Why not ban heuristics altogether?
U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
161–170 of 220 posts
Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
1, 2 and 3 are absolutely mundane. One could argue that if anything, they are disappointing: i remember passable speech recognition running on pentium 2 with 32 megs of ram (dragon naturally speaking was first released in 1997). "Natural" language parsers were around starting with the first text adventures (80s as far as I remember). Considering the computing resources big G and big A have, the performance of this "A…
imo, working memory at scale via improvements to more obscure methods like a DNC is what will be the next leap and make todays 'AI' seem mundane. Most AI today like deepfakes involve giving the model all memories available via input.
Scaling SHRDLU in a similar manner would also rock, though.
Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
#163Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so weird. Palantir put a GUI on Hadoop/whatever and that was enough to sell it to every government for citizen inspection. It’s the GUI that gets the contracts, not the technology alone.
Correct. You can't get a contract without marketing/sales interaction with the customers. Customers at a high enough level to sign off on a payment with 7-9 zeroes following the number are not generally programmers (or, if they were, they haven't been working at the coal face for decades): they're senior managers or civil servants. A GUI front end is a really amazing marketing tool for any piece of software insofar a…
“Please select the images that show US military bases to proceed”
Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so weird. Palantir put a GUI on Hadoop/whatever and that was enough to sell it to every government for citizen inspection. It’s the GUI that gets the contracts, not the technology alone.
If a government 1) wants to acquire a geospatial imagery recognition program; 2) does not have the tech themselves; 3) can import the underlying tech without interface; I highly doubt a restriction on GUI export will stop them.
3) will stop them from buying an off the shelf commercially-ready product. Yes, they can develop one from scratch, but only at enormous cost and difficulty relative to simple dollars.
Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be interested in how you would do NLP tasks such as those now done with transformers like gtp2 and Bert by working with multi variate normal distributions.
Maybe I didn't make myself clear enough. There was a time when a software engineer didn't get basic stuff. A time when languages like C were developed where there wasn't an associative data structure baked in for example. It wasn't because associative data structures are a secret tech that requires great insight to uncover. It is because the field was new and people hadn't cottoned on to how basic and important havin…
> There was a time when a software engineer didn't get basic stuff. A time when languages like C were developed where there wasn't an associative data structure baked in for example. It wasn't because associative data structures are a secret tech that requires great insight to uncover. It is because the field was new and people hadn't cottoned on to how basic and important having access to hash-maps is. Times moved on. Now basically all modern languages have hash-maps as a basic data type.
That is a really weird historical fantasy. If you pull out your copy of volume 3 of Knuth and look at chapter 6, it is obvious that associative data structures were some of the first ones to be developed in the field.
The reason why hash tables became so popular is the explosion in main memory size starting in the late 1990s. The trade-offs between the possible associative data structures became less important for a lot of applications, especially when you consider how much needed to be done on secondary storage and specifically on tapes in the 1960s through the 1980s.
Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
#167What the threat (of an ability the US doesn’t want other nations to have) here and how does geospatial imagery and point clouds fit in? This seems to target one or a few products so they dislike that someone uses the software for that purpose
Most likely autonomous drone navigation (particularly very low altitude terrain following) and targeting. That is how cruise missiles work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
There was a big drone attack on a Saudi Arabian oil processing facility last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_at...
Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
#168Because this is so incredibly broad, there's a good chance that >20% of people here will be working on something that falls under this at some point in the next decade. While we patiently await for a HN user (or, let's be honest, one of the ancient cryptologist-lawyers who come out of the woodwork every time something like this happens and sue the government) to fix this by suing the government on free speech grounds…
It actually sounds far more narrow than the title implies? > Under a new rule which goes into effect on Monday, companies that export certain types of geospatial imagery software from the United States must apply for a license to send it overseas except when it is being shipped to Canada.
The measure covers software that could be used by sensors, drones, and satellites to automate the process of identifying targets for both military and civilian ends, Lewis said, noting it was a boon for industry, which feared a much broader crackdown on exports of AI hardware and software.
"sensors, drones, and satellites" used to target anything means that you can't even send a Ring camera to Europe.
Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
#169Is there anything that people outside of the US should download now in order to get access to software?
Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
#170Is there anything that people outside of the US should download now in order to get access to software?
The rule refers to products, not freely available source code.
Companies don't sell stuff from GitHub, they sell proprietary stuff. It may well be based on open source code, but they own it to sell (license) it.
There's lots of examples of products in the geospatial domain that are not "AI" yet are restricted or even classified.
For example, ship detection from space-based radar. There are numerous public papers on the topic yet any software that purports to do this is subject to ITAR rules in the US and CGP rules in Canada.
Just because you may know how to do something doesn't prevent a government from restricting you from selling it, or talking about it. Even if it is "public". Machine guns are an old tech and yet are restricted. As they should be.