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Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

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Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#21

Post by NalNezumi »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #3

I wish more people would use ML if it's ML instead of AI.

And I wish more people would call it what it really is: optimization(regression) & statistics. The sooner the buzzword "AI / ML" dies, the earlier we can shift the wrongly allocated investment to more promising things, (just as blockchain caused all the weird money flow in one direction).

Unlike the blockchain, "AI" brigade seems to just have too many people that benefit from keeping it over-hyped so I guess it won't come soon enough.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#22

Post by abhinav22 »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #18
abhinav22 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some degree yes. For example, can the fields of mathematics and advanced physics or programming be studied to the degree they are with an understanding of causation? For some things, correlation can be sufficient, so I can see where you are coming from. As a better counterpoint: if we could not distinguish between causation and correlation, why is general AI so hard?

> can the fields of mathematics and advanced physics or programming be studied to the degree they are with an understanding of causation? Yes, pretty much. Newton's laws are a perfect example of something that establishes a correlation but are useful absent accurate causation. They did just fine until we needed something better. Einstein provided this but can we be so sure gravity as a result of curved space is "true…

I see where you are coming from and don’t disagree on many points. From a layman’s perspective, the causation vs correlation distinction I think works well still and I also think “machine learning” is a misrepresentation in its current use and limitations. But this is now getting into subjective opinion so it’s neither right or wrong. Nice talking to you on this topic :)

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#23

Post by NalNezumi »

The talk about "AI" is not just misinterpreted in the press, but the ML/AI practitioner themselves too.

I can understand academia & researcher hyping it up, they need to chase the funding. But code boot-camp "ML" engineers being all over-hyping is really, really annoying and contribute to the problem far worse.

These people are easy to spot: go to an ML/AI meetup or community that also shares latest tech. Since those does not understand the underlying math, they cant follow the paper, the talk or the discussion, so they quickly try to shift the discussion to "AI ethics" or "AI will take over the world" hypothetical useless discussions. These seems to also be the first to run out to promise big things with "AI".

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#24

Post by _y5hn »

drdeca wrote: post #10
_y5hn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to prove electronic computers/TPU works like an organic human.

Why does it have to? If you define “learning” as “being like an organic human”, then sure perhaps it isn’t “learning” under that definition, but that seems like a poor definition, and I don’t think it is how people use the word. What does “learning” mean?

Good. Ponder on that question.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#25

Post by laichzeit0 »

abhinav22 wrote: post #6
forgingahead wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The machine learns via essentially trial-and-error to produce a model that best fits the data provided to it. The hope is that the training data is representative of "unseen" data the model later encounters in order to be useful. Seems pretty accurate given the broadness of the topic and variety of use cases.

Because it’s regression and statistical analysis. Nothing special about ML except applying it to large(r) datasets, particularly in areas where it works well (various recommendation based models for example).

A lot of current ML/AI algorithms come from the computer science departments in universities. They use different words for the same ideas that exist in the statistics community. There is more of a focus on prediction versus inference. The interpretability of these algorithms come second. Here’s a little translation mapping: https://3qeqpr26caki16dnhd19sv6by6v-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/...

Nothing really to get one’s panties in a knot about though.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#26

Post by kerng »

NalNezumi wrote: post #23

The talk about "AI" is not just misinterpreted in the press, but the ML/AI practitioner themselves too. I can understand academia & researcher hyping it up, they need to chase the funding. But code boot-camp "ML" engineers being all over-hyping is really, really annoying and contribute to the problem far worse. These people are easy to spot: go to an ML/AI meetup or community that also shares latest tech. Since those…

You might underestimate the speed and velocity of advancement in the field. A few years ago creating artificial data or images that are indistinguishable from real data was impossible. Now machines generate information, like entire videos that are real but fake. This can, and has already (look at facebook and fake profiles), led to big problems and in a few years the world will change quite drastically because of further advances and automation. This can go in good and bad directions... I'm just worried that downplaying it will cause pivoting towards undesirable outcomes.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#27

Post by st1x7 »

From the highly recommended classic "AI Meets Natural Stupidity"[1], 1976:

    As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery

    ...

    Most AI workers are responsible people who are aware of the pitfalls of a difficult field and produce good work in spite of them. However, to say anything good about anyone is beyond the scope of this paper.
[1] - https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/graduate/691/fall19/07/pap...

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#28

Post by Ma8ee »

dennist wrote: post #16

I find a lot of the media (here in Japan anyways) call literally every automation by computers or machines AI. Example, there’s an automated gate that only opens if a scanner finds your body temperature is not too high. AI Gate. The other day was something related to automatic checkout at shops or something where it all boiled down to some computer reading QR codes

That reminds me how in South Africa the traffic lights are called robots.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#30

Post by Yajirobe »

abhinav22 wrote: post #11
KingOfCoders wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this differ from you "learning" words of a foreign language?

It’s not “learning” anything though. Difference is causation vs correlation: If I learn how to boil water for example, there is close to 100% causation that heating water causes it to boil (notwithstanding we do not know everything about Physics, eg before we would say the earth is flat because we learnt it so, but that was incorrect, ie not everything we learn is true, it’s just a super high level of correlation) Ho…

According to Hume neither the model nor you would know/see the causation. It would be correlation in both (an all other) cases
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