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

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

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 403 posts

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

#181

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

>> 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.

What exactly is your work? In research, including AI research, it is ordinary and expected for one's work to be subject to the most ruthless criticism. This is as it should be: only work that survives all criticism can really be expected to last.

If you are an AI researcher, you should be used to that by now and not take it personally.

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

#182

Post by SubiculumCode »

laingc wrote: post #96
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…

I completely agree with this. Let me add a non-US perspective that may surprise some people. I think a big part of what is holding back many companies from making effective, genuine, real-world use of AI is that a significant majority of the individuals involved are bad at their jobs . On the business side, there is an widespread unwillingness to acknowledge that technical people may be better placed to make decision…

Well hopefully startups that do so will outcompete the older models

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

#183

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

EE84M3i wrote: post #127
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…

Serious (and likely ignorant) question - what does linearity have to do with anything here? linear over what and why does non-linearity make something 'unpredictable'?

Linear models have more bias, so they represent current data less well and are more predictive of future, unseen data (think of a straight line through a point cloud).

Non-linear models have more variance so they represent current data better and are less predictive of future, unseen data (think of a line snaking around a point cloud).

An added complication is that deep neural net models are, in practice, vectors (or, well, tensors) of numbers so they are difficult to interpret. This and their extreme variance makes it hard to know how they will behave in the future.

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

#184

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

bronco21016 wrote: post #128
fock wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It’s doing exactly as it’s trained. Nudge the useds to buy more trinkets. Now just imagine how good it could be if it was being trained to actually give good search results instead of selling.

Unfortunately, Google Search (and Amazon and MS search and all three companies' assistants) doesn't work that well when it comes to selling you what you want to buy either:

https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes

But it sure can identify stripes.

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

#185

Post by robocat »

0x262d wrote: post #110
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.

> becoming unusably bad for many languages

I presume that is not due to a failure of the ML, but instead is often due to the lack of a good corpus of text, or the lack of appropriate manual training/nudging/correcting of the model for unprofitable languages.

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

#186

Post by webmaven »

andbberger wrote: post #74
renewiltord wrote: post #65

It's limited but so effective! The other day a friend asked for photos of her sister (also a friend) that I had because it's her birthday and she wanted to make a collage. I just searched on Google Photos by her name and it found a bunch because of the face classification. That's some good shit.

works great until I add epsilon of adversarial noise and turn your sister into an ostrich

The hard part of that would probably be getting unauthorized access to the photos in order to modify them in place, rather than the adversarial image perturbation per-se.

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

#187

Post by hamsterbooster »

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.

Many AI systems are used in the backend to increase revenue. Netflix has a very complex recommendation algorithm based on deep learning/statistics. Amazon uses a lot of machine learning to optimize transportation (NP-hard problem!) , sales, etc..

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

#188

Post by Olreich »

londons_explore wrote: post #38
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.

> can get things very wrong if faced with unexpected input Alice: Bob, Can you translate "Eat my shorts" into latin for me? Bob: No. I don't speak latin. Alice: Go on - try anyway. Bob: "Eatus mine shortus" Alice: Wrong! The answer is "Vescere bracis meis". You're totally wrong Bob! I was expecting more of you!

If models actually were able to tell you what they know and don’t know, then sure. But instead they just give you an output for any input you give them, whether they have a clue or not.

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

#189

Post by faitswulff »

neal_jones wrote: post #117
faitswulff wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it has also generated prodigious amounts of erotic fiction so that balances out some of those points, right?

I honestly don’t know if this is a joke or if there is a bunch of erotic fiction I’ve been missing

I was referring to AI Dungeon, actually, and yes it was a joke. But 100% true.

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

#190

Post by perl4ever »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #183
EE84M3i wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious (and likely ignorant) question - what does linearity have to do with anything here? linear over what and why does non-linearity make something 'unpredictable'?

Linear models have more bias, so they represent current data less well and are more predictive of future, unseen data (think of a straight line through a point cloud). Non-linear models have more variance so they represent current data better and are less predictive of future, unseen data (think of a line snaking around a point cloud). An added complication is that deep neural net models are, in practice, vectors (or…

I'm not good at math, but I'm confused by the association of AI with non-linear stuff, setting aside the association of non-linear with "bad". I thought ML involved linear algebra or something (says xkcd!) which would presumably be...linear?
Post reply on HN