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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]

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little surprised to see this sentiment. Some of the most important advances in the field have been unsupervised tasks: - OpenAI: Dota 2 (PPO), GPT-2... - NVidia: StyleGAN, BigGAN, ProGAN...

I would argue that GAN's by definition aren't unsupervised, they just aren't supervised by humans. Additionally, OpenAI's game stuff also has similar arguments against it.

The discriminator definitely is supervised but the generator is unsupervised. I.e., it has no labels on its targets.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#72
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should emphasize that this is Organic AI. It's low carbon and overall greener.

Or keep calling it AI, and concede that AI stands for "actual intelligence" if someone asks you directly.

AI now is like Cyber was in the 1990s it's seems to be nothing but a buzzword for many organizations to throw around.

The term AI is used as if humanity now has figured out general AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI). It's quite obvious organizations and people use the term AI to fool the less tech inclined into thinking it's AGI - a real thinking machine.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#74
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…

That sounds at least achievable, unlike examples in OP.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#75

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…

Using an association between features to make a prediction about something, rather than measuring the thing itself, is exactly what’s meant by “prejudice.” Even when the associations are real and the model is built with perfect mathematical rigor. ML is categorically unsuitable for government decisions affecting lives.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that GAN's by definition aren't unsupervised, they just aren't supervised by humans. Additionally, OpenAI's game stuff also has similar arguments against it.

The discriminator definitely is supervised but the generator is unsupervised. I.e., it has no labels on its targets.

I'm not sure that's correct. The discriminator and the generator both learn to match a training set. You don't need to label the training set at all. You can just throw 70,000 aligned photos at it.

I think I see what you're saying, but that might be a different definition of "supervised". It seems impossible for one half of the same algorithm to be supervised and the other to be unsupervised. But I like your definition (if it was renamed to something else) because you're right that the discriminator is the only thing that pays attention to the training data, whereas the generator does not.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#78
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are certainly important advances, but they don't really apply to most business needs for AI or ML.

I work in the industry on NLP tasks. Unsupervised learning has been behind the largest developments in the last decade in the field.

I don't disagree with your point, but the unsupervised aspect of NLP typically isn't useful on its own. Usually it's a form of pre-training to help supervised models perform better with less data.

From Google in 2018:

"One of the biggest challenges in natural language processing (NLP) is the shortage of training data. Because NLP is a diversified field with many distinct tasks, most task-specific datasets contain only a few thousand or a few hundred thousand human-labeled training examples. However, modern deep learning-based NLP models see benefits from much larger amounts of data, improving when trained on millions, or billions, of annotated training examples. To help close this gap in data, researchers have developed a variety of techniques for training general purpose language representation models using the enormous amount of unannotated text on the web (known as pre-training). The pre-trained model can then be fine-tuned on small-data NLP tasks like question answering and sentiment analysis, resulting in substantial accuracy improvements compared to training on these datasets from scratch."

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#79
My brush with AI snake oil:

I interviewed at a startup that seemed fishy. They offer a fully AI powered customer service chat as an off the shelf black box to banks. I highly suspect that they were a pseudo AI setup. LinkedIn shows that they are light on developers but very heavy on “trainers”, probably the people who actually handle the customers, mostly young graduates in unrelated fields, who may believe that their interactions will be the necessary data to build a real AI.

I doubt that AI will ever be built, it's just a glorified Mechanical Turk help-desk. I guess the banks will keep it going as long as they see near human level outputs.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or keep calling it AI, and concede that AI stands for "actual intelligence" if someone asks you directly.

AI now is like Cyber was in the 1990s it's seems to be nothing but a buzzword for many organizations to throw around. The term AI is used as if humanity now has figured out general AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI). It's quite obvious organizations and people use the term AI to fool the less tech inclined into thinking it's AGI - a real thinking machine.

Remember 5-ish years ago when IBM's marketing department was hawking their machine learning and information retrieval products as AI, and everyone in the world rolled their eyes so hard we had to add another leap second to the calendar to account for the the resulting change in the earth's rotation?

I suppose their only real sin was business suits. Everything seems more credible if you say it while wearing a hoodie.

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