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AI winter is well on its way

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#311

Post by [deleted] »

some_account wrote: post #242
felippee wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell me about it. The brightest minds are working on ads, and we have AI playing social games. Can AI make the world better? It can, but it won't since we are humans, and humans will weaponize technology every chance it gets. Of course some positive uses will come, but the negative ones will be incredibly destructive.

[deleted]

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#312

Post by zerostar07 »

An AI "winter" is a long period in which [edit: funding is cut because...] researchers are in disbelief about having a path to real intelligence. I think that is not the case at this time, because we have (or approaching) adequate tools to rationally dismiss that disbelief. The current AI "spring" has brought back the belief that connectionism may by the ultimate tool to explain the human brain. I mean you can't deny that DL models of vision look eerily like the early stages in visual processing in the brain (which is a very large part of it). Even if DL researchers lose their path in search for "true AI", the neuroscientists can keep probing the blueprint to find new clues to its intelligence. Even AI companies are starting to create plausible models that link to biology. So at this time, it's unlikely that progress will be abandoned any time soon.

E.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00161 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04698 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28095195

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#313

Post by sangnoir »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #277
icc97 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's Deep Blue, not Big Blue. The parameters used by its evaluation function were tuned by the system on games played by human masters. But it's a mistake to think that a system learning by playing against itself is something new. Arthur Samuel's draughts (chequers) program did that in 1959.

> It's Deep Blue, not Big Blue.

Big Blue is fine - it's referring to the company and not the machine. From Wikipedia "Big Blue is a nickname for IBM"

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#314

Post by jacksmith21006 »

One of the more silly articles on HN in a while. Waymo has cars as I type this driving around Arizona without safety drivers.

People were freaked out by the Google demo of Duplex a couple of weeks ago as it was just too human sounding.

Can give so many other example. One is foundational. The voice used with Google Duplex is using a DNN at 16k cycles a second in real-time and able to offer at a competitive price.

That was done by creating the TPU 3.0 silicon. The old way of piecing together was NOT compute intensive and therefore doing it using a DNN requires proprietary hardware to be able to offer at a competitive price to the old way.

But what else can be done when you can do a 16k cycles through a DNN in real-time? Things have barely even got started and they are flying right now. All you have to do is open your eyes.

DNN - Deep Neural Network.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#315

Post by nl »

eddd wrote: post #310

As a beginner in deep learning space, I am a bit baffled about the case "You need a lot of computational power". Good models learn fast, so if potential model looks promising on local machine, one can do training on gcloud for 100$ on high end machines. Where am I wrong in this line of thinking?

No, you are absolutely right. And modern transfer learning improves this even more in many domains.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#316

Post by jacksmith21006 »

norswap wrote: post #302
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…

Bleh, no it isn't. I am 100% in agreement with the author on the thesis: deep learning is overhyped and people project too much. But the content of the post is in itself not enough to advocate for this position. It is guilty of the same sins: projection and following social noises. The point about increasing compute power however, I found rather strong. New advances came at a high compute cost. Although it could be s…

Overhyped? There are cars driving around Arizona without safety drivers as I type this.

The end result of this advancement to our world is earth shattering.

On the high compute cost. There is an aspect of that being true but we have also seen advancement in silicon to support. We look at WaveNet using 16k cycles through a DNN and offering at scale and competitive price kind of proves the point.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#317

Post by ThomPete »

Great essay but this "Deep learning (does not) scale" I think is missing an important point.

There are many ways to think about scale.

If you think about a learned skill then that skill actually scales extremely well to other machines and thus to other industries that might benefit from the same skill.

The primary problem with technology is that society doesn't just implement it as fast as it gets developed so you will have these natural bottlenecks where society can't actually absorb the benefits fast enough.

In other words, Deep Learning scales as long as society can absorb it and apply it.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#318

Post by nl »

zerostar07 wrote: post #312

An AI "winter" is a long period in which [edit: funding is cut because...] researchers are in disbelief about having a path to real intelligence. I think that is not the case at this time, because we have (or approaching) adequate tools to rationally dismiss that disbelief. The current AI "spring" has brought back the belief that connectionism may by the ultimate tool to explain the human brain. I mean you can't deny…

That’s not what the AI Winter was. It was when anything that used the term “AI” (including academic research) was unfundable.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#320

Post by Scea91 »

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.

It would be great if people feared climate change the same way they fear AI takeover.
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