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AI winter is well on its way

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#261

Post by raverbashing »

gaius wrote: post #184
batmansmk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Poker players suffer from similar delusions about how their game can be generalised to other domains.

Oh that's so true

Poker players in the real life would give up more often than not, whenever they didn't know enough about a situation or they didn't have enough resources for a win with a high probability.

And people can call your bluff even if you fold.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#262

Post by tim333 »

salvar wrote: post #247
pleasecalllater wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How was it not equal?

There's discussion here https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/19366/hardware-use... AlphaZero's hardware was faster and Stockfish had a year old version with non optimum settings. It was still an impressive win but it would be interesting to do it again with a more level playing field.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#263

Post by AndrewDucker »

ankurdhama wrote: post #257
tigershark wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is this happening inside google campus or in a city?

In Arizona, on the streets: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/02/robotaxi-permit-gets-ar...

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#264

Post by cm2187 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #197
nopinsight wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is a dearth of experts and a lack of deep technical knowledge among many business people, there are still a great many companies that have not yet started investing in deep learning or AI despite potential profits based on current technology. Non-tech sectors of the economy are probably underinvesting at the moment. This is analogous to the way electricity took decades to realize productivity gains in t…

While I agree there is underinvestment in non-tech sectors, I don't see why that would change and they will use deep learning. There are lots of profitable things in non-tech sectors that can be done with linear regression but not done.

There are lots of things in the non-tech sector that can be automated with simple vanilla software but isn't. To use AI instead, you need to have 1) sophisticated devs in place, 2) a management that gets the value added, 3) lots of data in a usable format, 4) willingness to invest & experiment. Lots of non-tech businesses are lacking one if not all of these.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#265

Post by icc97 »

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.

Big Blue relied on humans to do all the training. Alpha Go zero didn't need humans at all to do the training.

That's a pretty major shift for humanity.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#266

Post by nopinsight »

AstralStorm wrote: post #226
nopinsight wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Not true. The problem with Google captioning and translate is that unlike a weak speaker it makes critical mistakes completely misunderstanding the point. A weak speaker may use a cognate, idiom borrowed from their native tongue or a similar wrong word more often. The translation app produces completely illegible word salad instead.

I was talking exclusively about auto-captioning, which has >95% accuracy for reasonably clear audio. Automatic translation still has a long way to go, I agree.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#267

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

sgt101 wrote: post #212
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true, I can't understand why people miss this. The games are just games. It's intelligence that is the goal. And comparing Alpha Go Zero against those "other chess programs that existed for 30 years" is exactly missing the point also. Those programs were not constructed with zero-knowledge. They were carefully crafted by human players to achieve the result. Are we also going to count in all the brain proce…

It shows something about the game, but it's clear that humans don't learn in the way that alpha zero does, do i don't think that alpha zero illuminated any aspect of human intelligence.

I think that fundamentally the goal of research is not necessarily human-like intelligence, just any high-level general intelligence. It's just that the human brain (and the rest of the body) has been a great example of an intelligent entity which we could source of a lot inspiration from. Whether the final result will share a the technical and structural similarity (and how much) to a human, the future will tell.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#268

Post by EdwardDiego »

tigershark wrote: post #190
felippee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where are the Waymo cars running? Everywhere? Are they still veering into buses to avoid sandbags?

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#269

Post by salty_biscuits »

ttctciyf wrote: post #260
salty_biscuits wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like the research on games is at the expense of other more worthy goals. It is a well constrained problem that lets you understand the limitations of your method. Great for making progress. Alpha zero didn't just play chess well, it learned how to play chess well (and could generalize to other games). I'd forgive it 10000 times the resources for that.

> It is a well constrained problem But attacking not-well-constrained problems is what's needed to show real progress in AI these days, right?

I'd say getting better sample efficiency is a bigger deal. It isn't like POMDP's are a huge step away theoretically from MDP's. But if you attach one of these things to a robot, taking 10^7 samples to learn a policy is a deal breaker. So fine, please keep using games to research with.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#270

Post by Yaggo »

nopinsight wrote: post #30
felippee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I agree that self-driving had/have been overhyped over the previous few years. The problem is harder than many people realize. The difference between the current AI renaissance and the past pre-winter AI ecosystems is the level of economic gain realized by the technology. The late 80s-early 90s AI winter, for example, resulted from the limitations of expert systems which were useful but only in niche markets and thei…

> I agree that self-driving had/have been overhyped over the previous few years. The problem is harder than many people realize.

The current road infrastructure (markings, signs) has been designed for humans. Once it has been modernized to better aid the self-driving systems, we don't probably need "perfect" AI.

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