Live data from Hacker News

How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

cs.princeton.edu

131–140 of 364 posts

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#131
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today ML can solve some problems. In the future it might solve some problems with advances in the field. Yet other problems will likely remain unsolved, such as the stock market, or the weather, or predicting /dev/rand "Up Next" problem can easily fall into any of the three buckets.

YouTube's "Up Next" recommendations do (significantly) better than random, therefore "Today ML can solve some problems".

>YouTube's "Up Next" recommendations do (significantly) better than random, therefore "Today ML can solve some problems".

IMO YT AI is the opposite of intelligent , it still recommends things I disliked. for some reason this basic rule of not showing something that I explicitly disliked was to hard for it to learn, I am wondering if it is truly an AI behind it or just statistics

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#132
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

As I said, I'm an NLP researcher and practitioner, so you don't need to quote this at me. The unsupervised aspect is the engine driving all modern NLP advancements. Your comment suggests that it is incidental, which is far from the case. Yes, it is often ultimately then used for a downstream supervised task, but it wouldn't work at all without unsupervised training. Indeed, one of the biggest applications of deep NLP…

I didn't mean to make it sound incidental although I do see your point. Just wanted to chime in with how important having a labeled dataset is for a successful ML project.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#133

I don't have time to read the entire paper but I would like to share an anecdote. I worked at a company with a well staffed/funded machine learning team. They were in charge of recommendation systems - think along the lines of youtube up next videos. My team wanted better recommendations (really, less editorial intensive) so the ML team spent weeks crafting 12 or more variants of their recommendation system for our c…

>>The best performing variant happened to be random. Some years ago I heard an anecdote from a developer who had worked on a video game about American football. The gist of it was that they had tested various sophisticated systems for an AI opponent to choose a possible offensive/defensive play, but the one that the players often considered the most "intelligent" was the one that simply made random decisions. In cert…

Humans are great at finding "patterns" in random noise.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An old team I advised for a while also compared model performance to a randomised baseline model. What they didn't seem to get however was that a randomised baseline model would beat a randomised baseline model on a naive comparison 50% of the time, so their understanding of randomness/statistical significance/performance metrics was way off. So while they believed they were also testing their models before presentin…

I am confused, if a new model beats randomly selected randomised model 100% of time for each experiment why does it matter if randomised model beats other randomised models? Are they only comparing against the subset of worst randomised models?

Short answer: if you do it right, it doesn't matter.

Long answer: I have saying in statistics: "nature abhors two numbers: 0 and 100". In the real world, there is no 100%, you have a number of models and a (finite) number of trials/comparisons to whatever metric and then you have to then make a decision.

My point was that their "non randomised" models may in fact have the equivalent performance of a random model, and that if this was in fact the case, you would expect them to beat a randomised comparison roughly half the time. If you have repeated trials of multiple models, the odds of one consistently beating others (even if it's properties were essentially equivalent to a random model) in a small finite number of trials is much higher than most people realise. Essentially, they're flipping a large number of coins to determine their performance, and choosing the coins that consistently come up heads.

Another observation I'd make is that in the real world, random or averages are almost the most facetious thing to be comparing performance against. We aren't generally in a state ignorance or randomness, but you see this kind of metric all the time, even from "respected" sources. 2 if/then/else statements will generally outperform randomness universally in a huge number of fields/subject matter areas.

What's not interesting is that one can build a robot that beats/meets the average human at tennis (the average human probably is probably incapable of serving out a single game), but that one can build one that performs better than a relatively cheap implementation of our current state of knowledge of the game.

Moving from 2 if/then/else statements to an n parameter complicated model that requires training data and that no one understands and requires huge amounts of power and time to train is not only not progression, it's actually a regression on the current state of affairs. In almost all fields, random or average is the last thing you want to compare against.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#135
post #56

I really wish we could stop using AI or ML for things in the "predicting social outcomes" category. Naming them more like "computational astrology" or "machine alchemy" would be a better fit.

"Astrology" (where mathematicians used to hang out before the scientific revolution, so no "computational"/"mathematical" qualifier needed) has been going on for decades in the financial and economic fields, so this one seems to be promised a bright future too!

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#136
post #109
post #20

Top textual feature predicting snake oil: calling the product AI rather than ML.

That doesn't work. Everything is called AI these days and in mountains of bullshit there are also some actually useful results, these few are not snake oil.

Somewhere out there, a biotech R&D company has developed an effective penis enlargement treatment. Unfortunately they have been having some trouble reaching potential customers.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#137
post #125

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…

It's hard to verbalize this, most of it is "intuition" but I think it boils down to "supervised learning is BS." Humans are smarter than computers. How can a human teach a computer how to do something when the human itself can't teach another human that something? We haven't solved that problem. The snake is eating its tail. You can't teach a human how to do something when the methodology to do that is the student tr…

Well... why is it necessary that we can teach a human to do something in order to teach a machine to do it?

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#138

I don't have time to read the entire paper but I would like to share an anecdote. I worked at a company with a well staffed/funded machine learning team. They were in charge of recommendation systems - think along the lines of youtube up next videos. My team wanted better recommendations (really, less editorial intensive) so the ML team spent weeks crafting 12 or more variants of their recommendation system for our c…

The San Jose Mercury News had a weather-forecasting contest. It was won one year by a 12-year-old, who's algorithm was "The weather tomorrow will be the same as the weather today". A kind of AI I guess.

I have a friend who lived in San Jose who just wrote the forecast on his whiteboard and left it there, because it never changed. It was funny, because he came from Minnesota where the weather is never the same two days in a row.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#139

I don't have time to read the entire paper but I would like to share an anecdote. I worked at a company with a well staffed/funded machine learning team. They were in charge of recommendation systems - think along the lines of youtube up next videos. My team wanted better recommendations (really, less editorial intensive) so the ML team spent weeks crafting 12 or more variants of their recommendation system for our c…

[deleted]

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#140

I don't have time to read the entire paper but I would like to share an anecdote. I worked at a company with a well staffed/funded machine learning team. They were in charge of recommendation systems - think along the lines of youtube up next videos. My team wanted better recommendations (really, less editorial intensive) so the ML team spent weeks crafting 12 or more variants of their recommendation system for our c…

I had a similar experience at one point. A team put energy into building a recommendation system, and were able to demonstrate that the "Recommended for you" content performed better than all other content editorial. After getting challenged a bit, though, turns anything performs better when put under the header "Recommended for you."
Post reply on HN