AI winter is well on its way • Hacker News Board

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#61

Post by felippee » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:03 AM UTC

nopinsight wrote: post #30

felippee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

> The difference between the current AI renaissance and the past pre-winter AI ecosystems is the level of economic gain realized by the technology

I would argue this is well discounted by level of investment made against the future. I don't think the winter depends on the amount that somebody makes today on AI, rather on how much people are expecting to make in the future. If these don't match, there will be a winter. My take is that there is a huge bet against the future. And if DL ends up bringing just as much profit as it does today, interest will die very, very quickly.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#62

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

felippee wrote: post #53

prewett wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CFD was merely used as an example of something that does scale well. I'm not sure it was the best example, since CFD isn't very common. But basically you have a volume mesh and each cell iterates on the Navier-Stokes equation. So if you have N processor cores, you break the mesh in N pieces, each of which get processed in parallel. Doubling the number of cores allows you process double the amount in the same time, mi…

Thanks for that, that is essentially my point. Agree it is not very rigorous, but it gets the idea across. By scalable we'd typically think "you throw more gpu's at it and it works better by some measure". Deep learning does that only in extremely specific domains, e.g. games and self play as in alpha go. For majority of other applications it is architecture bound or data bound. You can't throw more layers, more basi…

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#63

Post by felippee » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:07 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #56

The OP is obviously not keeping up with the field and has lot to learn about scientific approach. He basically uses the count of tweets from AndrewNg and crashes from risk-taking companies as indicator of "AI winter". He should have tried to look in to metrics such as number of papers, number of people getting in to field, number of dollars in VC money, number of commercial products using DL/RL etc. But you see, that…

I'll happily read your next post where you will include all of those. In fact amount of VC money spent in that field would only support my claim. And the number of papers is irrelevant. There were thousands of papers about Hopfield network in the 90's and where are all of them now? You see, all the things you point out is the surface. What really matters is that self driving cars crash and kill people, and no one has any idea how to fix it.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#64

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

wrycoder wrote: post #25

nopinsight wrote: post #14

A 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.

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#65

Post by daveguy » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:10 AM UTC

I thought there would be more of a backlash / winter onset when people realize that Alexa is so annoying to deal with (and you basically have to learn a set of commands) because AI isn't that clever yet. Also, when people realize that autocorrect took a dive for making edits when Google started putting a neural net in charge. (No! Stop deleting random words and squishing spaces during edits).

In other words I figured it would be the annoyances at what "should be easy by now" that would get Joe CEO to start thinking "Hm. Maybe this isn't such a good investment." When measurements are made and reliable algorithmic results attract and keep more users than narrowly trained kind of finicky AIs.

I don't want there to be an AI winter, and it won't be as bad as before. There are a lot of applications for limited scope image recognition, and other tasks that we couldn't do before. Unfortunately,I do agree with the post that winter is on its way.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#66

Post by felippee » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:12 AM UTC

evrydayhustling wrote: post #60

prewett wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CFD was merely used as an example of something that does scale well. I'm not sure it was the best example, since CFD isn't very common. But basically you have a volume mesh and each cell iterates on the Navier-Stokes equation. So if you have N processor cores, you break the mesh in N pieces, each of which get processed in parallel. Doubling the number of cores allows you process double the amount in the same time, mi…

Thanks for taking the time to render the more specific argument! I still don't think this is suggestive in a way that should influence readers. Here are some ways in which a naive "10x resources != 10x improvement" argument can err: - Improvement is hard to define consistently. Sometimes, improving classification accuracy by 0.5% means reducing error by 20%, and makes economic applications that have 100x the value or…

I certainly encourage everybody to consult the source material! Man, this is a blog, opinion by default not perfect.

But when I hear the keyword "major advances" I'm highly suspicious. I had seen already so many such "major advances" that never went beyond a circle of self citing clique.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#67

Post by jvolkman » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:12 AM UTC

fratlas wrote: post #57

wrycoder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a video of this?

https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=6m54s

Edit: also, a blog post with more examples and a link to the related publication: https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/04/looking-to-listen-audio-vi...

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#68

Post by signa11 » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:14 AM UTC

fratlas wrote: post #57

wrycoder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a video of this?

is it this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY perhaps ?

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#69

Post by Animats » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:15 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #50

The argument is that self-driving won't work because Uber and Tesla had well-publicized crashes. But I don't see how this tells us anything about other, apparently more cautious companies like Waymo. There seem to be significant differences in technology. More generally, machine learning is a broad area and there's no reason to believe that different applications of it will all succeed or all fail for similar reasons…

The argument is that self-driving won't work because Uber and Tesla had well-publicized crashes. But I don't see how this tells us anything about other, apparently more cautious companies like Waymo. There seem to be significant differences in technology.

Yes. I've been saying this for a while. Waymo's approach is about 80% geometry, 20% AI. Profile the terrain, and only drive where it's flat. The AI part is for trying to identify other road users and guess what they will do. When in doubt, assume worst case and stay far away from them.

I was amazed that anyone would try self-driving without profiling the road. Everybody in the DARPA Grand Challenge had to do that, including us, because it was off-road driving and you were not guaranteed a flat road. The Google/Waymo people understood this. Some of the others just tried dumping the raw sensor data into a deep learning system and getting out a steering wheel angle. Not good.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#70

Post by sheeshkebab » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:15 AM UTC

Deep learning maybe not the complete answer to gai, but it’s moving down the right path. Computers though are still years/decades away from approaching human brain power and efficiency, so my take is that current ai hype is 10 years too early - a good time to get in.