IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#111

Post by ModernMech » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #43

xevb3k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the big successes? Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me. Language translation (which for the languages I’m interested in (Japanese) is still almost totally unusable? Self driving cars? Which are not yet in production (and where the social issues are probably far harder than the technical ones, and likely have been since the 90s). Is there some big application if ML that I’m missing that is…

> Self driving cars? Which are not yet in production Yes they are. What do you mean, not in production? Maybe there aren't millions of fully autonomous cars on the road today, but there will be soon. They sure are in production. Companies like Tesla are making production hardware self-driving cars right now - full autonomy coming soon, of course. > Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me. Speech recogn…

> Yes they are. What do you mean, not in production? Maybe there aren't millions of fully autonomous cars on the road today, but there will be soon. They sure are in production.

Huh? They are in production but not yet in production, but they sure are in production? Can I go to the store and buy one? No. So they are still building the things!

> Speech recognition is 100% amazing. The phones never ever hear me wrong any more, not ever, not once. The main problem I have with it is interpretation, which can be shocking, shocking bad.

I simply do not believe your first point, based on my own experience. 100%? Really? Moreover, your second point, that the interpretation is off, is most of the problem. That's where 99% of the work for the foreseeable future will be spent on this problem.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#112

Post by mcguire » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

nartz wrote: post #7

The way IBM talks about it is completely bs. However, this round of AI is definitely better than the last one. Specifically, whats different this time around is that previously, expert based systems and many machine learning techniques require that you specifically hand code things like: 1. Parsing and providing the input dataset into 'features' 2. Hand coding the logic and rules for many different cases (Expert syst…

One of the neat parts of expert systems was that you could get surprising and bizarre interactions between rules, leading to entertainingly nonsensical answers.

One of the neat parts of neural networks is that you have no idea what rules it's using, but it still manages to produce answers that are sometimes not entertainingly nonsensical.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#113

Post by NeutronStar » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

rescripting wrote: post #96

earenndil wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So...one person died? Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars? It's never possible to get 100% accuracy.

I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fin…

Their claim is about hardware, not software.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#114

Post by ModernMech » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #48

Analemma_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate. Amazon's system for finding related products fucking sucks. After I buy an X, I see ads for more X for months, which is completely useless. Sometimes I'll see ads for the exact thing I bought... what?!

Yep, I see this all the time too. Buy a printer? Amazon thinks you want to buy a new printer every day for months. Google too. I bought a Pixel 2 online, from Google, signed in to Google. Now I see ads on Google ad networks all day long to buy a Pixel 2. It has been 5 months of daily ads from Google to buy the phone I just bought. Ridiculous. Ad networks are a clear financial win for AI - but they also show the ridic…

This. For all the talk about how Facebook is mining data to hyper-target customers, it still seems like they're still trying to throw stuff at the wall to see if it sticks.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#115

Post by durovo » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #79

stickfigure wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you are using, but speech recognition is amazing on my android device and has been for years. I rarely ever type anything into my phone anymore. It's a usability gamechanger.

> Not sure what you are using, but speech recognition is amazing on my android device and has been for years. Let me guess: white male native English speaker? Your Android device was built by you and trained for you specifically.

Non-white, non-native English speaker here. Speech recognition works very well for me too.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#116

Post by gnode » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

flamtap wrote: post #3

Dryken wrote: post #2

Anyway none of the company that pretend doing AI are actually doing AI. AI nowadays is pure branding bullshit.

I heard someone say that A.I. is just what we call technology that doesn't work yet. Once it works, we give it a specific name, like "natural speech recognition".

I think a reason for this is that in the early days of computing and AI research, strong AI / artificial general intelligence (AI possessing equivalent cognitive abilities to humans) was considered both to be within reach, and the most obvious solution to many problem domains. We now realise that things such as computer vision and natural language translation can be approximated with solutions falling far short of strong AI.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#117

Post by fixermark » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #39

fixermark wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate. The more you buy, the better it gets at anticipating what you want to buy. ... but the larger wins they've had are behind the scenes, in the predictive modeling that helps them get product into warehouses in front of demand spikes (and into geographically-relevant warehouses to satisfy the spikes).

> Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate. Amazon's system for finding related products fucking sucks. After I buy an X, I see ads for more X for months, which is completely useless. Sometimes I'll see ads for the exact thing I bought... what?!

I find that particular, oft-repeated bug fascinating. It's a known issue, but one that seems to spread across many vendors and ad networks. I have to assume there's something very stubborn about the system design that makes it harder to fix than it feels like it should be.

(One hypothesis: Perhaps for privacy reasons or Amazon-not-wanting-to-give-away-the-whole-farm-on-sale-conversion reasons, ad networks only have visibility onto what you've seen, not whether you actually closed the purchase).

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#118

Post by wintorez » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

I'm no expert in the field of AI or Machine Learning, so I have a question for the experts here? Has there been any theoretical breakthrough in the AI in the recent years? I knew we had neural networks and different types of classifiers, etc. for more than a few of decades now, so apart from better marketing, has there been a significant breakthrough that explains this sudden surge in the interest in AI?

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#119

Post by cirgue » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

saosebastiao wrote: post #59

nartz wrote: post #7

The way IBM talks about it is completely bs. However, this round of AI is definitely better than the last one. Specifically, whats different this time around is that previously, expert based systems and many machine learning techniques require that you specifically hand code things like: 1. Parsing and providing the input dataset into 'features' 2. Hand coding the logic and rules for many different cases (Expert syst…

> Now, it has become easier to train a model such as a neural net where you can provide much 'rawer' data; similarly you just provide it a 'goal' in the form of a loss function which it tries to optimize over the dataset. "just". Where is the mention of all of decisions on network size, node topologies, regularization, optimization methods, etc.. And you still have to do your first step. Deep learning is way more com…

And choosing a good loss function is not a small task either.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#120

Post by lifeformed » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

delinka wrote: post #106

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda how Tesla advertises autopilot as a self driving car that's safer than human drivers? > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/

But it’s technically correct: the hardware is present. The software isn’t there yet, that’s true. So is this a “lie by omission”? Reading the whole page, there’s this quote: “It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available.” What else needs to be said? At some point, critical thinking is required to navigate the world. The customer should ask “and when will…

I don't even think a lot of people would even consider the software side when reading that sentence. To the layperson, "Full self-driving hardware on all cars" sounds exactly like "These cars are self-driving".