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An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

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Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was just PR fluff designed to play to the ideological biases of their Valley employee base. They released GPT-2 anyway some months later because other people were going to replicate it anyway, and guess what, the river of fake news we're flooded with daily is still not being generated by AI. It's being generated by journalists with an agenda, same as ever. Don't get me wrong. You can absolutely generate news art…

The proportion of people who will spend 30 seconds with a search engine to check on something is practically infinitesimal. Even people who do it frequently don't do it most of the time. And it doesn't matter anyway, because it's too late - you only have to fool people for a second, or a fraction of a second.

Great, so focus on solving that problem generally instead of worrying about AI.

What I see is actually quite different. If the people who could detect fake news was practically infinitesimal then you'd see the vast majority of people having super high trust in the media. In fact most people don't trust the media, lots of polls showing that. Sure they may only fact check something occasionally (often by reading about a topic they happen to understand), but people aren't stupid. After they notice or hear about a few mistakes and observe they're always in the same ideological direction, they get the picture.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, "more predictive" doesn't mean it's a perfect fit. Every model has error. A line through a point cloud curving upwards will still represent some of the points in the cloud. So it will have high error, but it's still a representation of the data. And yes, the bias-variance tradeoff is about generalisation (i.e. the ability to extrapolate to unseen data). But this is more related to the fact that in the real worl…

My understanding is that generally, the error when extrapolating to areas not covered by the training data distribution would be considered to be part of the "bias" part of the bias-variance tradeoff. The way I see it, the variance is the part of the error that you can reduce by collecting more data from your distribution and increasing model complexity if needed. The bias part is what will not get better no matter h…

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Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, "more predictive" doesn't mean it's a perfect fit. Every model has error. A line through a point cloud curving upwards will still represent some of the points in the cloud. So it will have high error, but it's still a representation of the data. And yes, the bias-variance tradeoff is about generalisation (i.e. the ability to extrapolate to unseen data). But this is more related to the fact that in the real worl…

My understanding is that generally, the error when extrapolating to areas not covered by the training data distribution would be considered to be part of the "bias" part of the bias-variance tradeoff. The way I see it, the variance is the part of the error that you can reduce by collecting more data from your distribution and increasing model complexity if needed. The bias part is what will not get better no matter h…

Bias and variance are characteristics of the model, not components of its error as I think you're saying. In the most simple sense, bias and variance refer to the shape of the function represented by the model (let's say "the shape of the model" for simplicity). A model with a more "rigid" shape (approaching a straight line) has more bias and one with a more "relaxed" shape (further from a straight line) has more variance.

The extent to which a model can extrapolate to out-of-sample data depends on how well the shape of the model follows the true distribution of the data. This is true regardless of the bias and variance of the model. It just happens that most of the time, in interesting, real-world problems, the true distribution of the data is more or less different than the sampling distribution of the training data- i.e. there's always some amount of "sampling error".

Sampling error can't be reduced by collecting more training data- you just have more data with the same sampling error. Increasing model complexity increases variance, so if you start with high sampling error, you wil get a high error on out-of-sample data because your model matches the "off" distribution of the training data too closely. What training with more data and with a more complex model can do is increase the ability of the trained model to interpolate, i.e. to accurately represent (new) data points that are in the same region of "instance space" as the training data points.

A high-bias model can extrapolate well if the sampling error is not too high and the shape of the true distribution is not too irregular. However, a high-bias model will also not interpolate as well as a high-variance model. Its rigid structure will "miss" many data points. Like you say, this will not change if you train with more data. Anyway, that's the tradeoff.

Now, the reason why deep neural nets, which are extremely high-variance models, are trained with large amounts of data, is that they can interpolate very well but can't extrapolate very well. If a model doesn't extrapolate very well but its training sample is a large enough chunk of instance space, it can still be very useful, because it's still representing a large number of instances.

