"AI" will be there is almost everything is few years time.
Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#42I find a lot of the media (here in Japan anyways) call literally every automation by computers or machines AI. Example, there’s an automated gate that only opens if a scanner finds your body temperature is not too high. AI Gate. The other day was something related to automatic checkout at shops or something where it all boiled down to some computer reading QR codes
The other day I read an article about "uncovering tax fraud with algorithms and AI". The innovation: examining tax records not just from an individual perspective, but from a family perspective. Essentially a split-apply-combine. AI!
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#43The talk about "AI" is not just misinterpreted in the press, but the ML/AI practitioner themselves too. I can understand academia & researcher hyping it up, they need to chase the funding. But code boot-camp "ML" engineers being all over-hyping is really, really annoying and contribute to the problem far worse. These people are easy to spot: go to an ML/AI meetup or community that also shares latest tech. Since those…
The so called “AI” as they are practicing it now, is not intelligent at all. Sure, they found a new trick to recognize cat pictures. But this technique was discovered decades ago. It just took this long for computers to speed up, for it to be usable. Instead, they should change the moniker from Artificial Intelligence, to Artificial Insight. Because all it is doing is to comb through all that random data, to look for…
> But this technique was discovered decades ago. It just took this long for computers to speed up, for it to be usable.
This isn't really true. Old techniques don't work well even with modern compute. Now, try replacing sigmoid with ReLU in old networks and see it improve.
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#44The talk about "AI" is not just misinterpreted in the press, but the ML/AI practitioner themselves too. I can understand academia & researcher hyping it up, they need to chase the funding. But code boot-camp "ML" engineers being all over-hyping is really, really annoying and contribute to the problem far worse. These people are easy to spot: go to an ML/AI meetup or community that also shares latest tech. Since those…
> The talk about "AI" is not just misinterpreted in the press, but the ML/AI practitioner themselves too.
Of course, for example when you use the phrase "ML/AI".
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#45The talk about "AI" is not just misinterpreted in the press, but the ML/AI practitioner themselves too. I can understand academia & researcher hyping it up, they need to chase the funding. But code boot-camp "ML" engineers being all over-hyping is really, really annoying and contribute to the problem far worse. These people are easy to spot: go to an ML/AI meetup or community that also shares latest tech. Since those…
You might underestimate the speed and velocity of advancement in the field. A few years ago creating artificial data or images that are indistinguishable from real data was impossible. Now machines generate information, like entire videos that are real but fake. This can, and has already (look at facebook and fake profiles), led to big problems and in a few years the world will change quite drastically because of fur…
I appreciate your enthusiasm but we're still not there. The videos look almost perfect, with "almost" still oscillating around the uncanny valley. Self-driving cars are almost totally self-driving and are almost not killing people. GPT3 uses fluent English and can be used to generate almost meaningful content in most contexts. Speech recognition progressed enormously and can be used to transcribe most well-pronouncing native English speakers in favorable circumstances. It seems like we're slowly getting there, but the last mile is the hardest to finish.
For many companies this is not a problem because they can afford not to care. When you operate at the scale of Google, you can not afford not to use some form of ML to detect abuse, and you don't care about false positives because they're meaningless at this scale - you just get a couple of grumpy folks complaining they lost their accounts. But when you do something more meaningful, for example translation, you can't depend on machine translation - you can very well use it for the first draft, but if you delivered it to your client in that form, you'd be laughed at and you'd quickly be out of business. So yes, great advancements, still far from being there.
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#46I find a lot of the media (here in Japan anyways) call literally every automation by computers or machines AI. Example, there’s an automated gate that only opens if a scanner finds your body temperature is not too high. AI Gate. The other day was something related to automatic checkout at shops or something where it all boiled down to some computer reading QR codes
The other day I read an article about "uncovering tax fraud with algorithms and AI". The innovation: examining tax records not just from an individual perspective, but from a family perspective. Essentially a split-apply-combine. AI!
I read an article about a large firm of lawyers removing gendered language from their pro-forma documents. The article claimed they were going to use AI to achieve this. It's not even worth pointing out what is the obvious method for this task.
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#47On the other hand, we are today daily using tools that 20 years ago certainly was studied as AI, such as speech recognition and image classification. Maybe they are not using general artificial intelligence to do it, but I think that is beside the point. They are accomplishing something that used to be thought to require some kind of intelligence to accomplish. But as soon we succeed with one of these tasks, the magi…
I agree there is a moving goalpost for what counts as good enough to call "AI". But with the recent revolution in machine learning the goalpost kind of went backwards. The successes in machine learning problems have tended to come from "adjacent" fields like pattern recognition, information retrieval, plain old statistics, etc. Meanwhile the AI researchers were pursuing more ambitious directions that didn't pan out. Then AI researchers basically "annexed" these lower level methods that worked.
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might underestimate the speed and velocity of advancement in the field. A few years ago creating artificial data or images that are indistinguishable from real data was impossible. Now machines generate information, like entire videos that are real but fake. This can, and has already (look at facebook and fake profiles), led to big problems and in a few years the world will change quite drastically because of fur…
I appreciate your enthusiasm but we're still not there. The videos look almost perfect, with "almost" still oscillating around the uncanny valley. Self-driving cars are almost totally self-driving and are almost not killing people. GPT3 uses fluent English and can be used to generate almost meaningful content in most contexts. Speech recognition progressed enormously and can be used to transcribe most well-pronouncin…
This is what I've started thinking of as the ‘pretty dumb for a human’ take on AI.
If your requirement for believing something is on the path to AGI is for it to practically already be AGI, it's no longer predictively meaningful. This sort of argument suffices to dismiss, for example, the possibility that today's humans evolved from apes, or even that today's humans could have come from pre-language, pre-civilization humans.
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The so called “AI” as they are practicing it now, is not intelligent at all. Sure, they found a new trick to recognize cat pictures. But this technique was discovered decades ago. It just took this long for computers to speed up, for it to be usable. Instead, they should change the moniker from Artificial Intelligence, to Artificial Insight. Because all it is doing is to comb through all that random data, to look for…
> But this technique was discovered decades ago. It just took this long for computers to speed up, for it to be usable. This isn't really true. Old techniques don't work well even with modern compute. Now, try replacing sigmoid with ReLU in old networks and see it improve.
Many 90’s era attempts that failed do work vastly better on modern hardware. There are many tweaks that showed up once people could fine tune using vast amounts of processing power, but I would put ~80% of the advancements from HW and 20% from algorithms.
Having a million or more times the processing power really makes or breaks modern ML.
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate your enthusiasm but we're still not there. The videos look almost perfect, with "almost" still oscillating around the uncanny valley. Self-driving cars are almost totally self-driving and are almost not killing people. GPT3 uses fluent English and can be used to generate almost meaningful content in most contexts. Speech recognition progressed enormously and can be used to transcribe most well-pronouncin…
This is what I've started thinking of as the ‘pretty dumb for a human’ take on AI. If your requirement for believing something is on the path to AGI is for it to practically already be AGI, it's no longer predictively meaningful. This sort of argument suffices to dismiss, for example, the possibility that today's humans evolved from apes, or even that today's humans could have come from pre-language, pre-civilization…
Problem is that the AI we have is nothing like biological intelligence. Our super computers can't even compete with the intelligence of an ant, how am I to believe that replicating human intelligence is around the corner or that we are even moving the right direction to get there?