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Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

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Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#2
Unrelated to the article but I ran across an interesting result recently that is related to AI (and the hype surrounding it): Let A be an agent and let S be a Turing machine deductive system. If A correctly understands S, then A can correctly deduce that S does not have A’s capability for solving halting problems. [1]

One way to interpret this is that all existing AI systems are obviously halting computations simply because they are acyclic dataflow graphs of floating point operations and this fact is both easy to state and to prove in any formal system that can express the logic of contemporary AI models. So no matter how much Ray Kurzweil might hope, we are still very far from the singularity.

1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-014-9349-3

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#4
Michael I. Jordan is spot on. We have NO artificial intelligent systems, for any sensible definition of "intelligent". None. ZERO.

We have "big data". We have (brittle and rather poor) "pattern recognition". We have (very limited) "simulate a conversation". But we do not even know what "intelligence" really means!

We (the industry) should recognise "AI" as term that has become essentially meaningless. "AI" is now nothing but a marketing splat, like "New and Improved" or "Low Fat".

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#5
That's what pisses me the most about world these days, my pet peeve. Words seem to be losing their meaning. People just throw whatever words they want.

Recently I've been shopping for a steam station and I've seen that the top of the line Philips Stream&Go has a camera "with AI" that recognizes the fabric. The sales guy was persistent that that claim was true. Oh please. If it was, it was only in the simplest, most technical way possible so as not to get sued. There's more heuristics in there than anything.

Or the "luxury & exclusive iPhone etui for $9.99". Or "we value our customers privacy". Or the Apple "Genius". Or the amount of "revolutionary" things "invented" at Apple for that matter (not that they don't, just not as much as they claim).

(BTW, don't know how I landed on Apple at the end, they're not the worst offenders)

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#6
post #4

Michael I. Jordan is spot on. We have NO artificial intelligent systems, for any sensible definition of "intelligent". None. ZERO. We have "big data". We have (brittle and rather poor) "pattern recognition". We have (very limited) "simulate a conversation". But we do not even know what "intelligence" really means! We (the industry) should recognise "AI" as term that has become essentially meaningless. "AI" is now not…

I wonder what the breakthrough will be is it hardware or software. Seems like we can make as powerful of a computer as we want/try but what makes sentience. Does a fly or gnat have sentience?

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#7
post #4

Michael I. Jordan is spot on. We have NO artificial intelligent systems, for any sensible definition of "intelligent". None. ZERO. We have "big data". We have (brittle and rather poor) "pattern recognition". We have (very limited) "simulate a conversation". But we do not even know what "intelligence" really means! We (the industry) should recognise "AI" as term that has become essentially meaningless. "AI" is now not…

I've been having "AI" debates like this for about 10 years now, and I think they usually go in 1 of 2 directions:

1. We don't know what intelligence is 2. AI can never be intelligent because humans are special (in various ways)

Of the two, I think that 1 is the more compelling to talk about. Let's look at state of the art Large Language Models (GPT, BERT, BART, T5, etc.) Everyone claims that they can't be intelligent because they're just cleverly predicting the next tokens. The most common failure mode of this is that they hallucinate - if you ask them to do something for you, they'll get it wrong in a way that kind of makes sense. There are some other more subtle problems as well like common sense reasoning, negation, and factuality. We could say that because of these problems they are not "intelligent". But why is that so important? Can we say with certainty that human intelligence is more than just patterned IO? If it is just highly tuned patterned IO with the environment, perhaps we have discovered intelligent systems, but they're handicapped because they're limited in their sensory perception (read: data modalities). And perhaps by combining several of these models in clever ways, we will end up with an architecture for pattern IO that is indistinguishable from human intelligence.

The naysayers claim that this won't work because we'll still end up with mere pattern prediction machines. But this starts to look like a "humans are special" argument.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#8
Interestingly as soon as a system works or we understand it's principles we stop using the term "artificial intelligence". It becomes image recognition, autonomous cars, or face detection. We mostly talk about artificial intelligence when we dont really know or understand what we are talking about :-)

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#10
post #8

Interestingly as soon as a system works or we understand it's principles we stop using the term "artificial intelligence". It becomes image recognition, autonomous cars, or face detection. We mostly talk about artificial intelligence when we dont really know or understand what we are talking about :-)

Not really, the autonomous machine learning systems designed to solve games with limited observability are called AI properly, unlike say game scripts on fuzzy logic that are attempting to fool the user into thinking the machine is actually smart; or ones that work on fully observable games. (So no, AlphaZero is not exactly an AI.)

And for an intelligence, they are still pretty bad at figuring things out.

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