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How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

cs.princeton.edu

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Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#341

Post by hobofan »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #193
eloff wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only the carbon footprint of a human was the body carbon. Modern humans have a very heavy carbon footprint, especially in the US. Think of all the things you do and consume and all the carbon involved all thorough the chain. It's a big number. Computers are extremely efficient compared to that.

People you hire on MTurk don't generally work in the US, and have a small fraction of the carbon footprint of an average American.

Aren't most of those arguments here moot, since they also need a computer (+ networking) to be available on MTurk?

computer Of course not every computer has the same specs and footprint, but they should be in roughly the same ballpark.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#342

Post by coleifer »

I feel like if AI were so easy, someone would be making billions beating the stock market. It's got way more of the historical data and features than any of the problematic examples in this slide deck, but it's essentially unsolved.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#343

Post by jl2718 »

There is a particular form of statistical inference which is not well-understood as problematic. I will use my “smart” scale as an example. It takes weight and several impedance measurements, which are taken from a large population along with body composition truth measurements from DEXA, and the coefficients of the algorithm are determined by regression. It should be no surprise that the weight measurement overpowers all other measurements in the regression, and the impedance covariance is ill-conditioned, so really it’s just a height and weight formula. My information gain from the impedance measurement is zero. The correct way to do the regression is in reverse, from more (relevant) information to less, so the parameters should be well-conditioned. This is assuming that DEXA contains all useful information to predict impedance. If not, forget about the whole thing. If that model works, then the reverse can be found through Bayesian optimization. You still have bias set by the covariance prior, but it is at least known, and you can give information about how it is affecting the result.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#344

Post by jodrellblank »

mike_hock wrote: post #155
AareyBaba wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant. I think YouTube has arrived at the same algorithm - it picks the videos I watched yesterday to recommend today.

Seriously. Why would I want to watch a video that I've already watched (unless it's music maybe)?

Why wouldn't you? Do you never re-watch a film or re-read a book or re-order the same food at a restaurant, or re-drive the same route to work?

I often watch the same video that I've already watched, many times music, many times comedy, many times something I want to link to another person but end up watching some/all again as I find it, often if I remember it being interesting (e.g. a VSauce video or a Dan Gilbert TED talk), sometimes if it was a guide or howto that I want to follow - e.g. a cooking instruction.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#345

Post by causalmodels »

closeparen wrote: post #75
SkyBelow wrote: post #38

What I dislike far more than the idea of using such systems to predict social outcome is that the usage of such systems is done behind closed doors. I would be much more willing to accept such systems if the law required any system to be fully accessible online, including the current neural network, how it was trained, and training data used to train it (if the training data cannot be shared online, then the neural n…

Using an association between features to make a prediction about something, rather than measuring the thing itself, is exactly what’s meant by “prejudice.” Even when the associations are real and the model is built with perfect mathematical rigor. ML is categorically unsuitable for government decisions affecting lives.

I understand and agree with the outcry around using ML areas like criminal justice, but there are some really compelling examples of ML being used by governments to help citizens[1].

[1] https://www.kdd.org/kdd2018/accepted-papers/view/activeremed...

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#346

Post by mark-r »

munin wrote: post #226
chimi wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're touching on the "difficulty" in verbalizing it. I see what you mean, because you did learn that the heuristic was changing with just a yes or no. I said you can't teach that way, but you clearly learned that way, so I wasn't exactly correct, but I'm not practically wrong either still I don't think. I wonder, how would an AI perform on the same test. What is the mathematical minimum number of questions on such…

Sounds like Ravens progressive matricies.

Similar but not the same.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#347

Post by TeMPOraL »

hobofan wrote: post #341
TeMPOraL wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People you hire on MTurk don't generally work in the US, and have a small fraction of the carbon footprint of an average American.

Aren't most of those arguments here moot, since they also need a computer (+ networking) to be available on MTurk? computer Of course not every computer has the same specs and footprint, but they should be in roughly the same ballpark.

A typical computer used by a typical person has only a fraction of energy use of GPU farms utilized to train DNN models. We're not at the point where you can pick an existing DNN off the shelf and just use it, you have train (at least partially) a new one for each new task, often many times.

Re: How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]

#349

Post by alexanderchr »

coleifer wrote: post #342

I feel like if AI were so easy, someone would be making billions beating the stock market. It's got way more of the historical data and features than any of the problematic examples in this slide deck, but it's essentially unsolved.

Some are making billions beating the stock market

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies

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