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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

#101

Post by tomp »

eanzenberg wrote: post #87

This is so strange. If you use facebook, google, netflix, apple, microsoft, amazon, tesla or a whole host of other products and services you are interfacing with AI all the time, sometimes as the core product of the service. To think there’s no value there is asinine. Comes up a lot on HN. Seems like people who get excited for these types of articles are set in their ways and don’t want to progress forward.

Aside from possibly Google, all of these products / services would have just as much, if not more, value without any AI beyond basic statistics.

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

#102

Post by logicslave »

tomp wrote: post #101
eanzenberg wrote: post #87

This is so strange. If you use facebook, google, netflix, apple, microsoft, amazon, tesla or a whole host of other products and services you are interfacing with AI all the time, sometimes as the core product of the service. To think there’s no value there is asinine. Comes up a lot on HN. Seems like people who get excited for these types of articles are set in their ways and don’t want to progress forward.

Aside from possibly Google, all of these products / services would have just as much, if not more, value without any AI beyond basic statistics.

Amazon retail is currently in the process of baking advanced deep learning models into every area of their retail process. Its all becoming automated. Just because its not talked about openly doesnt mean its not happening

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

#103

Post by logicslave »

Amazon retail is currently in the process of baking advanced deep learning models into every area of their retail process. Its all becoming automated. Just because its not talked about openly doesnt mean its not happening.

These people at the economist are completely out of the loop.

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

#104

Post by Judgmentality »

p1esk wrote: post #56
mattlondon wrote: post #53

The trouble is that people have been sold this idea that ML/AI can do amazing things, without properly being told that really the things it can do are quite narrowly-scoped. They've been sold the Star Trek computer idea. For example, years ago I was working on a prototype/proof-of-concept thing for instrumenting industrial machinery with stick-on small computers. Simple stuff - attach accelerators, temperature, humid…

Things may have changed over the past 5 years or so. Things may have changed over the past 5 weeks or so with GPT-3.

Until GPT-3 can write something meaningful, it's really just a showcase of the technology and a gimmick of a product.

Sure it's cool, but what problem is it solving? As far as I can tell the only useful function it has is polluting the internet with pseudo-intellectual comments to promote some agenda (likely political). So now that I think about it, it actually would be incredibly valuable for things like subverting democracy.

I'm still waiting for AI to figure out self-driving cars, natural language processing, and other "holy grail" problems that researchers have been chipping away at for decades but we are still a long way from having "solved" them.

Also in the case of self-driving cars, there is actually a very serious problem of it being difficult to guarantee safety. You can't tie every input to every output to demonstrate how it will behave (it is way, way, wayyyyyyyy too big for that), so you have to show statistically by driving so many miles that it's better. Which is still sound from an engineering perspective! But it leads to things like Teslas driving into trucks parked sideways across the road because the engineers simply never predicted it would ever happen. And now it's happened multiple times!

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

#105

Post by stjo »

tomp wrote: post #101
eanzenberg wrote: post #87

This is so strange. If you use facebook, google, netflix, apple, microsoft, amazon, tesla or a whole host of other products and services you are interfacing with AI all the time, sometimes as the core product of the service. To think there’s no value there is asinine. Comes up a lot on HN. Seems like people who get excited for these types of articles are set in their ways and don’t want to progress forward.

Aside from possibly Google, all of these products / services would have just as much, if not more, value without any AI beyond basic statistics.

I think the engineers with access to their data know their job. Surely they run a/b tests and know for sure AI improves their metric of choice.

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

#106

Post by _y5hn »

eanzenberg wrote: post #87

This is so strange. If you use facebook, google, netflix, apple, microsoft, amazon, tesla or a whole host of other products and services you are interfacing with AI all the time, sometimes as the core product of the service. To think there’s no value there is asinine. Comes up a lot on HN. Seems like people who get excited for these types of articles are set in their ways and don’t want to progress forward.

Yet, every "suggestion" is infinitely worse than "My List", that I curated for myself. Interface hiding the fact of dwindling library and quality of content. Chronology gets perverted with random posts that later can't be easily navigated or referenced. Menu-items unexpectedly fade in and out for unclear reasons and lack of anticipation. In many cases these improvements are to user's detriment and confusion, worsening interface, UX and value for money proposition. In too many areas, end user is themselves the target, for ads, manipulation, propaganda, manufactured outrage and lies.

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

#107

Post by stephc_int13 »

eanzenberg wrote: post #87

This is so strange. If you use facebook, google, netflix, apple, microsoft, amazon, tesla or a whole host of other products and services you are interfacing with AI all the time, sometimes as the core product of the service. To think there’s no value there is asinine. Comes up a lot on HN. Seems like people who get excited for these types of articles are set in their ways and don’t want to progress forward.

So far, I have not been impressed by what Google/FB/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple have done with ML and the oceans of data they have.

Mostly boring statistical analysis wrapped in a very power inefficient way.

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

#108

Post by robbrown451 »

eanzenberg wrote: post #87

This is so strange. If you use facebook, google, netflix, apple, microsoft, amazon, tesla or a whole host of other products and services you are interfacing with AI all the time, sometimes as the core product of the service. To think there’s no value there is asinine. Comes up a lot on HN. Seems like people who get excited for these types of articles are set in their ways and don’t want to progress forward.

Nah, those aren't AI.... well, not to those who define AI as "things that can be done by humans but not by machines, done by machines." :)

It's quite the exercise in goalpost moving.

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

#109

Post by fock »

eanzenberg wrote: post #85
cjhanks wrote: post #59

We have also been watching these machine learning models for 6 months: - increase the volatility in virtually every financial market they touched - be exploited by adversarial learning networks to amplify funded propaganda as news - use poorly contrived sentiment analysis to generate incomprehensibly meaningless news headlines These non-linear "function approximators" have absolutely unpredictable and insane non-line…

This is so strange. If you use facebook, google, netflix, apple, microsoft, amazon or a whole host of other services you are interfacing with AI all the time. To think there’s no value there is asinine. Comes up a lot on HN. Seems like people set in their ways who don’t want to progress forward.

oh yeah, magnificient AI at Google search. Picked up my ebook-reader again, wanted to know about the state of linux there. so do a search: " linux ssh" (since a good shell is the point, where you can start developing). Turns out, the first 3 pages want to sell me the same thing I already own, with one outlier selling nutritional supplements. Oh well done AI!

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

#110

Post by 0x262d »

msla wrote: post #44

These days, you can translate text by pointing your phone at it and taking a picture. Thirty years ago, this would have been unambiguously AI, because it would have been not only impossible, but stupid impossible like something out of a soft SF novel where little self-flying robots deliver stuff to your house, or you can ask a computer a question in a natural voice and reasonably expect a civil, natural-language answ…

this is also one-sided though - the translation is cool but only kind of works and the quality varies a lot based on language, becoming unusably bad for many languages. so there's some amount of dismissal by AI boosters of its failures that people have grown accustomed to.
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