How to put it? Mabye your high-variance model has seen examples of white dogs and black dogs in training, but no green dogs. Your model will not be able to generalise to green dogs, but if green dogs are rare, it will still be able to represent most dogs, so it's still useful.

Of course, looking at the output of a trained model (its behaviour) doesn't tell you anything about what it was trained on. So a model that has very high accuracy on a large number of tasks will look impressive, even if it can't generalise at all.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#374

The trouble is that people have been sold this idea that ML/AI can do amazing things, without properly being told that really the things it can do are quite narrowly-scoped. They've been sold the Star Trek computer idea. For example, years ago I was working on a prototype/proof-of-concept thing for instrumenting industrial machinery with stick-on small computers. Simple stuff - attach accelerators, temperature, humid…

So, uh, how do you talk to the C_Os about this and tell them that it's GIGO? Asking for a friend.

Tell them ML is so smart it's almost as smart as a C_O.

So if they can solve the problem the ML probably can too ...

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#375
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, if we could write a specific, closed-end, prescriptive definition of "meaningful" or "understanding" or whatever, then we'd be able to program it. And we can't, so we have to settle for something else, usually how a thing fails to be what we (indeed subjectively) consider meaningful. Still, it's not arbitrary. The way that something like GPT-3 tends to fail basically is that you 2-3 paragraphs where par…

the thing has no fixed world-model What is "world-model"? What makes you think GPT-3 does not have some kind of a world model? It's clearly not a very good one, but at the same time it does not mean it can't get better. A 3 year old also does not have a very good world model, what's the difference between his world model and one of GPT-3? Again, clearly there's a big difference, I'm just not sure we know enough about…

Well, GPT-3 isn't any kind of general intelligence - it's explicitly architected as a language model - something that learns to pay attention to prior context to predict what word comes next. The only kind of world model it has is a statistical model of what word is most likely to come next based on the corpus it has been trained on.

You could argue that general intelligence is also based on prediction, and that a human's world model therefore isn't so different in nature, but there are some very significant differences ...

1) GPT-3's model is based only on a corpus of text (facts, lies, errors, etc) it was fed... there is no grounding in reality.

2) GPT-3 is only a passive model - it's not an agent that can act or in any way attempt to validate or augment it's world model.

3) GPT-3 is architecturally a language model .. it can get better with better or more data, but it's never going to be more than a language model.

The difference between a 3-year old's brain and GPT-3 is that the 3-year old's brain is not a one-trick pony ... it's a complex cognitive architecture, honed by millions of years evolution, capable of performing a whole range of tasks, not just language modelling.

The 3-year old's brain also has the massive advantage of being embedded in a 3-year old autonomous agent able to explore and interact with the world it's world model is representing... It you tell GPT-3 pigs can fly then as far as it is concerned pigs can fly, whereas the 3-year old can go seek out pigs and see that, in fact, they can't.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#376
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematical modeling that is 3-6 orders of magnitude faster, we are already talking deployment. Same for ML powered solutions to data management - I don't want to say enough to identify anything. My team has been working on a rudimentary humanlike reasoning engine based loosely on what AlphaGo proved: that machines can learn heuristics identical, equal to, or better than those of humans. And for perspective, AlphaGo…

since you’re working on the field : i’m still under the impression that modern ML (neural network in particular) are not producing any science, nor are they producing any level of understanding of the phenomenon it’s trying to model. And that as such, we can’t provide a reliable estimate of the limitations of the produced model, other than by feeding it tons of inputs and measure the result. It would be like trying t…

What makes you think Newtonian physics is in any form more real than computation? If Wolfram is correct, physics is inherently a computation in the form of cellular automata.

Intelligence might be so messy that the only way to get to it is to grow it organically, which to me seems to be happening in research. People are trying a bunch of stuff based on intuitions for what may work, and post hoc adding some theoretical justification for why it's working. Human intelligence didn't emerge from some grand theory of intelligence either.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#377
post #138

I'm still not sure what successful AI implementations there have been. Stuff like Amazon/Spotify recommendations seem sensible. Is there anything else out there that is impressive?

