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How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

cs.princeton.edu

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Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#61

Post by deusofnull »

nabla9 wrote: post #11
cellular wrote: post #5

It seems like at least half the tech people I talk to work with AI now... no matter their field.

Any type of heuristic search = AI. hand-made decision tree or lookup table = AI, Naive bayes = AI, KNN = AI. Uses numpy = AI. One employee in mobile app startup has graduate thesis in ML = AI startup. Approximate string matching in SQL query = AI. Not clear what the product is going to be = AI. "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not blockchain.…

I worked for a company that had a "big data machine learning" product. Yeah, it was mostly elasticsearch aggregations.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#63

Post by [deleted] »

avip wrote: post #10

My company is sourcing AI from MTurk. It's actually cheaper than running fat GPU model training instances. The network learns fast and adapts well to changes in inputs. I envision the sticker "human inside" strapped on our algorithms.

[deleted]

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#64

Post by deusofnull »

dmd wrote: post #28
smabie wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t even need AI for that. Here’s some flawless pseudo-code: fn is-snake-oil: return !(coin is BTC or coin is in stable-coin-list)

Sadly, that gives a false negative for when coin is BTC or coin is in stable-coin-list.

I think that was the joke

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#65

Post by Tistel »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #37
Tistel wrote: post #16

I worked at a place that was selling ML powered science instrument output analysis. It did not work at all (fake it till you make it is normal, was told). So there was a person in the loop (machine output -> internet -> person doing it manually pretending to be machine -> internet -> report app). The joke was “organic neural net.” Theranos of the North! ML is a great and powerful pattern matcher (talking about NN not…

We won’t ever have an AI winter like in the 70s again. A lot of ML is already very useful across many domains (computer vision, NLP, advertising, etc). Back then, there was almost no personal computing, almost no internet, smol data, and so on. Stuff you need for ML to be useful and used. So what if some corporate hack calls linear regression “AI”? The results speak for themselves. The ML genie is too profitable to g…

all fair points. I have have used it to do amazing things. It’s not going away. Just that AGI seems very far away. I think CS is like biology before the discovery of the microscope (why are we getting sick? Microorganisms etc). Or DNA. Once that big breakthrough happens we will quickly transition to a new local maximum.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#66

Post by [deleted] »

rasmi wrote: post #53
account73466 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

self-censored, fanboys don't buy it

Congratulations on your success! I'm actually familiar with the author's past talks and research, and am not just assuming he's competent because he lists his affiliation with Princeton. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the field of socio-technical systems. It is related to (but not the same as) "ML/DL", and it is important to know about if you are doing research in CS. A good place to start is the FAT* c…

[deleted]

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#67

Post by itronitron »

deusofnull wrote: post #61
nabla9 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any type of heuristic search = AI. hand-made decision tree or lookup table = AI, Naive bayes = AI, KNN = AI. Uses numpy = AI. One employee in mobile app startup has graduate thesis in ML = AI startup. Approximate string matching in SQL query = AI. Not clear what the product is going to be = AI. "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not blockchain.…

I worked for a company that had a "big data machine learning" product. Yeah, it was mostly elasticsearch aggregations.

well, aggregations are just leveraging how the data fields are analyzed and labeled, so if those were based on ML/NLP techniques then it could be legit

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#68

Post by hervature »

gok wrote: post #52
formalsystem wrote: post #15

Over the years my heuristic has turned into: "Did the team formulate their problem as a supervised learning problem?" - If not it's probably BS. In longform if anyone is interested https://medium.com/@marksaroufim/can-deep-learning-solve-my-... EDIT: I would consider autoencoders, word2vec, Reinforcement Learning examples of turning a different problem into a supervised learning problem EDIT 2: Social functions like…

I don't follow that. The recidivism predictor was supervised. Conversely, AlphaZero is unsupervised and certainly not BS.

AlphaZero is not unsupervised. It is a reinforcement learning algorithm, it knows exactly what the outcome of the game is.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#69

Post by mturmon »

SkyBelow wrote: post #38

What I dislike far more than the idea of using such systems to predict social outcome is that the usage of such systems is done behind closed doors. I would be much more willing to accept such systems if the law required any system to be fully accessible online, including the current neural network, how it was trained, and training data used to train it (if the training data cannot be shared online, then the neural n…

The problem with leaving this to independent companies is that some of the most natural application areas are dominated by independent companies operating as a cartel -- think about credit scoring. The fact that the data and models are a natural "moat" (in the sense of Warren Buffett) is all the more worrying.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#70

Post by scottlegrand2 »

avip wrote: post #46
scottlegrand2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20+ years ago I used to refer to this is as artificial artificial intelligence (AAI) specifically as part of a pitch to MGM for an MMORPG to run their non-player characters. Not surprisingly, it didn't catch on...

That was MTurk's slogan on launch.

Totally should have trademarked it along with "IGlasses" in the very same pitch. The patch was apparently rejected because our level design ideas were better than the actual episodes of the show upon which it was based: "Poltergeist: The Legacy."
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