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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’?

#31

Post by mattnewport »

allovernow wrote: post #4

I'm not sure about the pace of progress in research, but as an ML engineer at a startup who has been following developments, even if AI research stalls out completely, we've been given a huge set of amazing tools to apply to all kinds of technical problems for years to come. I also think that even in the absence of massive breakthroughs, there's still plenty of work to be done during a "winter" in filling in the gaps…

Can you give some examples of applications that you think will have big impacts? I see places where current AI techniques can make incremental improvements but I just don't see any applications that really seem game changing. The ones that come closest tend to be dystopian unfortunately, like most applications of facial recognition.

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

#32

Post by jean- »

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…

> When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task, there's only so much room for improvement.

When models commonly achieve 97% on a task, it means it's time to define a harder task, as it's long stopped providing any useful signal.

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

#33

Post by tintor »

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…

Difference between 97% and 99.99% in perception is huge for autonomous driving purposes. 300x less likely to cause an accident.

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

#34

Post by cbanek »

ggggtez wrote: post #25
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 abb…

Right, I get what you're saying about Japanese, I took a few years of Japanese in school, and it is a really interesting grammatical problem. (Which is why I love this example even more)

If you read the released book about the project, one of the problems he brings up is that also the AI will pick words that start with the same letter as the first kana, seemingly at random, when it gets confused.

While I don't disagree that using AI might not be the best tool for Japanese translation, or that there might be better specific Japanese translators that use AI, I think the idea that AI has "mastered translation" is honestly going a bit too far, which was the point I was attempting to make.

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

#35

Post by WilTimSon »

While the expectation vs. reality dichotomy is very real, the cost vs. return is just as vital and, ultimately, more easily solvable in the years to come. Curbing the expectations of the money-givers in regards to what they might get out of these ventures is always tough but using tech is going to be cheaper because, well, the price trends for tech have been downward for a while.

Personally, hoping to see more shifts toward trying new things rather than attempting to perfect the already existing models. This would, well, not solve but circumvent the need to try and improve something when the tools are not there yet. This way, a broader groundwork will be laid.

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

#36

Post by redisman »

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…

What makes me somewhat bullish is that parallel compute keeps getting better, cheaper and more widely available.

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

#37

Post by mellosouls »

In the sense of AGI, it's all been hype. We are in an ML summer and have been for the past few years.

But "deep learning" is nothing more than that, nothing to do with AGI, we're not approaching an AGI winter except for people who were daft enough to fall for the hype.

There have been no advances in AGI in decades, it's already winter, and we've long been in it.

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

#39

Post by allovernow »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #24
allovernow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Care to share some examples?

Unfortunately, the only example I know of is confidential, with a provisional patent filed. But what I can tell you is that we are already solving non-trivial problems some 3-6 orders of magnitude faster than FDM/FEM. Not quite navier-stokes tier, but still in the realm of PDEs.

Sorry I can't be more specific, such is the nature of cutting edge industry, as I'm sure you understand!

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

#40

Post by zelly »

Reminder: Most of the seminal accomplishments of this era's AI wave were actually developed in the 70s-90s. Yes, even GANs and RL. This industry has been riding on the NVIDIA welfare program for the past 10 yrs. How long until the hardware gets maxed out?

http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-miraculous-yea...

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