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The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

theguardian.com

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Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#111

Post by dfee »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #104
adamdrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not of the opinion that it is dangerous as an idea, but rather that the intentional deception I see on the AI topic is dangerous (not to mention unethical). I can't think of a single example of an "AI" company I talked with who did not know that they were explicitly exaggerating their claims and capabilities for the express purpose of attracting funding and fueling the hype fire. The solid tech startups I've seen…

Not to mention that AI as we define it does not actually exist yet. Anyone who uses that term is doing so dishonestly. Show me any intelligent code and I'll shut up. Until then I call BS on anything that's claims to be powered by AI.

Artificial Intelligence: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. [Google]

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#112

Post by chris123 »

baybal2 wrote: post #73
hyperrail wrote: post #2

My favorite example of this sort of thing, mentioned in the Guardian story, is the kerfuffle late last year when Expensify's receipt-reading SmartScan feature was found out to be partly backed by human receipt readers: https://qz.com/1141695/startup-expensifys-smart-scanning-tec... (I don't file expenses often, but personally when I do so through Expensify, I find SmartScan so slow that I now assume all my "SmartScan…

Quote from the article >How to start an AI startup >1. Hire a bunch of minimum wage humans to pretend to be AI pretending to be human >2. Wait for AI to be invented

Translation: Lean Startup Concierge/Wizard of Oz MVP. For anyone wanting to learn or refresh about that, here's a descent article I just Googled up (I reviewed a few and picked this one): https://grasshopperherder.com/concierge-vs-wizard-of-oz-test...

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#113

Post by Retric »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #104
adamdrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not of the opinion that it is dangerous as an idea, but rather that the intentional deception I see on the AI topic is dangerous (not to mention unethical). I can't think of a single example of an "AI" company I talked with who did not know that they were explicitly exaggerating their claims and capabilities for the express purpose of attracting funding and fueling the hype fire. The solid tech startups I've seen…

Not to mention that AI as we define it does not actually exist yet. Anyone who uses that term is doing so dishonestly. Show me any intelligent code and I'll shut up. Until then I call BS on anything that's claims to be powered by AI.

I think you can reasonably call self driving cars AI without it being BS. Many things like translation may qualify based on how you frame the question, but driving is an open ended real world task.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#114

Post by googlemike »

gaius wrote: post #82
googlemike wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Uber has what seems to be world class Machine Learning (If that's not the heart of AI, what is?) lab. I am not well versed enough to compare it to Google's, or openAI, but is surely seems like they are at least trying to push the research envelope?

Evading regulators (Greyball) is a very different problem domain to self-driving cars

I was not speaking about either, actually,

https://github.com/uber/pyro/

and

https://github.com/uber/horovod

Im by no means a machine learning expert, but sometimes on a Sunday i'll pour myself a mug of coffee and go through some neat tutorial, and sometimes the stuff is Ubers.

They are by no means free from criticism for their wrongs, but to ignore what they have done correctly paints the world far too simply.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#115

Post by kyle-rb »

yorwba wrote: post #21
User23 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that intelligence is more than quantifiable. Von Neumann machines, no matter how complex, will never achieve intelligence. Again, to be completely clear, I’m not claiming machine intelligence is impossible, just that what we see presently isn’t it in any honest sense.

What do you even mean by "Von Neumann machines, no matter how complex, will never achieve intelligence."? If you mean machines that self-replicate, then there're plenty counterexamples around already ( https://www.xkcd.com/387/ ). If you mean computers using the von Neumann architecture, then that's weirdly specific, since modern computers are at best vaguely inspired by that model, and GPUs in particular work very d…

You're using Von Neumann machine in the sense of a self-replicating machine. I think the commenter you're replying to meant Von Neumann architecture, which is the basic layout of a computer, and has nothing to do with self-replication.

See this Wikipedia disambiguation page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_machine

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#116

Post by [deleted] »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #104
adamdrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not of the opinion that it is dangerous as an idea, but rather that the intentional deception I see on the AI topic is dangerous (not to mention unethical). I can't think of a single example of an "AI" company I talked with who did not know that they were explicitly exaggerating their claims and capabilities for the express purpose of attracting funding and fueling the hype fire. The solid tech startups I've seen…

Not to mention that AI as we define it does not actually exist yet. Anyone who uses that term is doing so dishonestly. Show me any intelligent code and I'll shut up. Until then I call BS on anything that's claims to be powered by AI.

[deleted]

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#117

Post by akilian »

bencollier49 wrote: post #19

Great to see the Guardian referencing back to Spinvox here, whose speech-to-text service turned out to be largely run be sweatshop workers in the Phillipines; and a warning from history: This shtick works as long as you can transition to AI. If not, then the service will become increasingly flaky until the business collapses.

It depends on the use case and business model. At the end of the day, the question is can the business scale with good unit economics. Software, machine learning, etc.. are just potential levers. Reminder that no businesses have 100% gross margins, even SaaS companies cap out around 80-85% because they need to provide human support alongside their software.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#118

Post by pixl97 »

ekianjo wrote: post #40
davnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is nonsense. Dijkstra was right. Define AI first. One of the first few lines on Wikipedia about AI: The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring "intelligence" are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip, "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

> "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." If you can't replicate what a human do, it's not AI. The fact that we can only beat humans for very, very narrow applications/games and that we don't have a generalized model for learning is a clear failure of the AI hype.

A dog can't replicate what a human can do, therefore it's not intelligent, right?

Intelligence is a spectrum, some of the things we have created are intelligent by the definition of the word. They are not human level intelligence, yet.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#119

Post by pixl97 »

User23 wrote: post #36
crististm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is self-replication a requirement for intelligence?

I charitably assume he's drawing from the fact that all true intelligences we can observe are capable of self-replication.

At one point that was true for 'entities that can perform addition'.

I have a feeling your statement will not stand the test of time well at all.

Re: The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

#120

Post by pixl97 »

sorokod wrote: post #70
amelius wrote: post #69

This seems completely logical to me. A new business needs humans to train their AI. So why not use them to bootstrap your business while you're at it? When we have transfer learning or one-shot learning, it will be a different story.

Sounds reasonable as long as you are not lying about what the company does.

Under those conditions we would have never got chlorinated water, saving billions of lives.
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