Everyone always looks to consumer tech but at least where I am at the far more successful and interesting domains are outside of that (and frankly most serious jobs too).

I used to work for a lab doing coral reef sea floor mapping to track reef progression year over year, this was only possible because of recent advances in ml. This is just an example of course.

There is tons of work being done (and successfully used today) in healthcare domains, weather modeling, wireless rf tech, geospatial remote sensing etc etc etc.

My point is AI is being leveraged a lot and is moving forward quickly but the applications for average consumers that are both cost effective and highly useful are growing thinner.

If you want to see consumer tech examples that have been at least moderately successful I think some highlights are Google photos image recognition, current speech to text processing in most places (Apple google amazon), image processing in most smartphone cameras (wrt ml especially night photos) and unfortunately (IMO) a lot of content aggregation algorithms (YouTube, Facebook etc) optimizing for engagement.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#378
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in “making the sausage” - deep learning techniques have already completely transformed my field and are transforming many others. Most of the people I see naysaying don’t appear to causally work in the field, because their critiques are not the same as the ones people in the field are using.

Can you give a concrete example of deep-learning techniques which have transformed a field? Something not theoretical or confined in a lab? Something which may have changed my life?

Not OP but I can speak with a small example from my previous field - coral reef ecology. It used to be standard to collect video footage and hand annotate small portions of the footage to draw up some statistics about the reef progression. Today we can collect the footage and let ml annotate the entirety of it to get much more accurate and precise statistics about the progression/recession. Not only that but we can do that on an organism basis and also see do highly local analyses. This wasn’t possible 10 years ago. I think the applications for ML outside of consumer tech are far larger than within but everyone here seems focused on that for some reason.

Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually something ML is incredibly useful at, when it comes to machines with sensors - failure prediction / anomaly detection, etc. In the industry, (preventive) maintenance takes up a pretty huge chunk of resources. It's something techs need to do often, and it's often a laborious task, but it's obviously done to reduce downtime. So the business insight, as they like to call it, is to reduce costs tied up to…

Yep, you and the user you're replying to are both right in different ways. One thing's for sure - machines don't generate "insights" on their own. Let's define an "insight" as "new meaningful knowledge", just for fun. We could talk about what comprises "new" and "meaningful" but it would be beside the point I'm making. In a supervised learning problem, the range of possible outputs is already known, meaning the model…

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Re: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, "more predictive" doesn't mean it's a perfect fit. Every model has error. A line through a point cloud curving upwards will still represent some of the points in the cloud. So it will have high error, but it's still a representation of the data. And yes, the bias-variance tradeoff is about generalisation (i.e. the ability to extrapolate to unseen data). But this is more related to the fact that in the real worl…

My understanding is that generally, the error when extrapolating to areas not covered by the training data distribution would be considered to be part of the "bias" part of the bias-variance tradeoff. The way I see it, the variance is the part of the error that you can reduce by collecting more data from your distribution and increasing model complexity if needed. The bias part is what will not get better no matter h…

>> The way I see it, the variance is the part of the error that you can reduce by collecting more data from your distribution and increasing model complexity if needed.

Ah, apologies, I see what you mean. That is true, but this "error" is in-sample error, so increasing your model's variance will increase its ability to interpolate but not extrapolate to out-of-sample data, as I explain in my longer comment.

"In-sample" means all the data you've collected to train and test with. It includes training/validation/test splits. At the end of k-fold cross-validation, your model has "seen" all the data in your sample and the model that performs best is the model that best represents that data.

But, because the data was sampled from a distribution that is most likely not the true distribution of the data (since that distribution is unknown), the sampling error (i.e. the differences between the true and sample distributions) will be reflected in the model. A high-variance model will suffer more from this than a high-bias one.

Sorry I didn't understand immediately what you meant. The longer comment above is correct but probably doesn't help answer your question directly.

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