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Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

nytimes.com

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Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

#11
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that’s DARPA, it’s by definition for stuff that won’t be practical for the next 20 years, and it’s orthogonal to what they are pursuing in the near future. In the near future the goal is pretty simple: do the same things as they do now, but with more drones and a lot fewer people. A lot of off the shelf stuff is ready to go now: classification, object detection, segmentation, etc. And it’s not even that har…

Ok. I've spent the last several years working on neural networks for audio and music, and trying to reuse off the shelf classification and segmentation networks. It is ridiculously hard to get to work. I'm going to agree with BucketSort; I get the feeling that a lot of AI cheerleaders here have never actually trained a neural network.

I think his point isn’t that it is trivial, just possible. Off the shelf tools exist and practitioners (of which there are thousands) can build solutions now to identify tanks or people on a kill list, or whatever the military wants.

DARPA looks at what is plausible and spends money to get the brainpower (a number in the hundreds or less) who can create the tools and create the process thinking about things that the military wants or needs.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

#12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. I've spent the last several years working on neural networks for audio and music, and trying to reuse off the shelf classification and segmentation networks. It is ridiculously hard to get to work. I'm going to agree with BucketSort; I get the feeling that a lot of AI cheerleaders here have never actually trained a neural network.

What are you talking about? It’s ridiculously easy, to the point where my 14 year old can train a classifier. For classification in particular you don’t even need to do anything: just clone, point it to your dataset in one of the established formats (eg imagenet) and let it train for a few days. Object detection is quite a bit harder (and takes way longer to train even from a pretrained net), but again, totally doabl…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

#13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. I've spent the last several years working on neural networks for audio and music, and trying to reuse off the shelf classification and segmentation networks. It is ridiculously hard to get to work. I'm going to agree with BucketSort; I get the feeling that a lot of AI cheerleaders here have never actually trained a neural network.

What are you talking about? It’s ridiculously easy, to the point where my 14 year old can train a classifier. For classification in particular you don’t even need to do anything: just clone, point it to your dataset in one of the established formats (eg imagenet) and let it train for a few days. Object detection is quite a bit harder (and takes way longer to train even from a pretrained net), but again, totally doabl…

Some of us are working on more complicated data than just handwritten digits. Part of the problem is that existing networks are tuned for the dataset that the original authors were working on. If you want to use it on completely different problems, you have to change the sizes of the layers, convolution size, max pooling, etc. The other problem is figuring out how to preprocess your data to make it as easy as possible for the network to digest. Then, to make it harder, changing the preprocessing means you have to change the network architecture, and vice versa. Fun times!

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

#14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. I've spent the last several years working on neural networks for audio and music, and trying to reuse off the shelf classification and segmentation networks. It is ridiculously hard to get to work. I'm going to agree with BucketSort; I get the feeling that a lot of AI cheerleaders here have never actually trained a neural network.

What are you talking about? It’s ridiculously easy, to the point where my 14 year old can train a classifier. For classification in particular you don’t even need to do anything: just clone, point it to your dataset in one of the established formats (eg imagenet) and let it train for a few days. Object detection is quite a bit harder (and takes way longer to train even from a pretrained net), but again, totally doabl…

Try training a classifier that can detect a person holding weapon aiming to kill someone vs a person not. Make it a 99.9999% accuracy classfier under different weather conditions. Now make one for night vision images. Even seemingly straighforward classification problems can be hard. Not to mention the vast array of other problems out there.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

#15
A more important question is why can't the richest government in the world afford to hire competent qualified developers?

We've never had any similar problem building fighter jets, tanks, aircraft carriers, ICBMs, Railguns & Weaponized Lasers, Nuclear Warheads... But computer technology is outside our reach?

Forget the predictable excuses about how AI developers only work in the private sector because there's more money in it. That's bullshit because we all know the things I listed cost billions of dollars every year.

Something else is going on.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

#16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? It’s ridiculously easy, to the point where my 14 year old can train a classifier. For classification in particular you don’t even need to do anything: just clone, point it to your dataset in one of the established formats (eg imagenet) and let it train for a few days. Object detection is quite a bit harder (and takes way longer to train even from a pretrained net), but again, totally doabl…

Some of us are working on more complicated data than just handwritten digits. Part of the problem is that existing networks are tuned for the dataset that the original authors were working on. If you want to use it on completely different problems, you have to change the sizes of the layers, convolution size, max pooling, etc. The other problem is figuring out how to preprocess your data to make it as easy as possibl…

It can certainly be tricky. That said, if you've never used it, I highly recommend trying out adaptive max pooling.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

#17
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? It’s ridiculously easy, to the point where my 14 year old can train a classifier. For classification in particular you don’t even need to do anything: just clone, point it to your dataset in one of the established formats (eg imagenet) and let it train for a few days. Object detection is quite a bit harder (and takes way longer to train even from a pretrained net), but again, totally doabl…

Some of us are working on more complicated data than just handwritten digits. Part of the problem is that existing networks are tuned for the dataset that the original authors were working on. If you want to use it on completely different problems, you have to change the sizes of the layers, convolution size, max pooling, etc. The other problem is figuring out how to preprocess your data to make it as easy as possibl…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

#18
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? It’s ridiculously easy, to the point where my 14 year old can train a classifier. For classification in particular you don’t even need to do anything: just clone, point it to your dataset in one of the established formats (eg imagenet) and let it train for a few days. Object detection is quite a bit harder (and takes way longer to train even from a pretrained net), but again, totally doabl…

Try training a classifier that can detect a person holding weapon aiming to kill someone vs a person not. Make it a 99.9999% accuracy classfier under different weather conditions. Now make one for night vision images. Even seemingly straighforward classification problems can be hard. Not to mention the vast array of other problems out there.

Such a thing doesn’t exist and it doesn’t need to, because humans have much lower accuracy than that. You don’t need to run faster than the bear, you need to run faster than the other guy, and that’s not hard to do if you pick the right task.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

#20
Do they need Silicon Valley's help? They have all the money to buy hardwares, the only 'help' they need is talent.

They can just set up funds, I am sure there will be plenty of SV people willing to take that money and work for them. Even for Google, partnership presents as a problem for SOME of its employees, but definitely not all of them.

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