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Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

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Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#142

Who would have guessed that having a highly complex black box means you can't explain what's going on inside that black box... My pet theory is that this is the reason why Siri, Alexa and co. still are shit and haven't moved an inch forward since their inception. I like to play "sleep music" through Alexa when I bring my kid to bed. For his mid day nap it all works perfectly. But in the evening when I say the same ph…

Are you sure you are speaking as clearly in the evening? I don’t understand how voice command recognition could fluctuate based on AI and time of day.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't explain what's going on inside that black box Do you have a better solution for speech recognition? We all know how well speech recognition works in reality, and we know language models can accomplish more complex tasks than setting your music and lights. These models are not state of the art, they are cheap versions for scaling up to millions of users. It's sad but we rarely get to see SOTA in a product.

OP just described ridiculously bad behavior that consistently changes over time, not randomly random results. That's more a case of bad engineering (ie light sensor interfering with microphone data feed) or some stupid management decision then 'AI is complicated but we don't have anything better'

I think it was management that chose to go with a cheaper model, not the engineers. They got to think about profits.

You do realise that a neural net, given the same input, will always give the same output, if you set your random seeds of course. It doesn't depend on time of day unless you degrade the service when it is overloaded - say, you use a different model in the evening that is 10x faster but 2x worse.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#144

Who would have guessed that having a highly complex black box means you can't explain what's going on inside that black box... My pet theory is that this is the reason why Siri, Alexa and co. still are shit and haven't moved an inch forward since their inception. I like to play "sleep music" through Alexa when I bring my kid to bed. For his mid day nap it all works perfectly. But in the evening when I say the same ph…

Are you sure you are speaking as clearly in the evening? I don’t understand how voice command recognition could fluctuate based on AI and time of day.

I think its a Homekit to Siri issue. I have the opposite issue, Siri almost always works for me for turning off the lights but the Home app works only half of the time.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#145
post #40

I don't see a problem with not being able to explain how something works as long as it's not failing empirically. Scientists also cannot explain how humans work in detail and yet humans are "allowed" to do many things and make many decisions that cannot be fully explained. The question for me is...if I have an AI system that outperforms humans empirically, why do I need to understand how it works to use it? In fact i…

> The question for me is...if I have an AI system that outperforms humans empirically, why do I need to understand how it works to use it?

Because, for a start, if you don't have a clue how it works, it's pretty difficult to have any confidence that it will actually outperform humans empirically in the long run, or in a specific set of circumstances.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#146

Who would have guessed that having a highly complex black box means you can't explain what's going on inside that black box... My pet theory is that this is the reason why Siri, Alexa and co. still are shit and haven't moved an inch forward since their inception. I like to play "sleep music" through Alexa when I bring my kid to bed. For his mid day nap it all works perfectly. But in the evening when I say the same ph…

Are you sure you are speaking as clearly in the evening? I don’t understand how voice command recognition could fluctuate based on AI and time of day.

The AI might be trying to be "smart" and factor in the time of day when interpreting commands.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#147

Who would have guessed that having a highly complex black box means you can't explain what's going on inside that black box... My pet theory is that this is the reason why Siri, Alexa and co. still are shit and haven't moved an inch forward since their inception. I like to play "sleep music" through Alexa when I bring my kid to bed. For his mid day nap it all works perfectly. But in the evening when I say the same ph…

My first thought is that there may be something environmental... interfering with your voice. Something like someone watching a show in the evening, or turning on a fan when it's time for bed.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP just described ridiculously bad behavior that consistently changes over time, not randomly random results. That's more a case of bad engineering (ie light sensor interfering with microphone data feed) or some stupid management decision then 'AI is complicated but we don't have anything better'

I think it was management that chose to go with a cheaper model, not the engineers. They got to think about profits. You do realise that a neural net, given the same input, will always give the same output, if you set your random seeds of course. It doesn't depend on time of day unless you degrade the service when it is overloaded - say, you use a different model in the evening that is 10x faster but 2x worse.

Good luck always getting the same output from a microphone. Maybe the neural net works perfectly fine on crisp samples, but falls apart when some noise is introduced. Maybe it works fine with most kinds of noise, but not a specific type of noise generated in the evening.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> suspect this article was written by AI. Or a hack journalist. A friend of mine did not belive that the AI based astroturfing problem is real, he though he would tell apart human tweets / letters / phonecalls vs bots. But have you seen some of the dumb shit real people post? the overlap between mental people and bad ai is huge

I'm not sure how many people have messed around with the Character.ai beta but personally I'm awed that it does some of the things it does. It predictably fails at times and makes some odd mistakes, but at other times it insightfully points things out that I hadn't considered and explains itself quite eloquently when prompted. It's a lot better discussing literature and philosophy than science, though... and a compul…

We're also providing the input to train character ai on good quality results

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#150

Who would have guessed that having a highly complex black box means you can't explain what's going on inside that black box... My pet theory is that this is the reason why Siri, Alexa and co. still are shit and haven't moved an inch forward since their inception. I like to play "sleep music" through Alexa when I bring my kid to bed. For his mid day nap it all works perfectly. But in the evening when I say the same ph…

This is why I don't even like the "AI assisted autocomplete". I want consistency, not fanciness. consistency breeds productivity. autocompleting different things from 1 file to the next is not helpful.

Statistical inference also regresses to the mean. And the mean for spelling and grammar skills in society is regrettably low.

In the last year or so I've noticed more and more that I have to fix misspellings or grammatical mistakes that were introduced by autocorrect. The most common culprits I notice are contractions (when I am sick I am not "I'll", "its" sometimes actually the contracted subject and verb, etc).

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