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AI winter is well on its way

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#121

Post by nopinsight »

felippee wrote: post #119
nopinsight wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, I am familiar with it.

What do you think of recent papers and demos by teams from Google Brain, OpenAI, and Pieter Abbeel's group on using simulations to help train physical robots? Recent advances are quite an improvement over those from the past.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#122

Post by felippee »

solomatov wrote: post #118

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…

I sure agree there are many interesting things going on, there is no question about that. Also most of them are toy problems focused in some restricted domains, while a huge bag of equally interesting real world problems is sitting untouched. And let me tell you, all those VC's that put in probably way north of $10B are not looking forward to more NIPS papers or yet another style transfer algorithm.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#123

Post by bigger_cheese »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #70

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.

A lot of people said the same thing in the '90's about "Neural Networks". Senior colleagues of mine have vivid memories of consultants coming in then saying much the same thing "in 10 years this will completely revolutionize your industry (manufacturing)."

When I first start working in 2004 "data mining" was the big thing and it was going to solve all our problems. Nowadays I'm hearing the same thing again about "Machine Learning".

It's pretty natural to be skeptical people make big promises it ends up being a lot of hot air.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#124

Post by buvanshak »

nopinsight wrote: post #36
cooper12 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mean useless in the end result. Of course having perfect captions could potentially allow indexable videos, but the case is that the captions suck. They're so bad in fact that it's a common meme on Youtube comments for people to say "Go to timestamp and turn on subtitles" so people can laugh at whatever garbled interpretation the speech recognition made.

Have you used/tried them recently? The improvement relative to 5 years ago is major. At least in English, they are now good enough that I can read without listening to the audio and understand almost everything said. (There are still a few mistakes here and there but they often don’t matter.)

>understand almost everything said...

If by 'almost everything', you mean stuff that a non native English speaker could have understood anyway, then yes.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#125

Post by solomatov »

felippee wrote: post #122
solomatov wrote: post #118

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…

I sure agree there are many interesting things going on, there is no question about that. Also most of them are toy problems focused in some restricted domains, while a huge bag of equally interesting real world problems is sitting untouched. And let me tell you, all those VC's that put in probably way north of $10B are not looking forward to more NIPS papers or yet another style transfer algorithm.

>Also most of them are toy problems focused in some restricted domains, while a huge bag of equally interesting real world problems is sitting untouched.

It always starts with toy problems. Recognizing pictures from imagenet was also a toy problem back then.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#127

Post by tim333 »

This seems over negative. Just the opening argument, that companies were saying "that fully self driving car was very close" but "this narrative begins to crack"

Yet here they are self driving https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqRMTWqhwzM&feature=youtu.be and you should be able to hail one as a cab this year https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/09/self_driving_taxis_...

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#128

Post by felippee »

nopinsight wrote: post #121
felippee wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, I am familiar with it. What do you think of recent papers and demos by teams from Google Brain, OpenAI, and Pieter Abbeel's group on using simulations to help train physical robots? Recent advances are quite an improvement over those from the past.

I'm skeptical, and side with Rodney Brooks on this one. First, reinforcement learning is incredibly inefficient. And sure, humans and animals have forms of reinforcement learning, but my hunch it that it works on an already incredibly semantically relevant representation and utilize the forward model. That model is generated by unsupervised learning (which is way more data efficient). Actually I side with Yann Lecun on this one, see some of his recent talks. But Yann is not a robotics guy, so I don't think he fully appreciates the role of a forward model.

Now using models for RL is the obvious choice, since trying to teach a robot a basic behavior with RL is just absurdly impractical. But the problem here, is that when somebody build that model (a 3d simulations) they put in a bunch of stuff they think is relevant to represent the reality. And that is the same trap as labeling a dataset. We only put in the stuff which is symbolically relevant to us, omitting a bunch of low level things we never even perceive.

This is a longer subject, and a HN is not enough to cover it, but there is also something about the complexity. Reality is not just more complicated than simulation, it is complex with all the consequences of that. Every attempt to put a human filtered input between AI and the world will inherently loose that complexity and ultimately the AI will not be able to immunize itself to it.

This is not an easy subject and if you read my entire blog you may get the gist of it, but I have not yet succeeded in verbalizing it concisely to my satisfaction.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#129

Post by mastrsushi »

tim333 wrote: post #127

This seems over negative. Just the opening argument, that companies were saying "that fully self driving car was very close" but "this narrative begins to crack" Yet here they are self driving https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqRMTWqhwzM&feature=youtu.be and you should be able to hail one as a cab this year https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/09/self_driving_taxis_...

You sure about that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IqpUK5teGM

Tesla self driving cars have crashed too. Arrogant people like Elon Musk are making a bad name for the hardworking AI developers who are actually trying to make self driving cars faulty proof.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#130

Post by pleasecalllater »

tim333 wrote: post #109
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…

>Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero They went on to make AlphaZero, a generalised version that could learn chess, shogi or any similar game. The chess version beat a leading conventional chess program 28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws. That seemed impressive to me. Also they used loads of compute during the training but not so much during play.(5000 TPUs, 4TPUs). Also it got better th…

> The chess version beat a leading conventional chess program 28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws.

In a not equal fight, and the results are still not published. I'm not claiming that AlphaZero wouldn't win, but that test was pure garbage.

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