Judea Pearl sees a way out of the winter. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/machi...
Boomer GOFAI, no thanks.
AI winter is well on its way
21–30 of 518 posts
Re: AI winter is well on its way
#22A different take by Google’s cofounder, Sergey Brin, in his most recent Founders’ Letter to investors: “The new spring in artificial intelligence is the most significant development in computing in my lifetime.” He listed many examples below the quote. “understand images in Google Photos; enable Waymo cars to recognize and distinguish objects safely; significantly improve sound and camera quality in our hardware; und…
>caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube; Utterly useless. And I don't think it is improving.
I find the auto captions pretty useful.
Re: AI winter is well on its way
#23A different take by Google’s cofounder, Sergey Brin, in his most recent Founders’ Letter to investors: “The new spring in artificial intelligence is the most significant development in computing in my lifetime.” He listed many examples below the quote. “understand images in Google Photos; enable Waymo cars to recognize and distinguish objects safely; significantly improve sound and camera quality in our hardware; und…
>caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube; Utterly useless. And I don't think it is improving.
This is less useless than you think. Captioning video could allow for video to become searchable as easily as text is now searchable. This could lead to far better search results for video and a leap forward in the way people produce and consume video content.
Re: AI winter is well on its way
#24I would not call it the “AI winter”. If you look at what people have called AI over time, the definition and the approaches have evolved (sometimes drastically) over time. Instead of being stuck on the fact that deep learning and the current methods seem to have hit a limit I think I am actually excited about the fact that this opens the door for experimenting other approaches that may or may not build on top of what…
Perhaps it'd be more correct to call it a "Strong AI Winter". We're no closer to "aware" machines. We've simply gotten very good at automating tasks that were once difficult to automate.
Re: AI winter is well on its way
#25A different take by Google’s cofounder, Sergey Brin, in his most recent Founders’ Letter to investors: “The new spring in artificial intelligence is the most significant development in computing in my lifetime.” He listed many examples below the quote. “understand images in Google Photos; enable Waymo cars to recognize and distinguish objects safely; significantly improve sound and camera quality in our hardware; und…
When I saw the Google demo of a CNN using video to split a single audio stream of two guys talking over each other, I became a believer.
Re: AI winter is well on its way
#26Disclaimer: I am a lay technical person and don't know much about AI. I find this article somewhat condescending. I look at all the current development as stepping stones to progress, not an overnight success that does everything flawlessly. I imagine the future might be some combination of different solutions, and what the author proposes may or may not play a part in it.
it's not a stepping stone, if you look closely it's a dead end
Re: AI winter is well on its way
#27It's the same story again like exaggerating the influence of IoT 5 years ago. The whole thing is exaggerated to raise money from investors and attract customers instead of actually buidling superior product
It's 99% marketing and places like HN and reddit eat it up and try to hype it up even more. When you confront these characters about the basis on which they claim AI will solve whatever problem or evolve to whichever point, they only reply "it'll only keep getting better (given time, data, resources, brains, etc)"
It's a buzzword people brainlessly use to fetishize technological progress without understanding the inherent limitations of the technology or the actual practicality and real-life results outside of crafted demos or specific problem domains (for example Alpha Go beating a grandmaster has almost no bearing on a problem like speech cognition).
It's turned me off a lot from reading about advances in the field because I know like a lot of science releases that most of it is empty air that won't really have bearing on the actual software I use (I've watched the past two Google's I/O where pretty much every presentation mentions AI, but the Android experience still remains relatively stale).
Re: AI winter is well on its way
#28Disclaimer: I am a lay technical person and don't know much about AI. I find this article somewhat condescending. I look at all the current development as stepping stones to progress, not an overnight success that does everything flawlessly. I imagine the future might be some combination of different solutions, and what the author proposes may or may not play a part in it.
I agree. Overhype is annoying, but it happens with every technological advance. So does the inevitable backlash jump from "some people claim too much" to "this whole field is a bubble with no real gains". Both are cliched viewpoints that give a false sense of being "in the know" without helping anyone navigate change effectively.
Re: AI winter is well on its way
#29Author's reasons:
1.Hype dies down (which is really good! Meaning the chance of burst, is actually lower!)
2.Doesn't scale is false claim. DL methods have scaled MUCH better than any other ML algorithms in recent history (scale SVM is no small task). Scaling for DL methods are much either as comparing to other traditional ML algorithms, where it can be naturally distributed and aggregated.
3. Partially true. But self-driving is a sophisticated area by itself, DL is part of it, it can't really put full claim on its potential future success or ultimate downfall.
4. Gary Marcus isn't an established figure in DL research.
AI winter will ultimately come. But it is because people will become more informed about DL's strengths and limits, thus becoming smarter to tell what is BS what is not. AGI is likely not going to happen just with DL, but that is no way meaning it is a winter. DL has revolutionized the paradigm of Machine Learning itself, the shift has now complete, it will stay for a very very long time, and the successor is likely to build upon it not subvert it completely as well.
Re: AI winter is well on its way
#30A different take by Google’s cofounder, Sergey Brin, in his most recent Founders’ Letter to investors: “The new spring in artificial intelligence is the most significant development in computing in my lifetime.” He listed many examples below the quote. “understand images in Google Photos; enable Waymo cars to recognize and distinguish objects safely; significantly improve sound and camera quality in our hardware; und…
Hi, author here: Well first off: letters to investors are among the most biased pieces of writing in existence. Second: I'm not saying connectionism did not succeed in many areas! I'm a connectionist by heart! I love connectionism! But that being said there is disconnect between the expectations and reality. And it is huge. And it is particularly visible in autonomous driving. And it is not limited to media or CEO's,…
I agree that self-driving had/have been overhyped over the previous few years. The problem is harder than many people realize.
The difference between the current AI renaissance and the past pre-winter AI ecosystems is the level of economic gain realized by the technology.
The late 80s-early 90s AI winter, for example, resulted from the limitations of expert systems which were useful but only in niche markets and their development and maintenance costs were quite high relative to alternatives.
The current AI systems do something that alternatives, like Mechanical Turks, can only accomplish with much greater costs and may not even have the scale necessary for global massive services like Google Photos or Youtube autocaptioning.
The spread of computing infrastructure and connectivity into the hands of billions of global population is a key contributing factor.