Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI Update, Late 2019

blog.piekniewski.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 50 posts

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#11

Post by avip »

brenden2 wrote: post #2

Interesting read, I'm glad to see others are beginning to call the bluff on the AI hype machine. The summary is excellent: > The whole field of AI resembles a giant collective of wizards of Oz. A lot of effort is put in to convincing gullible public that AI is magic, where in fact it is really just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. The wizards use certain magical language, avoiding carefully to say anything that would in…

Wait but the Wizard of Oz actually helped the other characters, and he so did even after they had learned he has no magic powers.

I have no idea what's the moral here, if any.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#12

Post by jturpin »

sorenn111 wrote: post #10

Sure there is a lot of hype in AI/ML right now, but this post reads like there is an axe to grind with all ML. it ignores true progress made in a lot of areas and denigrates the whole field. to me it did not read like an objective post, but more like just a "all AI is bullshit" style blog post

Yeah that's where I'm at. There's this general sentiment that if AI does not solve everything immediately, then it is worthless and hype. Especially the part about not being able to deal with corner cases, forgetting that all AI needs to be valuable is to deal with such cases better than your average human, which isn't a very high bar.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#13

Post by curious_fella1 »

Jenz wrote: post #9

A refreshing view of AI, this excerpt I particulary enjoyed: > I mentioned in my previous half-year update, Open AI came up with a transformer based language model called GPT-2 and refused to release the full version fearing horrible consequence that may have to the future of humanity. Well, it did not take long before some dude - Aaron Gokaslan - managed to replicate the full model and released it in the name of sci…

God forbid that it takes more than a few days for decent chat bots to appear on Reddit from a troll farm in eastern europe/china/wherever based on these new models. Or has that already happened, and we're simply unaware?

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#14

Post by curious_fella1 »

At least one misleading source from the article: when talking about the limitations of Uber's self-driving tech, the author links to a source mentioning Uber may be paying license fees to Waymo for their AV tech, insinuating that Uber is unable to move its AV program forward on their own. The article linked actually mentions Uber being court-ordered to pay for the tech (the Lewandowski case)

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#15

Post by m463 »

sorenn111 wrote: post #10

Sure there is a lot of hype in AI/ML right now, but this post reads like there is an axe to grind with all ML. it ignores true progress made in a lot of areas and denigrates the whole field. to me it did not read like an objective post, but more like just a "all AI is bullshit" style blog post

I agree. Some people are hyping things, but this is expected.

All new technology is overestimated short term, but underestimated long term.

We might not have autonomous driving that takes our kids at school, but we have cars that can recognize lanes and other cars and complain if something is dangerous. We also have facial recognition, voice recognition and almost turing level chatbots to sell you stuff.

I suspect AI might be analogous to computer graphics. Purists in the beginning said the holy grail was ray tracing. However, people still worked on the problem, marching the state of the art forward with smaller building blocks, and now that ray tracing is appearing, a practiced eye is needed to see the difference.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#16

Post by jefb »

Sure, take some pot shots - some are valid criticisms - but OpenAI's Rubic's cube solver being lame does not mean AI needs to be re-evaluated.

Sure, AI has its faults; the tantalizing cost savings of automation has created some negative feedback loops - might that be more deserving of the question "what in the hell are we trying to accomplish and how exactly did we get here in the first place?"

A Rubic's cube solver is the problem? Really?

OpenAI (of now infamous Rubic's cube failure :p) released a hide-and-seek demo a few months back that gave me literal goosebumps. Little AI agents facing off in a game of hide and seek start evolving with seriously clever strategies. According to the author's bio (dynamic, time-aware ML systems, etc.) that sort of thing should be right up their ally!

Instead we get some sort of selective self-promotion hit piece - highlighting anecdotal failures while claiming some better AI based robotics startup is coming soon(tm).

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#17

Post by chubot »

nemo1618 wrote: post #6

>John Carmack is going to take a shot at AI. Whatever he accomplishes in that field I hope it will be equally as entertaining as Quake and equally as smart as the fast inverse square root algorithm. John Carmack did not invent the fast inverse square root algorithm. (I'm still rooting for him, though!)

Hm interesting, I knew it from Quake and implicitly assumed that it was Carmack's trick. But Wikipedia has some more history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Histo...

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#18

Post by AnimalMuppet »

m463 wrote: post #15
sorenn111 wrote: post #10

Sure there is a lot of hype in AI/ML right now, but this post reads like there is an axe to grind with all ML. it ignores true progress made in a lot of areas and denigrates the whole field. to me it did not read like an objective post, but more like just a "all AI is bullshit" style blog post

I agree. Some people are hyping things, but this is expected. All new technology is overestimated short term, but underestimated long term. We might not have autonomous driving that takes our kids at school, but we have cars that can recognize lanes and other cars and complain if something is dangerous. We also have facial recognition, voice recognition and almost turing level chatbots to sell you stuff. I suspect AI…

> All new technology is overestimated short term, but underestimated long term.

Well, no, some technology is overestimated short term and also overestimated long term.

For example, flying cars. Nuclear fusion (though that one could still come through). Gallium arsenide (still one of my favorite names for a speed-metal band, and still available as far as I know).

The question is, which category is AI going to be in? AI for specific tasks seems likely to be underestimated long term. AGI? My guess is that it's overestimated long term, because it isn't going to happen. That's a guess. Evidence? Don't have any. Guesses are like that.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#19

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jturpin wrote: post #12
sorenn111 wrote: post #10

Sure there is a lot of hype in AI/ML right now, but this post reads like there is an axe to grind with all ML. it ignores true progress made in a lot of areas and denigrates the whole field. to me it did not read like an objective post, but more like just a "all AI is bullshit" style blog post

Yeah that's where I'm at. There's this general sentiment that if AI does not solve everything immediately, then it is worthless and hype. Especially the part about not being able to deal with corner cases, forgetting that all AI needs to be valuable is to deal with such cases better than your average human, which isn't a very high bar.

Hmm. That means that in order for a human to get paid, they're going to have to be able to do something better than an AI can...

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#20

Post by andrepd »

jturpin wrote: post #12
sorenn111 wrote: post #10

Sure there is a lot of hype in AI/ML right now, but this post reads like there is an axe to grind with all ML. it ignores true progress made in a lot of areas and denigrates the whole field. to me it did not read like an objective post, but more like just a "all AI is bullshit" style blog post

Yeah that's where I'm at. There's this general sentiment that if AI does not solve everything immediately, then it is worthless and hype. Especially the part about not being able to deal with corner cases, forgetting that all AI needs to be valuable is to deal with such cases better than your average human, which isn't a very high bar.

No, I feel like that's the exact other way around. There's a general sentiment that AI will solve everything immediately and lead to a massive breakthrough in every single aspect of our lives, when in fact what has been accomplished so far in this "new AI" boom is improvements brute-force statistical fitting.
Post reply on HN