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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

#111

Post by ImaCake »

laingc wrote: post #96
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…

I completely agree with this. Let me add a non-US perspective that may surprise some people. I think a big part of what is holding back many companies from making effective, genuine, real-world use of AI is that a significant majority of the individuals involved are bad at their jobs . On the business side, there is an widespread unwillingness to acknowledge that technical people may be better placed to make decision…

>On the business side, there is an widespread unwillingness to acknowledge that technical people may be better placed to make decisions than businesspeople.

Maybe acknwledging this would mean losing their jobs. Buisness people have mortgages and children and they probably don't like the idea of having their job replaced by a robot. It is important to remember that the admin/money-side people are not playing the game that they tell the operations people they are playing. They want to keep their jobs, accrue power and money, they don't really care about AI or sales, those are just tools for their own game.

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

#112

Post by aljgz »

Economist editor to writer: This year, X is on the down slope of hype cycle and no one is talking about it, gimme something ASAP.

Economist editor: opens their "pessimist template"

"X has over-promised and under-delivered, A, and B have not commercialized yet, and may never be. X cannot do C yet. The challenges of X are D, E and F"

Replaces A...F with the most prominent examples they can find, Boom, we have an article.

I read through the article, hoping for a bit of important info. I wish we had a vote in HN: "Isn't worth your time, don't read it"

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

#113

Post by slykar »

tikititaki wrote: post #92
bsaul wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

While I can't speak for Siri, Google's voice recognition continues to surprise and even frighten me. And if you go online and look up deepfakes or AI generated voice of famous people, it also is freakishly accurate. Sure, there are some issues and most of them still fall somewhere in the uncanny valley.. but we are just starting to fully exploit this technology. AI that people don't tangibly see but make a giant impa…

I'm always disappointed with Google Asistant. When I say "navigate back home" it tries to route me to a company called "Home". Great job. I've included a hint "back". I've never been to a company called "Home". I'm after work. This is a fun example, but I never get good results. I say "weather" and it shows me the weather, just in a different city. FFS. Maybe in the next 5 years I'll be finally able to do something using voice commands. Right now I just want to smash my phone.

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

#114

Post by tikititaki »

slykar wrote: post #113
tikititaki wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can't speak for Siri, Google's voice recognition continues to surprise and even frighten me. And if you go online and look up deepfakes or AI generated voice of famous people, it also is freakishly accurate. Sure, there are some issues and most of them still fall somewhere in the uncanny valley.. but we are just starting to fully exploit this technology. AI that people don't tangibly see but make a giant impa…

I'm always disappointed with Google Asistant. When I say "navigate back home" it tries to route me to a company called "Home". Great job. I've included a hint "back". I've never been to a company called "Home". I'm after work. This is a fun example, but I never get good results. I say "weather" and it shows me the weather, just in a different city. FFS. Maybe in the next 5 years I'll be finally able to do something u…

Fair enough. Usually when I use "Navigate to the nearest gas station" or "navigate home" or "set an alarm for 8am on Tuesday" it all works perfectly for me, but I concede I don't use the feature that often so perhaps I've just been using it for well-adjusted commands.

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

#115

Post by irrational »

cjhanks wrote: post #59

We have also been watching these machine learning models for 6 months: - increase the volatility in virtually every financial market they touched - be exploited by adversarial learning networks to amplify funded propaganda as news - use poorly contrived sentiment analysis to generate incomprehensibly meaningless news headlines These non-linear "function approximators" have absolutely unpredictable and insane non-line…

So Skynet will be insane?

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

#116

Post by Kaibeezy »

cjhanks wrote: post #59

We have also been watching these machine learning models for 6 months: - increase the volatility in virtually every financial market they touched - be exploited by adversarial learning networks to amplify funded propaganda as news - use poorly contrived sentiment analysis to generate incomprehensibly meaningless news headlines These non-linear "function approximators" have absolutely unpredictable and insane non-line…

Where are stop signs hexagons?

Am I being a pedantic numpty or am I illustrating a point about the many ways errors creep in, regardless of the natural- or artificial-ness of the intelligence?

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

#117

Post by neal_jones »

faitswulff wrote: post #81
cjhanks wrote: post #59

We have also been watching these machine learning models for 6 months: - increase the volatility in virtually every financial market they touched - be exploited by adversarial learning networks to amplify funded propaganda as news - use poorly contrived sentiment analysis to generate incomprehensibly meaningless news headlines These non-linear "function approximators" have absolutely unpredictable and insane non-line…

But it has also generated prodigious amounts of erotic fiction so that balances out some of those points, right?

I honestly don’t know if this is a joke or if there is a bunch of erotic fiction I’ve been missing

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

#118

Post by beckingz »

laingc wrote: post #96
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…

I completely agree with this. Let me add a non-US perspective that may surprise some people. I think a big part of what is holding back many companies from making effective, genuine, real-world use of AI is that a significant majority of the individuals involved are bad at their jobs . On the business side, there is an widespread unwillingness to acknowledge that technical people may be better placed to make decision…

I am an underqualified and generally ignorant data scientist.

I'm really good at understanding technology and talking to people though, so all the true experts who I know enough to talk shop with love me for keeping management off their backs.

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

#119

Post by mathgenius »

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.

I agree with your skepticism, while also acknowledging that A.I. in all its incarnations is a powerful tool. But the argument against AI, apart from "this is obviously limited", is much more subtle than what you are claiming in your article. (IMO, it comes down to quantum physics... Hopefully one day this will become obvious to everyone when we all have quantum computers.)

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

#120

Post by abetusk »

cjhanks wrote: post #59

We have also been watching these machine learning models for 6 months: - increase the volatility in virtually every financial market they touched - be exploited by adversarial learning networks to amplify funded propaganda as news - use poorly contrived sentiment analysis to generate incomprehensibly meaningless news headlines These non-linear "function approximators" have absolutely unpredictable and insane non-line…

Intelligence is the amalgamation of many smaller problems working together and building on top of each other.

* Facial recognition/detection

* Facial synthesis (deepfakes)

* Speech synthesis, including mimickry

* Speech recognition

* Natural language processing

* Gait/walking algorithms

* Motion planning

* etc.

Complexity arises from simple units working together in parallel. We're working on the smaller, specialized problems that will, in the next generation, be put together to build more complex and complete systems.

I'm no fan of the 'black box' nature of neural networks but it's clear they're getting results. As they become more accessible to the lay person, we'll see a profusion of use cases that are both anticipated and surprising.

I'm always flabbergasted by the doom prediction. The path we're on seems apparent.

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