is a different beast. During the evolution of computers, CPUs remain basically the same (just faster, they are all Turing machines) - what evolved was the software, culminating in current day AI/ML.
What you're talking about is better explained by prejudice against computers based on past experience, but we're bad at predicting the evolution of computing and our prejudices are lagging.
Dan Klein shared in a graduate NLP class at Berkeley a few years back a AAAI article on Watson back in 2010 (when it actually was a distinct technology stack and not just marketing nonsense). At that time IBM was focused on question answering in Jeopardy. It was pretty clearly incremental rather than novel— Dan used the example to show that 1) ensemble techniques can be effective if done properly and 2) hyper paramet…
It was also unclear to me when they did the contest as to whether Watson only had access to the analog audio and/or image of the questions asked. So did they have to parse the question the same as Ken. Also, it was clearly optimized for a specific use case. If the questions were reworded with more clues that were puns or needed inference, I think Ken would have done about the same but Watson would have faired much mo…
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2011/01/how-watson-sees-h...
> At exactly the moment that the clue is revealed on the game board, a text is sent electronically to Watson[...]
Had IBM sales people present on Watson as a security solution recently. The stench of BS was so bad I nearly had to leave the room. It wouldn't bother me if they kept things generic, but they deliberately sprinkle the presentations with specific terms referencing hyped technology (deep learning, etc), with the clear objective of deceiving the audience into thinking they are using those technologies when they clearly…
Did your company still buy it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being able to do many things at a level below what trained humans can isn't what any reasonable person would call superhuman performance. If machine translation could perform at the level of human translators at even one pair of languages (like English-Mandarin), that would be impressive. That would be the standard people apply. But they very cleary can't.
It's a problem with who you're comparing against. Generally people think superhuman = better than the best humans. I understand this and it's an obvious choice, but it assumes that humans are measured on a objective scale of quality for a task, which is rarely the case. Being on the front line of deploying ML systems, I think it's the wrong way to measure it. I think Superhuman should be considered relative to the co…
Because that's what it means.
Also, I shudder to think of the prose coming out of a company that decides to "hire" an AI instead of a translator...
The most ingenious trick that the IBM marketing department pulled was to get non-technical (and probably even technical people, judging by this thread) to think that Watson is some kind of singular thing. Like that it’s a single big neural network with different APIs on it, or something. I honestly think that’s what most people think Watson refers to. Watson is like Google Cloud Platform. It’s just a name for a platf…
I remember when Microsoft .NET came out and I hated it because they named it something that had no relation to what it was. The product had nothing to do with the Internet, but the Internet was a big new fad back then and marketing wanted to latch onto that. Today .NET is a great product ecosystem and a huge success, except for the horribly awkward name. I don't know if they'll ever regret naming it Watson, but latch…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> has there been a significant breakthrough that explains this sudden surge in the interest in AI? Yes. Some tasks like language translation, face recognition etc. have reached human level performance. Why has this happened? Large data and increase in computing power (Thanks gamers and GPUs!).
Is this translation service available online? I tried different services recently while travelling, none of them were better than basic knowledge of the language and a dictionary. Full sentences sometimes work well but anything else is problematic (e.g. restaurant menus).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a problem with who you're comparing against. Generally people think superhuman = better than the best humans. I understand this and it's an obvious choice, but it assumes that humans are measured on a objective scale of quality for a task, which is rarely the case. Being on the front line of deploying ML systems, I think it's the wrong way to measure it. I think Superhuman should be considered relative to the co…
> Generally people think superhuman = better than the best humans. Because that's what it means . Also, I shudder to think of the prose coming out of a company that decides to "hire" an AI instead of a translator...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but Watson isn’t really a product and IBM isn’t really a merchant here. There’s never going to be a Watson review anywhere because (AFAICT) Watson is just a marketing name for a wide range of technologies, none of which do any of the stuff shown in the TV commercials. That’s the problem. I don’t even know who those ads are targeting. Anyone who knows anything at all about this stuff will be dismayed at the shee…
Remember these ads? https://youtu.be/x7ozaFbqg00