AI winter is well on its way • Hacker News Board

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#111

Post by felippee » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:36 AM UTC

mirceal wrote: post #35

felippee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the problem is deep learning sucked a bunch of money - essentially took a loan against the future in the form of VC investments. And if that loan does not get payed, for the next few years you may not afford to explore all that other stuff.

Technically, VCs are not loaning you money. They’re more likely betting on you. It’s true that maybe they’ll be more reluctant to place big bets, but as with everything in life the VC optimism is cyclical.

Sure it is not technically a loan. But it carries the same sentiment change when it blows up. People get extremely cautious, to the point of skipping some really good ideas. And not just those VC's that made the bets but everyone else too. Fear spreads just as effectively as hype.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#112

Post by Ngunyan » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:39 AM UTC

tensor wrote: post #90

felippee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, a small advice for the future: never build your belief entirely on a youtube video of a demo. In fact, never build your belief based on a demo, period. This is notorious with current technology: you can demonstrate anything. A few years ago Tesla demonstrated a driverless car. And what? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I'm willing to believe stuff I can test myself at home. If it works there, it likely actually work…

You can't test most of high end physics at home. I hope that doesn't mean you don't believe it!

We're talking here of technology, something that can be turned into a product, and not black holes, for example.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#113

Post by mastrsushi » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:41 AM UTC

Warning 23 year old CS grad angst ridden post:

I'm very sick of the AI hype train. I took a PR class for my last year of college, and they couldn't help but mention it. LG Smart TV ads mention it, Microsoft commercials, my 60 year old tech illiterate Dad. Do any end users really know what it's about? Probably not, nor should that matter, but it's very triggering to see something that was once a big part of CS turned into a marketable buzzword.

I get triggered when I can't even skim through the news without hearing Elon Musk and Steven Hawking ignorantly claim AI could potentially takeover humanity. People believe them because of their credentials, when professors who actually teach AI will say otherwise. I'll admit, I've never taken any course in the subject myself. An instructor I've had who teaches the course argues it doesn't even exist, it's merely a sequence of given instructions, much like any other computer program. But hey, people love conspiracies, so let their imagination run wild.

AI is today what Big Data was about 4 years ago. I do not look highly on any programmer that jumps bandwagons, especially for marketability. Not only is it impure in intention, it's foolish when their are 1000 idiots just like them over-saturating the market. Stick with what you love, even if it's esoteric. Then you won't have to worry about your career value.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#114

Post by tim333 » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:42 AM UTC

01GOD wrote: post #106

I have to say that any autonomous vehicle tested on a public road MUST have a physically fit, non-obese driver in the driver's seat that is EXTREMELY agile and has the reflexes necessary to ensure the safety of the public. How obese that "driver" in that uber incident was is very surprising. That person could not physically qualify to test pilot a military aircraft, so how is that person allowed to test pilot a proto…

Overweigh people drive fine. Being a military test pilot is a completely different thing.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#115

Post by foobarbecue » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:45 AM UTC

mastrsushi wrote: post #113

Warning 23 year old CS grad angst ridden post: I'm very sick of the AI hype train. I took a PR class for my last year of college, and they couldn't help but mention it. LG Smart TV ads mention it, Microsoft commercials, my 60 year old tech illiterate Dad. Do any end users really know what it's about? Probably not, nor should that matter, but it's very triggering to see something that was once a big part of CS turned…

I mean at least you don't have to worry about Steven Hawking bothering you any more...

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#116

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:48 AM UTC

foobarbecue wrote: post #115

mastrsushi wrote: post #113

Warning 23 year old CS grad angst ridden post: I'm very sick of the AI hype train. I took a PR class for my last year of college, and they couldn't help but mention it. LG Smart TV ads mention it, Microsoft commercials, my 60 year old tech illiterate Dad. Do any end users really know what it's about? Probably not, nor should that matter, but it's very triggering to see something that was once a big part of CS turned…

I mean at least you don't have to worry about Steven Hawking bothering you any more...

[deleted]

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#117

Post by nopinsight » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:50 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #81

This is a deep, significant post (pardon pun etc). The author is clearly informed and takes a strong, historical view of the situation. Looking at what the really smart people who brought us this innovation have said and done lately is a good start imo (just one datum of course, but there are others in this interesting survey). Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero. Another thing to co…

The brain most likely has much more than a petaflop of computing power and it takes at least a decade to train a human brain to achieve the grandmaster level on an advanced board game. In addition, as the other comment says, they learn from hundreds or thousands of years of knowledge that other humans have accumulated and still lose to AlphaZero with mere hours of training.

Current AIs have limitations but, at the tasks they are suited for, they can equal or exceed humans with years of experience. Computing power is not the key limit since it will be made cheaper over time. More importantly, new advances are still being made regularly by DeepMind, OpenAI, and other teams.

https://www.quora.com/Roughly-what-processing-power-does-the...

Unsupervised Predictive Memory in a Goal-Directed Agent

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10760

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#118

Post by solomatov » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:51 AM UTC

AI winter is not on its way. We constantly get new breakthroughs and there's no end in the view. For example, in the last year a number of improvements in GANs were introduced. This is really huge, since GANs are able to learn a dataset structure without explicit labels, and this is a large bottleneck in applying ML more widely.

IMO, we are far away from AGI, but even current technologies applied widely will lead to many interesting things.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#119

Post by felippee » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:52 AM UTC

nopinsight wrote: post #117

joe_the_user wrote: post #81

This is a deep, significant post (pardon pun etc). The author is clearly informed and takes a strong, historical view of the situation. Looking at what the really smart people who brought us this innovation have said and done lately is a good start imo (just one datum of course, but there are others in this interesting survey). Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero. Another thing to co…

The brain most likely has much more than a petaflop of computing power and it takes at least a decade to train a human brain to achieve the grandmaster level on an advanced board game. In addition, as the other comment says, they learn from hundreds or thousands of years of knowledge that other humans have accumulated and still lose to AlphaZero with mere hours of training. Current AIs have limitations but, at the ta…

Sure, but have you heard about Moravec's paradox? And if so, don't you find it curious that over the 30 years of Moore's law exponential progress in computing almost nothing improved on that side of things, and we kept playing fancier games?

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#120

Post by shub » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:54 AM UTC

tensor wrote: post #90

felippee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, a small advice for the future: never build your belief entirely on a youtube video of a demo. In fact, never build your belief based on a demo, period. This is notorious with current technology: you can demonstrate anything. A few years ago Tesla demonstrated a driverless car. And what? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I'm willing to believe stuff I can test myself at home. If it works there, it likely actually work…

You can't test most of high end physics at home. I hope that doesn't mean you don't believe it!

A lab publishes an exciting result, what does the physics community do? Wait for replication. Or if you’re LHC, be very careful what you publish.