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AI winter is well on its way

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#161

Post by [deleted] »

akvadrako wrote: post #142
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…

AI taking over is the biggest threat facing humanity, but I don't think Hawking ever claimed it was imminent; it's likely 1000+ years away. It should be obvious why a superior intelligence is something dangerous.

[deleted]

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#162

Post by edejong »

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…

AI is already taking over humanity. The news you read, the products you buy, the advice you take, the friends you meet are all partially or fully supported by machine-learned algorithms.

Personally, I do not doubt AI-based methods are changing our language, our communication patterns and our transport infrastructure.

The problem with the statement "AI will take over humanity" is actually in:

- What exactly is AI? There are many definitions. Most researchers adopt the weakest forms, whereas the general public adopts the strongest form.

- What exactly is 'take-over'? Does this mean: in control? Like a dictator is in control over a country? Or: adopting us as slaves? As a gradual change, when does it 'take-over'? At 50%? Does this need to be a conscious action by an AI actor, or would an evolutionary transition suffice?

- What exactly is humanity? I would go for the definition: "the quality or state of being human", but most people probably read in it: "the human race". In the former case, technology is a part of the quality of being human. In Heideggerian fashion, we become the technology and the technology becomes us. Technology, and AI as part of it, has been taking over humanity since we started permanently adjusting our environments.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#163

Post by canoebuilder »

felippee wrote: post #137
tim333 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I think for most people, the research interest in games of various sorts, is not simply a desire for a better and better game contraption, a better mousetrap. But rather the thinking is, "playing games takes intelligence, what can we learn about intelligence by building machines that play games?"

Most games are also closed systems, and conveniently grokkable systems, with enumerable search spaces. Which gives us easily produceable measures of the contraptions' abilities.

Whether this is the most effective path to understanding deeper questions about intelligence is an open question.

But I don't think it's fair to say that deeper questions and problems are being foregone simply to play games.

I think most 'games researchers' are pursuing these paths because they themselves and no one else has put forth any other suggestion that makes them think, "hmm, that's a really good idea, that seems like it might be viable and there is probably something interesting we could learn from it."

Do you have any suggestions?

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#164

Post by batmansmk »

felippee wrote: post #137
tim333 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I guess there are reasons why researchers build chess programs: it is easy to compare performance between algorithms. When you can solve chess, you can solve a whole class of decision-making problems. Consider it as the perfect lab.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#165

Post by tigershark »

digitalzombie wrote: post #144
tensor wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the same could be said for early computer graphics before the GPU race. You don't need Moore's Law to make machine learning fast, you can also do it with hardware tailored to the task. Look at Google's TPUs for an example of this. If you want an idea of where machine learning is in the scheme of things, the best thing to do is listen to the experts. _None_ of them have promised wild general intelligence any…

> Funding for this basic science isn't going away. What make this 3rd/4th boom in AI different? The other AI winter, the funding for these science went from well funded to little funding. I'm skeptical, with respect of course, on your statement because it doesn't have anything to back that up other than it produce useful technologies. Wouldn't this statement imply that the other previous AI which experience AI Winter…

Strangely enough he didn’t speak at all about waymo self driving cars that are already hauling passengers without a safety driver. Given that he needs to hide the facts that go against his narrative I don’t really think that what he is convinced of will become reality.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#166

Post by John_KZ »

m3kw9 wrote: post #76

Bet your house on it if it’s “well on it’s way”

Yeah this is a dumb article. Number of tweets by AndrewNg? Really? All those articles denying the reality of the revolution brought by AI have an emotional basis, but I don't understand what it is. Are they feeling threatened? Or is it an undergrad/early 20s thing, like a complete lack of understanding of the dynamics coupled with abnormally strong opinions?

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#167

Post by johnmoberg »

digitalzombie wrote: post #146
imh wrote: post #40

FYI This post is about deep learning. It could be the case that neural networks stop getting so much hype soon, but the biggest driver of the current "AI" (ugh I hate the term) boom is the fact that everything happens on computers now, and that isn't changing any time soon. We log everything and are even starting to automate decisions. Statistics, machine learning, and econometrics are booming fields. To talk about t…

Bayesian can be seen as a subset of deep learning or hell a superset. AI is a superset and Machine learning is a subset of AI and most funding is in deep learning. Once Deep Learning hit the limit I believe there will be an AI winter. Maybe there will be hype around statistic (cross fingers) which will lead to Bayesian and such.

How can Bayesian stuff be seen as a subset or superset of deep learning?

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#168

Post by carlmr »

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…

>Also it got better than humans in those games from scratch in about 4 hours whereas humans have had 2000 years to study them so you can forgive it some resource usage.

Most humans don't live 2000 years. And realistically don't spend that much of their time or computing power on studying chess. Surely a computer can be more focused at this and the 4h are impressive. But this comparison seems flawed to me.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#169

Post by edejong »

fourfaces wrote: post #158

The inconvenient but amazing truth about deep learning is that, unlike neural networks, the brain does not learn complex patterns. It can see new complex patterns and objects instantly without learning them. Besides, there are not enough neurons in the brain to learn every pattern we encounter in life. Not even close. The brain does not model the world. It learns to see it.

This post is very uninformed.

"It can see new complex patterns and objects instantly without learning them."

Except, it doesn't. It is clearly false. When animals grow up in an environment without certain patterns, they will be unable to see these patterns (or complex combinations of these) at a later stage. We see complex patterns as combinations of patterns we have seen before and semantically encode them as such. This is very similar to how neural networks work at the last fully connected layers.

"Besides, there are not enough neurons in the brain to learn every pattern we encounter in life."

There is a lot of self-similarity in our environment. Compression algorithms (and NN auto-encoders) are able to leverage this self-similarity to encode information in a very small number of data-points / neurons.

"The brain does not model the world. It learns to see it."

Except, it doesn't. Your brain continually makes abstractions of the world. When you 'see' the world you see a (lossy) compressed version of it, compressed towards utility. Similar to how MP3 compression works: the information gain of higher frequencies is low, so your brain can safely filter these out.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#170

Post by empath75 »

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…

What, no progress six months after achieving a goal thought impossible even just few years ago? Pack it up boys it’s all over but the crying.
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