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We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

calpaterson.com

31–40 of 427 posts

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#31

Since Dartmouth AI looks like a story of naive visions, exaggerated promises, massive disappointment, recurrent divisionary tactics, rebranding and snak oil sale. Until finally a light on the horizon became visible and academically camouflaged wishful thinking could be materialized into usable products. A groping in the dark, nothing more. There are probably good reasons why the blind watchmaker needed billions of ye…

What?

To make a long story short, you may find it all here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intell...

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#32

amazing quotes: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of theconsumers and that we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have acompetitive search engi…

I guess the prospect of literally a hundred billion dollars each made them reconsider.

It would be interested to know how this process looked like. I'd imagine it was very gradual and consisted of little steps each leading to the next one, and when they finally started to serve ads they were probably thinking it's not that bad. I believe crossing that line made paved the way for considering things like tracking the whole web morally acceptable, maybe even positive.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#33
post #9
post #5

This seems it will be applied to self driving technology in a huge way. All of these companies doing advanced AI vision detection, classification etc... they’re really hard problems. But the whole challenge will eventually become nullified when every single road sign, landmark, and the road itself are tagged internally with metadata. Instead of trying to decipher how does this PNG of a speed limit sign translate into…

My car already does a pretty good job of showing the speed limits (and it's definitely based on computer vision/ works offline and in places where map metadata is poor). And it doesn't have "self driving", just a limited "pilot assist". Not sure why reading road signs is used as and example of "extremely hard thing to do" - there are other way harder things that cars can't currently do. E.g. figuring out the right sp…

Actually I think road speeds for various curves are pretty standardized, so it shouldn't be that hard for the car to estimate the correct speed based on the curve.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#34

amazing quotes: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of theconsumers and that we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have acompetitive search engi…

I sometimes ask myself if they are looking back and questioning all the little decisions they took and think, "where did we go wrong"?

I think that you end up convincing yourself that you did the best, despite the obvious differences between what you were thinking back in the day and now. Also, you would make yourself think it was probably the only possible outcome and your younger self was wrong or at least very, very naïve.

Or at least that's what I would do, sitting on a mountain of dollars.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#35
post #3

The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an opinion and you’ll get 5 pages of custom built “review” sites that offer nothing useful besides copious ads and paid click-through to Amazon. Even when Google knows where I go with my searches, they still refuse to show those sites for anything that might have commercial interest. So much for customized search. I get tired of being the product. Can we get…

I literally append "site:reddit.com" like in the article whenever I'm looking for reviews and comparisons. Google is nearly useless for finding content among the sea of crap and autogenerated near-crap (like Slant). I might click on the links going to sites that I half-remember by name, but for open-ended searches it's a lost war.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#36

amazing quotes: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of theconsumers and that we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have acompetitive search engi…

Well, they weren’t wrong, but then they saw there was nothing wrong with the first passage you quoted.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#37
The problem is that google created a negative feedback loop with the web. People have a tangible interest to game google, which worsens the quality of their AI datasets, which makes their AI suggestions terrible. There was the expectation that google's AI suggestions and info boxes would improve over time, but i 've noticed them getting worse and consider them a permanently broken gimmick now. They probably have the same problem in their Ads business which tries to optimize revenues

Voice recognition on the other hand keeps getting better because there's no tangible benefit for someone to game it.

Perhaps, crawling the web is the worst way to go about creating a thinking AI

Incidentally, i think the solution to web search is peer review: websites ranking other websites, and having themselves punished when they mis-rank (which is what pagerank was originally)

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#38
post #3

The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an opinion and you’ll get 5 pages of custom built “review” sites that offer nothing useful besides copious ads and paid click-through to Amazon. Even when Google knows where I go with my searches, they still refuse to show those sites for anything that might have commercial interest. So much for customized search. I get tired of being the product. Can we get…

I literally append "site:reddit.com" like in the article whenever I'm looking for reviews and comparisons. Google is nearly useless for finding content among the sea of crap and autogenerated near-crap (like Slant). I might click on the links going to sites that I half-remember by name, but for open-ended searches it's a lost war.

Google modified the algorithm a while back to ignore such flags at times.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#40
post #2

> There are woolly intimations that self driving cars will read roadsigns to work out what the speed limit is for any stretch of road but the truth seems to be that they use the current GPS co-ordinates to access manually entered data on speedlimits. I actually didn't know Tesla cars relied on GPS + map data w/ speed limits until recently. What a disappointment, apparently it causes all sorts of issues with sudden br…

And sometimes the map is wrong but the sign is stolen or unreadable.
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