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AI winter is well on its way

blog.piekniewski.info

231–240 of 518 posts

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#231

This is a deep, significant post (pardon pun etc). The author is clearly informed and takes a strong, historical view of the situation. Looking at what the really smart people who brought us this innovation have said and done lately is a good start imo (just one datum of course, but there are others in this interesting survey). Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero. Another thing to co…

> BUT it cost petabytes and petabytes of flops, expensive enough that they released a total of ten or twenty Alpha Go Zero game to the world

Training is expensive but inference is cheap enough for Alpha Zero inspired bots to beat human professionals while running on consumer hardware. DeepMind could have released thousands of pro-level games if they wanted to and others have: http://zero.sjeng.org/

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#232
post #109

This is a deep, significant post (pardon pun etc). The author is clearly informed and takes a strong, historical view of the situation. Looking at what the really smart people who brought us this innovation have said and done lately is a good start imo (just one datum of course, but there are others in this interesting survey). Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero. Another thing to co…

>Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero They went on to make AlphaZero, a generalised version that could learn chess, shogi or any similar game. The chess version beat a leading conventional chess program 28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws. That seemed impressive to me. Also they used loads of compute during the training but not so much during play.(5000 TPUs, 4TPUs). Also it got better th…

there is no human that has studied any of those games for 2000 years. So I think you mean 4 hours versus average human study of 40 years.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#233
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't speak for the other items, but these >translate over 100 languages in Google Translate; >caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube; barely even work. Yeah, it's a difficult problem but it's not even close to being solved.

YouTube captioning in English works surprisingly well, the improvement over the last few years is huge. It still chokes on proper nouns but in general it mostly works.

I think it's a bit like self-driving cars in the sense that it's good enough to be impressive but not good enough to be actually usable everywhere. Of course self-driving is worse because people seldom die of bad captions.

Google's captioning works well when people speak clearly and in English. Google translate works well when you translate well written straightforward text into English. It's impressive but it's got a long way to go to reach human grade transcription and translation.

I think when evaluating these things people underestimate how long the tail of these problems is. It's always those pesky diminishing returns. I think it's true for many AI problems today, for instance it looks like current self-driving car tech manages to handle, say, 95% of situations just fine. Thing is, in order to be actually usable you want something that critical to reach something like 99.999% success rate and bridging these last few percent might prove very difficult, maybe even impossible with current tech.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#234
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you can solve chess, you can solve a whole class of decision-making problems If this were true, there would be a vast demand for grandmasters in commerce, government, the military... and there just isn’t. Poker players suffer from similar delusions about how their game can be generalised to other domains.

I think batmansmk doesn't mean "when X is good at chess, X is automatically good at lots of other things", but "the traits that make you a good chess player (given enough training) also make you good at lots of other things (given enough training)".

And Gaius point stands before this argument as well, chess is seen as such a weak predictor that playing a game of chess or requesting an official ELO rating isn't used for hiring screening for instance.

I suspect that chess as a metagame is just so far developed that being "good at chess" means your general ability is really overtrained for chess.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#235

This is a deep, significant post (pardon pun etc). The author is clearly informed and takes a strong, historical view of the situation. Looking at what the really smart people who brought us this innovation have said and done lately is a good start imo (just one datum of course, but there are others in this interesting survey). Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero. Another thing to co…

>> Makov Tree Search

You mean Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is not at all like Ma(r)kov chains. You're probably mixing it up with Markov decision processes though.

Before criticising something it's a good idea to have a solid understanding of it.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#236
post #127

This seems over negative. Just the opening argument, that companies were saying "that fully self driving car was very close" but "this narrative begins to crack" Yet here they are self driving https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqRMTWqhwzM&feature=youtu.be and you should be able to hail one as a cab this year https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/09/self_driving_taxis_...

You sure about that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IqpUK5teGM Tesla self driving cars have crashed too. Arrogant people like Elon Musk are making a bad name for the hardworking AI developers who are actually trying to make self driving cars faulty proof.

That vid of the Uber crash - just because one company has a crap product doesn't mean they are all bad. Waymo is about the only one that seems about ready to go and I think partly because they don't just count on deep learning.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#237
I think all talk about computer intelligence and learning is bullshit. If I'm right, then AI is probably the most /dangerous/ field in computer science because it sounds just likely enough that it lures in great minds, just like a sitcom startup idea[0].

[0] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like humanity really needs another chess playing program 20 years after IBM solved that problem (but now utilizing 1000x more compute power). I just find all these game playing contraptions really uninteresting. There are plenty real world problems to be solved of much higher practicality. Moravec's paradox in full glow.

I think for most people, the research interest in games of various sorts, is not simply a desire for a better and better game contraption, a better mousetrap. But rather the thinking is, "playing games takes intelligence, what can we learn about intelligence by building machines that play games?" Most games are also closed systems, and conveniently grokkable systems, with enumerable search spaces. Which gives us easi…

A favour work by Rodney Brooks - "elephants don't play chess"

https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#239

This is a deep, significant post (pardon pun etc). The author is clearly informed and takes a strong, historical view of the situation. Looking at what the really smart people who brought us this innovation have said and done lately is a good start imo (just one datum of course, but there are others in this interesting survey). Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero. Another thing to co…

Moore's law (or at least, the diminishing one) is not relevant here because these are not single threaded programs. Google put 8x on their TPUv2 -> v3 upgrade; parallel matrix multiplies at reduced precision are a long way away from any theoretical limits, as I understand it.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#240
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero They went on to make AlphaZero, a generalised version that could learn chess, shogi or any similar game. The chess version beat a leading conventional chess program 28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws. That seemed impressive to me. Also they used loads of compute during the training but not so much during play.(5000 TPUs, 4TPUs). Also it got better th…

> The chess version beat a leading conventional chess program 28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws. In a not equal fight, and the results are still not published. I'm not claiming that AlphaZero wouldn't win, but that test was pure garbage.

The results were published - https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815

I agree AlphaZero had fancier hardware and so it wasn't really a fair fight.

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