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AI winter is well on its way

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#281

Post by dx034 »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #245

Forget about self driving cars - the real killer application of deep learning is mass surveillance - there are big customer for that (advertising, policing, political technology - we better get used to the term) and its the only technique that can get the job done. I sometimes think that there really was no AI winter as we got other technologies that implemented the ideas: SQL Databases can be seen as an application…

The BBC recently requested information about the use of facial recognition from UK police forces. Those that use facial recognition reported false positive rates of >95%. That led some to abandon the systems, others just use it as one form of pre-screening. Mass surveillance with facial recognition is nowhere near levels where it can be used unsupervised. And that's even before people actively try to deceive it.

For advertising, I'm also not sure if there's been a lot of progress. Maybe it's because I opted out too much but I have the feeling that ad targeting hasn't become more intelligent, rather the opposite. It's been a long time that I've been surprised at the accuracy of a model tracking me. Sure, targeted ads for political purposes can work very well but are nothing new and don't need any deep learning nor any other "new" technologies.

Where I really see progress is data visualisation. Often dismissed it can be surprisingly hard to get right and tools around that (esp for enterprise use) have developed a lot over recent years. And that's what companies need. No one's looking for a black-box algorithm to replace marketing, they just want to make some sense of their data and understand what's going on.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#282

Post by dx034 »

Yaggo wrote: post #270
nopinsight wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that self-driving had/have been overhyped over the previous few years. The problem is harder than many people realize. The difference between the current AI renaissance and the past pre-winter AI ecosystems is the level of economic gain realized by the technology. The late 80s-early 90s AI winter, for example, resulted from the limitations of expert systems which were useful but only in niche markets and thei…

> I agree that self-driving had/have been overhyped over the previous few years. The problem is harder than many people realize. The current road infrastructure (markings, signs) has been designed for humans. Once it has been modernized to better aid the self-driving systems, we don't probably need "perfect" AI.

But current signs designed for humans work well. They're machine readable (traffic sign detection is available from basically all manufacturers) and can (usually) be understood without prior knowledge and don't need much change over decades. I think there are few examples where messages were designed for computers but are easy to understand independent of the system, manufacturer. ASCII encoded text files are the only thing that come to mind.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#283

Post by dx034 »

SomethingStars wrote: post #200
Grue3 wrote: 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.

It works for general purpose videos. Transcripts of any kind appear to stop working whenever there's domain knowledge involved. That doesn't matter for most youtube videos but is crucial if you want to have a multi purpose translator/encoder.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#284

Post by dx034 »

crummy wrote: post #241
Grue3 wrote: 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.

Google Translate is way, way better than it used to be (at least German > English which I suppose is probably an easier task than many languages).

Not sure if I agree. If you have some knowledge of the language is still mostly easier to translate the words you don't understand. Easy texts work, anything more complicated (e.g. science articles) not really.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#285

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

raducu wrote: post #206
felippee wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also why does every single result has to be breathtaking? If you build the hype like say Andrew Ng it better be. Also if you consume more money per month than all the CS departments of a mid sized country, it better be.

In terms of hype you may be right, but it doesn't mean that if something doesn't live up to the hype of Andrew Ng or Elon Musk it won't still be pretty good. For instance: even if Elon Musk doesn't colonize Mars but instead just builds the BFR, that would still be amazing; even if BFR is never build but falcon 9 becomes fully reusable that would be great; even if falcon 9 won't be fully reusable, the fact that it cut…

Honestly I think the raspberry pi indicates the (short-term) future of AI. Most of the “easy” problems have been solved (image classification, game playing), but the hard ones like NLP are orders of magnitude more complex and therefore elusive.

I’m happy to leave the hard problems for the PhDs and the big tech researchers. Go nuts, folks.

In the meantime, the applications for small-scale, pre-trained neural networks seem limitless. Manufacturing, agriculture, retail, pretty much any industry could make use of portable neural networks.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#286

Post by wslh »

joe_the_user wrote: post #81

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…

Retrospectively it might sound that the Japanese were partially right in pursuing "high performance" computing with their fifth generation projects [1] but the Alpha Zero results are impressive beyond the computing performance achieved. It was a necessary element but not the only one.

[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/1992/06/05/business/fifth-generat...

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#287

Post by dx034 »

ehsankia wrote: post #94
CamelCaseName wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is stating that the quality of the transcription is poor.

You don't need amazing transcription to search a video. A video about X probably repeats X multiple times, and you only really need to detect it properly once. As for the users, sure the translation may not be perfect, but I'm sure if you were deaf had no other way of watching a video, you would be just fine with the current quality of the transcription.

Often you need exactly that. Because it's the unique words the machine will get wrong. If you look for machine learning tutorials/presentations that mention a certain algorithm, the name of it must be correctly transcribed. At the moment, it appears to me that 95%+ of words work but exactly the ones that define a video often don't. But then again getting those right is hard, there's not much training data to base it on.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#289

Post by dx034 »

imh wrote: post #40

FYI This post is about deep learning. It could be the case that neural networks stop getting so much hype soon, but the biggest driver of the current "AI" (ugh I hate the term) boom is the fact that everything happens on computers now, and that isn't changing any time soon. We log everything and are even starting to automate decisions. Statistics, machine learning, and econometrics are booming fields. To talk about t…

I think the problem is the definition of AI. It appears most in the field define it as a superset of ML, encompassing all kinds of statistical methods and data analysis. For the general public, AI is a synonym for deep learning. When large companies speak about AI they always mean deep learning, never just a regression (probably also because many don't see a regression as intelligent). So AI in the public's perception could face a winter but much of the domain of machine learning would be unaffected.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#290

Post by raducu »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #285
raducu wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of hype you may be right, but it doesn't mean that if something doesn't live up to the hype of Andrew Ng or Elon Musk it won't still be pretty good. For instance: even if Elon Musk doesn't colonize Mars but instead just builds the BFR, that would still be amazing; even if BFR is never build but falcon 9 becomes fully reusable that would be great; even if falcon 9 won't be fully reusable, the fact that it cut…

Honestly I think the raspberry pi indicates the (short-term) future of AI. Most of the “easy” problems have been solved (image classification, game playing), but the hard ones like NLP are orders of magnitude more complex and therefore elusive. I’m happy to leave the hard problems for the PhDs and the big tech researchers. Go nuts, folks. In the meantime, the applications for small-scale, pre-trained neural networks…

I feel exactly the same way. Just wait 2-3 years before someone launches an embedded TPU and the sky will be the limit.
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