Has anyone done something genuinely useful with ml/ai/whatever outside of advertising or stock trading? I am genuinely curious if it has really been applied to real commercial applications.
Improvements in search, translation, image recognition and categorization, voice recognition, and text to speech off the top of my head. I'm sure there are a lot more.
Have you spent real money on something because it used Deep Learning?
Me not.
Maybe indirectly, ads have become more targeted, but we cant be sure how much. It might be just a dtandard small optimization
>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.
You're right, though the distinction with the parent poster is that AlphaGo Zero had no input knowledge to learn from, unlike humans (who read books, listen to other players' wisdom, etc). It's a fairly well known phenomenon that e.g. current era chess players are far stronger than previous eras' players, and this probably has to do with the accumulation of knowledge over decades, or even hundreds of years. It's incredibly impressive for software to replicate that knowledge base so quickly.
I’m not sure how the hype wagon started but I for one am glad it’s about to pop. I am working (founded) a startup and while we have AI on the roadmap for about a years time, it isn’t something that’s central to our product. (We already use some ML techniques but I’d not confidently boast its the same thing as AI). Cue an informal lunch with a VC guy who takes a look, says we’re cool and tells us just to plaster the w…
> ...just to plaster the word AI in more places...
I bet that's how the new "AI-assisted" Intellisense in Visual Studio got greenlit:
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.
When you can solve chess, you can solve a whole class of decision-making problems
If this were true, there would be a vast demand for grandmasters in commerce, government, the military... and there just isn’t. Poker players suffer from similar delusions about how their game can be generalised to other domains.
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.
"it's likely 1000+ years away."
That seems like a pretty high number when you consider the exponential rate of technological advancement.
1000 years in the future is probably going to be completely unrecognizable to us given the current rate of change in society/tech.
"Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero" ... what about when the Google assistant near perfectly mimicked a human making a restaurant reservation .... the voice work was done at DeepMind. All the problems in AI haven't been solved yet? Well no, of course not. Limitations exist and our solutions need to be evolved. I think perhaps the biggest constraint is requiring huge amounts of train…
what about when the Google assistant near perfectly mimicked a human making a restaurant reservation
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
"Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero" ... what about when the Google assistant near perfectly mimicked a human making a restaurant reservation .... the voice work was done at DeepMind. All the problems in AI haven't been solved yet? Well no, of course not. Limitations exist and our solutions need to be evolved. I think perhaps the biggest constraint is requiring huge amounts of train…
> what about when the Google assistant near perfectly mimicked a human making a restaurant reservation
Low hanging fruits are scarce now. With 3 orders of magnitude difference in power (MW over few watts), clearly this is not the right way for reaching the tree top.
"Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero" ... what about when the Google assistant near perfectly mimicked a human making a restaurant reservation .... the voice work was done at DeepMind. All the problems in AI haven't been solved yet? Well no, of course not. Limitations exist and our solutions need to be evolved. I think perhaps the biggest constraint is requiring huge amounts of train…
The Google Duo demo was definitely very impressive. The only caveat I can think of is that they didn't say how often it works. That might have been the one success from hundreds of calls.
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…
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,…
Hi, why in your analysis you spoke only about the companies that are not doing so well in self driving leaving out waymo success story?
They are already have been hauling passengers without a safety pilot since last October. I guess without the minimum problem otherwise we would have heard plenty in the news like it happened for Tesla and Uber accidents.
Is it not too convenient to leave out the facts that contradict your hypothesis?