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An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

economist.com

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Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#31

Post by dgb23 »

seibelj wrote: post #7

I’m a longtime AI skeptic who has been arguing passionately against the doom-sayers, many in my own family and in casual conversations with laymen, for several years. I stand by this article I wrote which summarizes my views https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam... The hype on AI was absolutely astonishing. I’m glad it’s finally coming back to reality.

The more I understand AI technology the less magic and powerful it seems.

More traditional AI is often logic or algorithm based. This is powerful and expressive, but the "intelligence" part is as flexible as the specific implementation. This is intelligent in the sense of a design being intelligent, which can be attributed to the author of said design.

Modern AI is often statistical. We have more data, so we can use that to generate a de-facto decision making database with statistically sound heuristics.

These techniques are all useful and can be very impactful. But we have to understand them as tools.

Your article agrees with this sentiment in a very entertaining way.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#33

Post by neals »

mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

Honest curiosity: do you have some examples of interesting applications? Large and small?

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#34

Post by fxtentacle »

seibelj wrote: post #7

I’m a longtime AI skeptic who has been arguing passionately against the doom-sayers, many in my own family and in casual conversations with laymen, for several years. I stand by this article I wrote which summarizes my views https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam... The hype on AI was absolutely astonishing. I’m glad it’s finally coming back to reality.

That article is well argued and I am inclined to agree. But then I noticed that we seem to strongly disagree on other topics.

I find it fascinating that you can both see AI as what it truly is (a rebranding to solicit investment) yet still cheer for cryptocurrencies, which I personally believe to be not much more than a pyramid scheme to dupe those investors that buy in late. In my opinion, both AI and crypto are quite similar in the ways that they mislead investors by promising a golden future.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#35

Post by bsaul »

MiroF wrote: post #16
mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

Absolutely. To be perfectly honest, it surprises me the extent to which ML naysaying seems to be popular on HN. The evidence of enormous progress seems pretty obvious to me.

Siri still isn’t able to understand « do NOT set the alarm to 3pm », and many image classifier produces aberrations that no human would ever commit.

Many people feel that ML has so far only produced « tricks », but still doesn’t show any sign of « understanding » anything. As in, provide meaning. It may be unfair, but i think that at this point people would be more impressed by a program « smiling » at a good joke than by something able to process millions of a positions per second, or « learn » good moves by playing billions of games against itself.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#36

Post by nextos »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #23
mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

Ok, consider me intrigued. What is that we are going to see/experience once you folks had some time? Genuine question! Can you give us a basic idea of the things that you are already sure by now will see the light of day?

I guess once the field starts mixing probabilistic, deep and logic approaches we will see a bit of progress towards AGI.

This is one example of where things might be heading: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1332

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#37

Post by mellosouls »

richk449 wrote: post #28
mellosouls wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been next to ZERO progress towards genuine AGI despite a never-ending deluge of AI articles; that's normally the cause of scepticism. After several decades and a much-hyped last few years we have fake cleverness - impressively so in both cases - but nothing more.

> After several decades and a much-hyped last few years we have fake cleverness - impressively so in both cases - but nothing more. Why should I care if my fridge is fake clever or real clever?

You should care if the makers of your fridge are charging you a billion dollars to buy it because its "real clever".

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#38

Post by londons_explore »

unreal6 wrote: post #4

"The result is an artificial idiot savant that can excel at well-bounded tasks, but can get things very wrong if faced with unexpected input." I think this gets to the core of what is still a limitation of current technologies. Venturing into the unknown is still a deeply relevant task that seems unlikely to be replaced by computers anytime soon.

> can get things very wrong if faced with unexpected input

Alice: Bob, Can you translate "Eat my shorts" into latin for me?

Bob: No. I don't speak latin.

Alice: Go on - try anyway.

Bob: "Eatus mine shortus"

Alice: Wrong! The answer is "Vescere bracis meis". You're totally wrong Bob! I was expecting more of you!

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#39

Post by m0zg »

Crucially, it's not "beginning to sink in" at the Economist, since they don't have a faintest clue what they're talking about. If there's anything the past 3-4 months have taught us (or at least the smarter subset of "us"), one should be careful about predicting future state of exponential processes _even if_ one is expert in the field.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#40

Post by charliemil4 »

mtgp1000 wrote: post #29
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, consider me intrigued. What is that we are going to see/experience once you folks had some time? Genuine question! Can you give us a basic idea of the things that you are already sure by now will see the light of day?

Mathematical modeling that is 3-6 orders of magnitude faster, we are already talking deployment. Same for ML powered solutions to data management - I don't want to say enough to identify anything. My team has been working on a rudimentary humanlike reasoning engine based loosely on what AlphaGo proved: that machines can learn heuristics identical, equal to, or better than those of humans. And for perspective, AlphaGo…

Your training set must be something unique to make those claims - very intrigued to know if you chose another closed system environment (I.e. any structured game with predefined scoring), or an open system with carefully selected labeling with multiple “scores.”

Also complete novice so be merciful if I’m off base.

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