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AI winter is well on its way

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#461

Post by tim333 »

You could actually make a reasonable argument for the opposite of a winter, that we are heading into an unprecedented AI boom.

The article's main argument for a winter is that deep learning is becoming played out. But this misses the once in history event of computer hardware reaching approximate parity with and overtaking the computing power of the human brain. I remember writing about that for my uni entrance exam 35 years ago and have been following things a bit since and the time is roughly now. You can make a reasonable argument the the computational equivalent of the brain is about 100 TFLOPS which was hard to access or not available in the past but you can now rent a 180 TFLOP TPU from Google for $6.50/hr. While the current algorithms may be limited there are probably going to be loads of bright people trying new stuff on the newly powerful hardware, perhaps including the authors PVM and some of that will likely get interesting results.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#462

Post by _Tev »

raverbashing wrote: post #261
gaius wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those traits seem to me like a thing most people desperately need ... Everyone being confident in their assessment of everything seems like one of major problems of today's population.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#463

Post by meh2frdf »

felippee wrote: post #403

Author here: seriously I'm here at the front page for the second day in the a row!? The sheer viral popularity of this post, which really was just a bunch of relatively loose thoughts indicates that there is something in the air regarding AI winter. Maybe people are really sick of all that hype pumping... Just a note: I'm a bit overwhelmed so I can't address all the criticism. One thing I would like to state however,…

The fact you use the word connectionism makes you alright in my book :)

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#464

Post by meh2frdf »

visarga wrote: post #306

AI winter is not "on its way". There is AI hype and anti-AI hype, and then there is actual practice. This article is anti-AI hype, just as bad as its opposite. In practice there are tons of useful applications. We haven't even begun to apply ML and DL to all the problems laying around us, some of which are quite accessible and impactful. The hype cycle will pass with time, when we learn to align our expectations with…

Give us a list then, because what I’m seeing is shoehorning “AI” into everything but not with significant results.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#465

Post by meh2frdf »

pascalxus wrote: post #460

But, they're getting more and more data every year, right? All those almost millions of teslas running around could provide enough video input for the training data Besides "Good software takes 10 years", according to Joel Spolsky. As I see it, we're, what 5 year into ML.

5 years ha! Wow the rebranding has worked well.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#466

Post by timr »

bitL wrote: post #453
timr wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, check that table. It says a lot: https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/competitions/mura/ On just about every test set, the model is beaten by radiologists. Even the mean performance is underwhelming.

I was referring mainly to this one (from the same group and it actually surpassed humans on average): https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/projects/chexnet/ In their paper they even used "weaker" DenseNet-121 instead of DenseNet-169 for Mura/bones. DenseNet-BC I tried is another refinement of the same approach.

Those are some sketchy statistics. The evaluation procedure is questionable (F1 against the other 4 as ground truth? Mean of means?), and the 95% CI overlap pretty substantially. Even if their bootstrap sampling said the difference is significant, I don't believe them.

Basically, I see this as "everyone sucks, but the AI maybe sucks a little less than the worst of our radiologists, on average"

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#467

Post by _Tev »

dqpb wrote: post #305
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…

I disagree. Even if there are a number of big customers for mass surveillance, self driving cars fundamentally changes the platform of our economy for everyone.

That sounds like US-centric PoV. For large portion of (most?) Europeans self-driving won't change much in their lives, definitely not anything major.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#468

Post by oldgradstudent »

tensor wrote: post #90
felippee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, a small advice for the future: never build your belief entirely on a youtube video of a demo. In fact, never build your belief based on a demo, period. This is notorious with current technology: you can demonstrate anything. A few years ago Tesla demonstrated a driverless car. And what? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I'm willing to believe stuff I can test myself at home. If it works there, it likely actually work…

You can't test most of high end physics at home. I hope that doesn't mean you don't believe it!

It's probably a good idea to ignore high-end physics results for a few years, though.

The BICEP2 fiasco is a good example why.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#469

Post by taneq »

majewsky wrote: post #203
gaius wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think batmansmk doesn't mean "when X is good at chess, X is automatically good at lots of other things", but "the traits that make you a good chess player (given enough training) also make you good at lots of other things (given enough training)".

True, but I'd phrase it the other way around. The traits that make you (a human) good at general problem solving are also the traits that make you a good chess player. I do suspect, though, that there are some Chess-specific traits which boost your Chess performance but don't help much with general intelligence. (Consider, for example, the fact that Bobby Fischer wasn't considered a genius outside of his chosen field.)

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#470

Post by mastrsushi »

tim333 wrote: post #236
mastrsushi wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure about that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IqpUK5teGM Tesla self driving cars have crashed too. Arrogant people like Elon Musk are making a bad name for the hardworking AI developers who are actually trying to make self driving cars faulty proof.

That vid of the Uber crash - just because one company has a crap product doesn't mean they are all bad. Waymo is about the only one that seems about ready to go and I think partly because they don't just count on deep learning.

Like I said, Uber and Tesla have both been reported. If two companies of that status with their funding abilities are potentially dangerous, I wouldn't doubt any smaller company would.
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