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AI winter is well on its way

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#291

Post by dx034 »

ehsankia wrote: post #98
rch wrote: 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.

Because it's the only time we see it in action. The speech recognition of my Amazon Echo is still subpar (and it feels like it's getting worse each week) and ad targeting also hasn't really improved. Of all those claims that came with deep learning, Go was the only time where you really saw a result. I'm not sure which version of Android will bring the improved battery life (and which manufacturers) but I wouldn't be surprised if the 30% were a bit optimistic.

I get that a lot of services we use on a daily basis make use of deep learning to accomplish tasks. But I don't really see what has fundamentally changed over the past 5 years in the way I use services. Siri was introduced 7 years ago and while we have clearly made progress in voice recognition, it's nowhere close to what many had hoped.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#292

Post by visarga »

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…

> petabytes and petabytes of flops

Why not petaflops of bytes then?

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#295

Post by chillydawg »

acdha wrote: post #258
nopinsight wrote: post #14

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…

> understand images in Google Photos This is one of the areas I’m most enthusiastic about but … it’s still nowhere near the performance of untrained humans. Google has poured tons of resources into Photos and yet if I type “cat” into the search box I have to scroll past multiple pages of results to find the first picture which isn’t of my dog. That raises an interesting question: Google has no way to report failures.…

They collect virtually everything you do on your phone. They probably notice that you scroll a long way after typing cat and so perhaps surmise the quality of search results was low.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#296

Post by dx034 »

Jach wrote: post #139
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…

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…

> What annoys me is that when people say "Machine Learning" these days they almost invariably mean deep learning, ignoring all the rest of AI.

But that's not people's fault. Companies only say AI if they mean deep learning. I've yet to hear a company advertising AI if they accomplished it with a linear regression. Maybe experts should stop talking about AI and use specific terms instead (Deep Learning in the case of this article).

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#297

Post by Tepix »

djoyal wrote: post #280
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.

I think chess may actually be the worst lab. Decisions made in chess are done so with perfect knowledge of the current state and future possibilities. Most decisions are made without perfect knowledge.

For chess, the future possibilities are so vast, you can't call them "perfect knowledge" with a straight face.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#298

Post by Eesais2e »

xedarius wrote: post #175

"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…

> Humans simply don't need that, which must be some indication that what we're doing isn't quite right.

Not really. DNNs are much simpler and need to be much more specialized towards specific tasks than the human brain. They're more like a nematode that was optimized by evolution for millions of years to tell cats and dogs apart because it preferentially infects dogs. It's the only thing it does. It does it via some shortcuts and it won't be able to learn chess without a radical redesign.

Not to mention that primate brains take some time to get bootstrapped. A toddler has to be fed visual input for many months before they can be left unsupervised for reasonable amounts of time. And have you seen what those "optical illusion" things do? It's a miracle that those humans can self-navigate at all considering those failure modes!

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#299

Post by tome »

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.

The biggest threat facing humanity is 1000+ years away?

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#300

Post by jopsen »

dx034 wrote: post #281
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #245

Forget about self driving cars - the real killer application of deep learning is mass surveillance - there are big customer for that (advertising, policing, political technology - we better get used to the term) and its the only technique that can get the job done. I sometimes think that there really was no AI winter as we got other technologies that implemented the ideas: SQL Databases can be seen as an application…

The BBC recently requested information about the use of facial recognition from UK police forces. Those that use facial recognition reported false positive rates of >95%. That led some to abandon the systems, others just use it as one form of pre-screening. Mass surveillance with facial recognition is nowhere near levels where it can be used unsupervised. And that's even before people actively try to deceive it. For…

> Those that use facial recognition reported false positive rates of >95%.... Mass surveillance with facial recognition is nowhere near levels where it can be used unsupervised.

Is this deep neural networks with the latest technologies?

While yes, deep learning isn't going to solve everything, we'll probably see significant changes in the products available as this technology discovered the past few years makes into the real world.

Most scanners that do OCR and most forms of facial recognition isn't using deep neural networks with transfer learning, YET.

This is not to say that discoveries will continue, winter is probably coming :)

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