"Deep Learning projects are typically written in Python. AI projects are typically PowerPoints."
The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
151–160 of 384 posts
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#152Ben Goertzel.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#153This happened right before the first AI Winter in the late 80s: AI (in the form of expert systems) solved a number of hard problems and was hyped as being able to solve every problem. Reality set in when we figured out: 1. It didn't scale and 2. Getting 80% of the problem solved was easy, but getting that last 20% was very, very hard. Maybe several orders of magnitude harder than the first 80%. Nowadays we don't seem…
The first "AI winter" happened in the 60's. In 1949 Warren Weaver published a memorandum outlining his plan for universal machine translation. He likened the problem to cryptography, a field that had exploded due to WWII, and thought it would be solved in a few years. In hindsight, we know that his ideas were very naive but Weaver was an influential and charismatic person so they inspired lots researchers. They also attracted lot of funding from the US government, likely because of the envisaged military and political uses of machine translation. Then in 1966, the ALPAC committee setup by the US government published a report
that concluded that machine translation were infeasible and thereby killing the funding.
Work on machine translation resumed at IBM in the late 80's, but then based on statistical methods.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#154In my opinion the term intelligence itself is misplaced for machine learning tasks. Every problem that is solved with ML and "big data" appears to me to be a perception problem (which wouldn't be surprising because the mechanism is inspired by human vision, not cognition, which it lends itself to naturally).
As a specific example, a few months ago or so openai released their text generation tool and branded it as "too dangerous too release", claiming it could , with the help of AI, generate believable texts.
But what it generated was simply natural sounding gibberish. There were plenty of sentences in the text along the lines of "before the first human walked the earth, humans did..""
What, for me at least, lies at the core of intelligence is understanding semantics. An intelligent system can recognise the sentence above as flawed because it could extract meaning.
Everything coming out of the field of ML seems to me just like sophisticated statistics. In many ways symbolic AI to me still seems more valuable, profit aside.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#155For a real emperor's new clothes moment, look at SpinVox!
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#156At the Biennale in Venice (one of the most important art shows there is) I saw a work which looked like this: There was a metal frame holding two glas plates with ventian sediment inbetween (sand, soil, mud). In the center there was another metal frame which formed a hole. There also were to PCB boards with ATMEGA micro controllers. In the text the artist claimed she controlled the biome of the soil with an AI using…
Maybe that's exactly the point she was trying to make :-)
With 90% of modern art, the "point they're trying to make" is whatever is the most convenient at the occasion. For the artists themselves rarely know as modern art is as much a BS-industrial complex as the AI.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm doing a bit of hiring at the moment. It's hard to find a single CV which doesn't have some kind of machine learning slant. As much as I think there are plenty of advances in ML left to take, I doubt every graduate will step out into a good application for existing machine learning tools.
Just like not all astrophysicists reach Nobel prize level achievements not all machine-learning graduates will innovate in their field. But to help you out, in order to find people who are likely to innovate, find out if that is their goal. If it is not then you know not to hire them. But if that's their goal, maybe start some kind of "program" where you give these people a chance. 6 months. A year maybe. If the are…
Sorry if I wasn't clear, our problems are CRUD at modest scale. There is little room for the application of machine learning.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> plenty of cities with no or very little snow But what happens that rare day it snows? Hundreds of deads? Cars get recalled for much less than that.
I don't know if you live in such a city, but I can tell you that in mine the rare days it snows circulation is extremely chaotic, with people having slow paced crashes all over the place, and I'd wager AI is good enough to do that as well.
My understanding is that AI has different failure modes. If it doesn't see the road, it might not realise it doesn't see the road and just go off road. It's not necessarily going to react like a reasonable human.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#159If everyone sophisticated enough to be on this site would just use the term “applied computational statistics” (even just in their own thoughts) instead of “deep learning” or AI, the world would be a better place. Gradient descent finds some fun minimia (my current venture is heavily based on that idea) but to assign more agency to Adam or RMSProp than they merit is just an exercise in feeding the trolls.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#160I can attest. while doing research in a T1 university, all the professors were mildly disgusted by the hype pushed out by startups, and even Google's own internal marketing department. Nonetheless they too are minting the same nonsense in the "introduction" part of academic research, it's a clear case of everyone is playing the game, so "I have to play or be left behind."
I used to work on fundamental molecular microbiology. We looked at what happened when DNA replication went wrong in E. coli. What I used to do when writing or speaking about it was to start with cancer or antibiotic resistance as if anyone in my field gave a crap about either of those topics. Sure, we do care about those things in the broad sense, but we didn't consider ourselves to be on the front line of solving ei…
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