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Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#21

Post by thrower123 »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #16
thrower123 wrote: post #8

I've been waiting for the hype and marketing to collapse for a few years. Probably the fastest way to tarnish public perception of AI would be to keep pushing "AI-enhanced" products in front of the consumer as has been done. These things tend to demo well and have a nice cool factor for the first fifteen minutes or so, but after any kind of prolonged usage the limitations and rough-edges come up quick.

The hype only started in 2015ish, how many years could you have been waiting for it to collapse?

Watson has been an IBM hype-brand for a decade. It is finally getting to the point that it can reliably achieve some parts of what I was sold on back in 2012.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#22

Post by [deleted] »

thrower123 wrote: post #8

I've been waiting for the hype and marketing to collapse for a few years. Probably the fastest way to tarnish public perception of AI would be to keep pushing "AI-enhanced" products in front of the consumer as has been done. These things tend to demo well and have a nice cool factor for the first fifteen minutes or so, but after any kind of prolonged usage the limitations and rough-edges come up quick.

[deleted]

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#23

Post by Veedrac »

rococode wrote: post #5

I think there's an interesting disconnect right now between research and practice. Cutting-edge research does feel like it's reaching a plateau - across most AI fields even "major" breakthroughs are only gaining a couple percentage points and we're probably starting to hit the limits of what current approaches can achieve. When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task, there's only so much room for improvement. Yoav Gol…

> Cutting-edge research does feel like it's reaching a plateau

It's really not. The second half of last year alone had MuZero and Megatron-LM, to name just a couple that most scream to me that we are actually progressing towards AGI.

You say ‘When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task’, but solved tasks are the least interesting tasks.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#24

Post by semi-extrinsic »

allovernow wrote: post #15
thrower123 wrote: post #8

I've been waiting for the hype and marketing to collapse for a few years. Probably the fastest way to tarnish public perception of AI would be to keep pushing "AI-enhanced" products in front of the consumer as has been done. These things tend to demo well and have a nice cool factor for the first fifteen minutes or so, but after any kind of prolonged usage the limitations and rough-edges come up quick.

This is brand new technology. It's going to take a few years to reliably productionize - and most of the applied solutions will look nothing like the research. Many real world problems are going to combine multiple neural nets into systems with specific applications and there's a lot of detail to work out. The hype may collapse in the short term, but that's only because many of the first movers are stereotypical tech…

> one example is massively accelerated modeling as an alternative to slow finite difference/finite element simulation

I work in the field of numerical modelling (fluid simulation), and I haven't seen any convincing demos of anything but utterly trivial problems solved this way. Care to share some examples?

(There are some works that focus on fluid simulation for CGI. That's neat, but a) only interpolates between real simulation data, and b) doesn't achieve physical accuracy, just looks good.)

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#25

Post by ggggtez »

cbanek wrote: post #19

> While AGI isn't going to be created any time soon, machines have learned how to master complex tasks like: > translating text into practically every language Note: they said they have mastered these tasks. Yeah... I'm not sure a lot of native speakers would agree. Here's a great example of using Google Translate to automatically translate a video game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uNkubEHfQU > Driving cars I'm…

As amusing as the Final Fantasy translation project is, it simply is not the right comparison. It's a case of using the wrong tool for the job.

There are better systems for natural language translation that attempt to keep track of the subject, something that is very often implicit from context in Japanese. Additionally, that subject could be implicit based on the visuals of what is on screen. The enemy names are abbreviations due to artificial limits of the system...

All in all, it's like using a hammer to drive a screw. It might sort of work, but you shouldn't be surprised when it fails. It's just a case of using the wrong tool for the job. That is hardly proof that Hammers are bad, or the screws can never be successfully inserted into a board.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#26

Post by Barrin92 »

mindcrime wrote: post #3

No. Maybe an "AI Fall", but I doubt there will ever be another true "AI Winter". The AI we have today is too good, and creates too much value... at this point, there is no longer any question as to whether or not there is value in continuing to research and invest in AI. What will happen, almost without doubt, is that particular niches within the overall rubric of "AI" will go in and out of vogue, and investment in p…

> the important thing is that we don't need AGI to do many amazing and valuable things

that's absolutely true but I think a lot of people still consider actual human-like intelligence, common sense and so on to be important features of what we call AI or AGI. I think it's very obvious when we look at the cultural impact of AI in fiction or even in discussion around the dangers of AI that this is what many people in and outside the field are thinking about.

I think it's true that the commercial success of current techniques will endure but then maybe we should start differentiating between a sort of 'automation science' and cognitive/intelligent systems. Because on the latter I really don't think we are seeing much or maybe even any progress.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#27

Post by zmmmmm »

I actually think that basic deep learning is well on its way into the plateau of productivity. It's not going to be used strictly as AI though, just a more robust type of model fitting than traditional ML which required cleaner data and better extracted features.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#29

Post by AlexCoventry »

cbanek wrote: post #19

> While AGI isn't going to be created any time soon, machines have learned how to master complex tasks like: > translating text into practically every language Note: they said they have mastered these tasks. Yeah... I'm not sure a lot of native speakers would agree. Here's a great example of using Google Translate to automatically translate a video game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uNkubEHfQU > Driving cars I'm…

> Now don't get me wrong, we've made a lot of progress, but I wonder if we can get these things to a place better than humans before the next economic recession.

I don't think it's necessary to completely solve superhuman performance to achieve automation of great economic value. Some of the most famous AI achievements leverage a fairly modest intelligence improvement with massive amounts of classic automation. E.g., the AlphaGo policy/value networks, combined with MCTS.

It may also be possible for automation to reliably determine when it's encountering a situation it's going to fare badly in, and then hand off to human telepresence control. It wouldn't surprise me if the first self-driving systems worked that way.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#30

Post by tomrod »

Veedrac wrote: post #23
rococode wrote: post #5

I think there's an interesting disconnect right now between research and practice. Cutting-edge research does feel like it's reaching a plateau - across most AI fields even "major" breakthroughs are only gaining a couple percentage points and we're probably starting to hit the limits of what current approaches can achieve. When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task, there's only so much room for improvement. Yoav Gol…

> Cutting-edge research does feel like it's reaching a plateau It's really not. The second half of last year alone had MuZero and Megatron-LM, to name just a couple that most scream to me that we are actually progressing towards AGI. You say ‘When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task’, but solved tasks are the least interesting tasks.

> solved tasks are the least interesting tasks.

Yeah, but they also tend to be pretty profitable.

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