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An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

economist.com

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Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#11

Post by mtgp1000 »

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society.

We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potential that general purpose function approximators are having right now across all domains. The applications are not only limitless but they're being realized right now and it's insulting to have my work dismissed so shallowly by someone who speaks with such authority.

There's far more to do with ML and AI than self driving cars and shitty ad recommendations. It's just that the people who live at the intersection of mathematics, programming, and third domains are rare; give us some time. Even $16T in value by 2030 is 2-4 US GDPs from something which basically did not exist 5 years ago.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#12

Post by zby »

unreal6 wrote: post #4

"The result is an artificial idiot savant that can excel at well-bounded tasks, but can get things very wrong if faced with unexpected input." I think this gets to the core of what is still a limitation of current technologies. Venturing into the unknown is still a deeply relevant task that seems unlikely to be replaced by computers anytime soon.

This is the same thing people have been writing about computers since 1950s. At that level of abstraction the progress is invisible - and yet: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/10/the-obligatory-gpt-3-p... https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/06/a-very-unlikely-chess-...

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#13

Post by stoddur »

corporateslave5 wrote: post #2

Nlp is getting better at a rapid rate. Articles like this are worthless click bait. No one knows what ml will look like in ten years. And for the record, ten years is a short period of time for a technology that could have such a massive impact.

I think it's also a matter of expectation. People expecting conscious thinking machines with reasoning abilities are going to be disappointed but that doesn't mean AI as a field is useless and a big hoax. There are plenty of narrow problems where we can benefit from the use of AI. I am an MD and I see a lot of use cases of AI based technology in the future within the medical field though it needs more co-work between AI researchers and medical researchers. Good quality scientific validation of these systems needs to take place and that will take some time.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#14

Post by derivativethrow »

distant_hat wrote: post #3
corporateslave5 wrote: post #2

Nlp is getting better at a rapid rate. Articles like this are worthless click bait. No one knows what ml will look like in ten years. And for the record, ten years is a short period of time for a technology that could have such a massive impact.

People don't understand what exponential improvement means. GPT-3 is a 175B with B parameter model. Another few rounds of doubling and we could be seeing models spit out short stories and novellas.

Have you read the GPT-3 paper? The authors are pretty forthright about how the GPT techniques likely won't scale much beyond 175B parameters.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#16

Post by MiroF »

mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

Absolutely. To be perfectly honest, it surprises me the extent to which ML naysaying seems to be popular on HN. The evidence of enormous progress seems pretty obvious to me.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#17

Post by mellosouls »

mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

There has been next to ZERO progress towards genuine AGI despite a never-ending deluge of AI articles; that's normally the cause of scepticism.

After several decades and a much-hyped last few years we have fake cleverness - impressively so in both cases - but nothing more.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#18

Post by jbay808 »

ur-whale wrote: post #6
distant_hat wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't understand what exponential improvement means. GPT-3 is a 175B with B parameter model. Another few rounds of doubling and we could be seeing models spit out short stories and novellas.

Yet, the darn thing still can't reason.

Five years ago we would have said "the darn thing still can't write a cohesive paragraph".

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#19

Post by hopfscotch7 »

MiroF wrote: post #16
mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

Absolutely. To be perfectly honest, it surprises me the extent to which ML naysaying seems to be popular on HN. The evidence of enormous progress seems pretty obvious to me.

Yeah, we sure are good at solving the iris data set nowadays.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#20

Post by mellosouls »

MiroF wrote: post #16
mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

Absolutely. To be perfectly honest, it surprises me the extent to which ML naysaying seems to be popular on HN. The evidence of enormous progress seems pretty obvious to me.

There have been plenty of articles about progress in machine learning, but nothing in genuine (human-like) intelligence.

I would expect that's the issue for most people who are interested in the subject.

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