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AI’s Instagram Problem

deeplearning.ai

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Re: AI’s Instagram Problem

#21

Post by satvikpendem »

gnramires wrote: post #19
minimaxir wrote: post #7

All AI projects are valuable, but it's annoying and demotivating to work hard on a unique and useful project and have no one read/use it because it doesn't stand out in the extremely rapidly-evolving ecosystem. Most of my AI text-generation and image-generation projects and tools have already become obsolete by technology released in the past few months, and I've almost given up competing.

One advise I'll never forget (from an interview with late mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani) is that you don't have to race faster than everyone else (although if you can, that's great!). You can just run in a direction no one is running toward (and hopefully be persistent). Then you're only racing yourself and speed is largely irrelevant. I myself know I'm very slow, specially developing projects. So I don't try to ra…

Problem is that's not how academic funding works. Grants are generally not given to possible dead ends.

Re: AI’s Instagram Problem

#23

Post by keerthiko »

This is so true, but to follow this advice takes a respectable amount of personal discipline, combined with picking a very specific niche to focus on. A business with an R&D core such as AI should only be considering generalizing (if at all) after developing concrete confidence that you are on, and will stay on the bleeding edge of your initial niche. It's easy to feel ashamed when you tell someone you're doing X, and enough lay (tech) persons ask if it uses the trending research technology, and you're not. It may also make you think like you should use that tech, but it's likely a costly distraction more often than not.

Our company [0] developed a cutting edge computer vision system focused on detecting cardio machine exercise cadence (hyper specific!) and became the only reliable camera-based solution to do so. We then tried to generalize to all exercise motion (rep tracking, a still unsolved problem), achieved mediocre success, and put the exploration to sleep later because we think waiting for other technologies to mature would be easier and faster (better 3D cameras, AI pose models, etc). On the other hand we've picked other niches that meet our business needs to expand our CV R&D into, with pretty good success but mostly just for internal use (video content creation tools). More importantly, we're still the best camera-based indoor cardio detection tech out there, and that's a big part of why we're still alive as a bootstrapped business founded in 2010.

Quadruple down on your niche first!

[0] https://www.activetheoryinc.com/

Re: AI’s Instagram Problem

#24

Post by nl »

minimaxir wrote: post #7

All AI projects are valuable, but it's annoying and demotivating to work hard on a unique and useful project and have no one read/use it because it doesn't stand out in the extremely rapidly-evolving ecosystem. Most of my AI text-generation and image-generation projects and tools have already become obsolete by technology released in the past few months, and I've almost given up competing.

Don't be discouraged. Your work is good.

And remember we are 6-12 months off having good, open source chatGPT class open source models and the software support to make it possible to run them at home.

Re: AI’s Instagram Problem

#25

Post by eternalban »

minimaxir wrote: post #7

All AI projects are valuable, but it's annoying and demotivating to work hard on a unique and useful project and have no one read/use it because it doesn't stand out in the extremely rapidly-evolving ecosystem. Most of my AI text-generation and image-generation projects and tools have already become obsolete by technology released in the past few months, and I've almost given up competing.

Ironic mantra for you: Geoffrey Hinton in 70s, Minsky, Symbolic Logic, Neural Nets, stay the course.

Re: AI’s Instagram Problem

#26

Post by ImaCake »

psyklic wrote: post #20
version_five wrote: post #14

This is correct, but there's also some meta comment to be made that research has an "instragram problem". What he's talking about isn't really even AI so much as deep learning: there are lots of other branches that now get virtually no play relative to deep learning. And then there are all sorts of adjacent CS, image processing (when was the last time you saw someone talk about wavelets), language analysis, and other…

Academic research has the same problem. When I studied neuroscience, flashy fMRI studies received substantially more funding than fundamental research. Without understanding how small neural nets work, it's difficult to construct bottom-up theories of the brain.

> flashy fMRI studies received substantially more funding than fundamental research

This is particularly infuriating since fMRI studies are not statistically robust and should be held in deep distrust.

The same happens everywhere in academia unfortunately. The current big thing is building “Apps” for your project even when no app is needed.

Re: AI’s Instagram Problem

#28

Post by ModernMech »

satvikpendem wrote: post #21
gnramires wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One advise I'll never forget (from an interview with late mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani) is that you don't have to race faster than everyone else (although if you can, that's great!). You can just run in a direction no one is running toward (and hopefully be persistent). Then you're only racing yourself and speed is largely irrelevant. I myself know I'm very slow, specially developing projects. So I don't try to ra…

Problem is that's not how academic funding works. Grants are generally not given to possible dead ends.

Research grants are typically given with the expectation the project may possibly be a dead end. Otherwise it wouldn’t be research.

Re: AI’s Instagram Problem

#29

Post by satvikpendem »

ModernMech wrote: post #28
satvikpendem wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is that's not how academic funding works. Grants are generally not given to possible dead ends.

Research grants are typically given with the expectation the project may possibly be a dead end. Otherwise it wouldn’t be research.

In theory, yes; in practice, no. Many grants these days are given based on the trend du jour.
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