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AI winter is well on its way

blog.piekniewski.info

131–140 of 518 posts

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd say the current Youtube autocaptioning system is at an advanced nonnative level (or a drunk native one :)) and it would take years of intensive studying or living in an English-speaking country to reach it.

The vast majority of English learners are not able to caption most Youtube videos as well as the current AI can.

You underestimate the amount of time required to learn another language and the expertise of a native speaker. (Have you tried learning another language to the level you can watch TV in it?)

Almost all native speakers are basically grandmasters of their mother tongue. The training time for a 15-year-old native speaker could be approx. 10 hours * 365 days * 15 years = 54,750 hours, more than the time many professional painists spent on practice.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#132

I'm sorry but it feels really good to be true about many things like Blockchain and AI/ML hype, get ostracized for having such opinions by communities like HN and Reddit, wait few years and then find out that they have all jumped ships when you didn't check. You first-worlders need to stop blowing smoke up your asses and wind down a little bit. Next "big" thing to be killed by reality: Quantum computers (another BS m…

The difference between Blockchain advocates and the thieves from the tale "The Emperor's New Clothes" is that the weavers from the tale knew they were bullshitting the king. Sadly blockchains will not revolutionize mankind.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#133

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…

The history of humanity is full of examples of people using technology to prevail over other groups of people. Applications of AI and ML will be no exception: computer vision, game theory, autonomous systems, material design, espionage, cryptography... You name it.

Supraintelligent AI is not required to cause severe problems.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#134
post #52

> Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero. Didn't this just happen? Maybe my timescales are off, but I've been thinking about AI and Go since the late 90s, and plenty of real work was happening before then. Outside a handful of specialists, I'd expect another 8-10 years before the current state of the art is generally understood, much less effectively applied elsewhere.

Also why does every single result has to be breathtaking? Here's a quick example, at IO they announced that their work on Android improved battery life by up to 30%. That's pretty damn impressive.

> Also why does every single result has to be breathtaking?

If you build the hype like say Andrew Ng it better be. Also if you consume more money per month than all the CS departments of a mid sized country, it better be.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#135

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…

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#136

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…

The history of humanity is full of examples of people using technology to prevail over other groups of people. Applications of AI and ML will be no exception: computer vision, game theory, autonomous systems, material design, espionage, cryptography... You name it. Supraintelligent AI is not required to cause severe problems.

I'm sure they have, but none of those fields have been exploited for marketability, at least nowhere near this degree.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#137
post #109

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…

It's not like humanity really needs another chess playing program 20 years after IBM solved that problem (but now utilizing 1000x more compute power). I just find all these game playing contraptions really uninteresting. There are plenty real world problems to be solved of much higher practicality. Moravec's paradox in full glow.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#138

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…

Your post has two different points, and I think they should be separated. Yes, there's an AI hype train, and it's pretty tiring. I'm starting to wonder when the first AI-enhanced shoes are going to come out. Or an AI enhanced blockchain, right?

That said, the rest of the rant about AI is less solid. Sure, AI today is fairly boring and run of the mill data processing / optimisation stuff (I sort of know, though I only have an MSc in the topic). Much of the promise of near-future AI is that we can go from human designed, or shall we say human-bootsrapped AI to self-bootstrapping kind. The fact that AlphaGo pretty much does this (in a very limited capacity), and accomplished something which classical programming and game "AI" couldn't, should show us that we're pretty close to this type of AI being highly effective. How exactly the future unfolds from there is anyone's guess, but outright calling it ignorant is... pretty ignorant, IMHO.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#139

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…

You can finish a CS undergrad without taking any AI course? Or just haven't taken one yet? It's very helpful to go through even a tiny bit of AI: A Modern Approach to cut through a lot of the hype. What annoys me is that when people say "Machine Learning" these days they almost invariably mean deep learning, ignoring all the rest of AI.

> I can't even skim through the news without hearing Elon Musk and Steven Hawking ignorantly claim AI could potentially takeover humanity.

Have you considered that their claims may not in fact be ignorant, just the reporting around them? For some details perhaps you would start with this primer from a decade ago, section 4 & 5 if you're in a hurry: http://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf

Or if you want a professor's opinion, from one of the co-authors to the previously mentioned AI:AMA check out some of the linked pointers on his home page: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/

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