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AI Update, Late 2019

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Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#21

Post by riyadparvez »

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 think we need a new word for this kind of posts anti-hype hype. Lot of people try to ride on anti-hype train to fame without bringing anything new to the table.

Anytime there's new progress in AI, you will see many comments or posts some variations of "but humans do it more efficiently" (in arbitrary dimension) or "what about the other problem AI didn't solve". More often than not these are just some lazy layman criticism that makes the posters feel smart without offering anything new or substantial.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#22

Post by m0zg »

It's good to have some skepticism, but there are things that genuinely work, which the author alludes to at the end of his diatribe. Unfortunately they happen to be less trendy things like surveillance, military, retail, factory QA, and other strictly perceptual tasks that are far cry from "self driving" cars or "AGI".

I'd also like to point out that very little of what you can see in those Boston Dynamics videos is "AI". It's mostly just good old fashioned control systems, just very sophisticated.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#23

Post by JonathanFly »

jefb wrote: post #16

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…

>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.

There may be genuine criticisms of that particular project, but 'only the actual solving is done via symbolic methods' is a non-sequitur. The Rubik's cube is just a generic physical task that requires dexterity, they could have done the same research with dominoes or blocks or playing Tic-Tac-Toe with random pens in various adverse conditions -- the point wouldn't be that the ML solves or doesn't solve the actual Tic Tac Toe!

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#24

Post by streetcat1 »

globuous wrote: post #4
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…

Agreed. I much prefer we would call it statistical intelligence. Although artificial intelligence is actually spot on. We just understand the wrong side of the ambiguity. Its not really intelligence that we have reproduced artificially - since it isn’t intelligence - but a fake intelligence, the artificial kind. We’ve created the artifice of intelligence, through statistics, but not intelligence. People knew long bef…

So advances in RL (Deepmind), are not merely statistical intelligence, those are true advancement in AI (not only ML). I.e. those a machine can train on their own data.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#25

Post by ousta »

curious_fella1 wrote: post #13
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?

yeah sure because western countries believe in free speech and never influence other countries policies.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#26

Post by m0zg »

sgt101 wrote: post #5
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…

But then the guy says 'oh yeah but I'm using the stuff that works'

Nobody ever reads that far before commenting. :-)

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#27

Post by DanielleMolloy »

This blog gets passed around a lot recently. While I do draw value from the thorough observations of developments, the amount of text the author spends on shallow negativity can feel like the same waste of time as the overhyping PR machine he is reacting to.

There is without doubt something novel in the successes of convnets for sensory perception, deep Q-learning for decades-old and new game problems, artificial curiosity, recent machine translation, generative models and their various applications. Recent models also found their way into for-profit companies. It’s legit to be fascinated by this, and I’d rather stand on the side that doesn’t remain in their cave.

AI research may have picked all current low-hanging fruits or hit a wall either soon or in ten years, nobody can know yet, so there is no reason to run around predicting the future painted in only positive or negative light.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#28

Post by boltzmannbrain »

> 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.

No, you're generalizing the marketing department at IBM over a deeply passionate, hard-working, brilliant community of scientists and engineers.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#29

Post by Veedrac »

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…

As someone who has posted an GPT-2 excerpt and accidentally had people confuse it for a human comment—I thought the context would make it obvious—calling a language model ‘pathetic’ for only occasionally getting math right hardly strikes me as a reasonable sort of complaint. Nor does disingenuously putting false words in OpenAI's mouth.

Re: AI Update, Late 2019

#30

Post by bitL »

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #27

This blog gets passed around a lot recently. While I do draw value from the thorough observations of developments, the amount of text the author spends on shallow negativity can feel like the same waste of time as the overhyping PR machine he is reacting to. There is without doubt something novel in the successes of convnets for sensory perception, deep Q-learning for decades-old and new game problems, artificial cur…

We need contrarian voices for both spotting any issues we might have overlooked, and assuring ourselves we know better.

It's still better than what I can read from "LinkedIn influencers" in my feed like "Logistic regression is still the best" or "Self-driving cars will never work because of long tail"...

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