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An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

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Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#41

Post by not_a_moth »

blazespin wrote: post #37

An AI winter will not happen. We are past the point of no return. The vast majority of research is net positive research. The only risk is misappropriation of investment, but that has already been smoothed over quickly. I’d get the complaint if AI was not doing anything useful as it wasn’t in ‘74, but it simply is. For example, plate recognition, drones and facial recognition. These are brutally efficient technologie…

You sure?

Without a doubt, there's an investment bubble for AI companies in industry: a huge amount of companies have added "AI" to their proposition, where the AI is only marginally useful if not useful at all, for the purpose of marketing and inflating valuation.

On research side, it's now clear the current AI paradigm will not produce the kind of massive, society-shifting promises that were made to investors, which is the focus of the article.

Yes deep learning is here to stay for narrow tasks, but the investment contraction for the rest could certainly feel like a Winter.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#42

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

The term AI winter is IMHO misrepresenting the true state of affairs. Since day one, the field's modus operandi was one of overpromising and underdelivering. That has not changed. We see how Alphabet plows billions of dollars into DeepMind [1] and all they get in return is a series of game-playing bots. If unproductive activities are defunded, this creates an opportunity for productive ones to thrive. "Winter" is not a suitable word to describe this.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/deepminds-losses-future-artifici...

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#43

Post by madenine »

eanzenberg wrote: post #18
buboard wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do most of the hyped papers have peer review even? the field moves too fast for that, press releases are issued as soon as the first draft is on arxiv.

Apologies, but I see a lot of “trash” published in arxiv (also some real good stuff) Peer review could fix some things but would also show some other things down

I like to think of arxiv as the holding area for anything that COULD be peer reviewed.

Advantage is we get to see stuff now, not after it gets accepted at by a conference or journal. Disadvantage, we have to filter on our own.

Twitter and sites like arxiv sanity preserver are helpful for filtering.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#44

Post by marcosdumay »

not_a_moth wrote: post #41
blazespin wrote: post #37

An AI winter will not happen. We are past the point of no return. The vast majority of research is net positive research. The only risk is misappropriation of investment, but that has already been smoothed over quickly. I’d get the complaint if AI was not doing anything useful as it wasn’t in ‘74, but it simply is. For example, plate recognition, drones and facial recognition. These are brutally efficient technologie…

You sure? Without a doubt, there's an investment bubble for AI companies in industry: a huge amount of companies have added "AI" to their proposition, where the AI is only marginally useful if not useful at all, for the purpose of marketing and inflating valuation. On research side, it's now clear the current AI paradigm will not produce the kind of massive, society-shifting promises that were made to investors, whic…

> it's now clear the current AI paradigm will not produce the kind of massive, society-shifting promises that were made to investors

It's correct in that it won't produce the society-shifting promises. But there is a huge amount of money on non-society-shifting innovation.

Besides, I really doubt the media predictions are what actually was told to investors.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#45

Post by andreyk »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #42

The term AI winter is IMHO misrepresenting the true state of affairs. Since day one, the field's modus operandi was one of overpromising and underdelivering. That has not changed. We see how Alphabet plows billions of dollars into DeepMind [1] and all they get in return is a series of game-playing bots. If unproductive activities are defunded, this creates an opportunity for productive ones to thrive. "Winter" is not…

This is a ridiculously reductive take on DeepMind... they produce a TON of great research, and have helped advance the state of RL considerably (speaking as an AI researcher here, having read many of their papers). Google should be commended for investing in largely basic AI research, even if once in a while they make a PR splash out of it, IMO.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#46

Post by scottlegrand2 »

The funny thing for me is that if The Economist had just hacked the input into GPT-2 so that it was an ongoing conversation they would have found that it's OK at holding a conversation, better than I expected when I did so.

The conversation that I posted at:

https://medium.com/@scottlegrand/my-interview-with-the-world...

is performed in one shot. And I think it shows both the abilities and the limitations of GPT-2 and similar models. I am 100% role playing with the language model and prompting it to go in the directions it goes, but it surprised me several times, and eventually it all fell apart because I didn't perform any transfer learning on the model I just used the raw GPT-2 XL model to measure whether further work would be worth the effort and I would conclude yes it would be.

The first thing I need to do is dramatically increase the length of its input context. It's pretty good at running with an ensuing script because I suspect much of its training data was formatted that way. But since I ran out of context symbols, it eventually suffers from several incidents of amnesia and eventually effective multiple personality disorder. It also contradicts itself several times but then no more than the typical thought leader or politician does IMO.

What The Economist did was effectively erase the thing's memory between questions. So they were starting fresh with each question. And I think that's why they had to do the best of 5.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#47

Post by andreyk »

It's kind of funny just how much complaining about AI hype and bad coverage there is (on Twitter, and on this very subreddit), it feels like there is more of that now than actually bad coverage. This article suggests some actions to take at the very bottom, which amount to including some discussion of the limitations of the work in the paper -- not a bad idea, but then again the misleading coverage usually does not stem from claims in the papers themselves in the first place.

Shameless but relevant plug warning, I run this effort Skynet Today with the aim to let AI researchers/experts present various advancements/topics to a general audience without hype and with context. Everyone on the team is volunteering their time for free and we can always use more people to help us tackle various subjects, so if you care about this issue feel free to take a look here: https://www.skynettoday.com/contribute

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#48

Post by euske »

The more I read articles like this (or pretty much ANY article recently), the more I'm convinced that what we really need is: transparency.

I don't mean just AI, but transparency on everything: Transparency from researchers, news outlets, governments, retailers, and YouTubers. It's a great shame that a lot of IT has been used for bringing more confusion and obfuscation to the people, whereas it could be used to provide a more coherent/honest view of the world. We should demand more transparency on every matter.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#49

Post by g82918 »

andreyk wrote: post #47

It's kind of funny just how much complaining about AI hype and bad coverage there is (on Twitter, and on this very subreddit), it feels like there is more of that now than actually bad coverage. This article suggests some actions to take at the very bottom, which amount to including some discussion of the limitations of the work in the paper -- not a bad idea, but then again the misleading coverage usually does not s…

> It's kind of funny just how much complaining about AI hype and bad coverage there is (on Twitter, and on this very subreddit)

I think your copy and paste script broke here. Please put some effort into promoting yourself.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#50

Post by laichzeit0 »

mbruce wrote: post #39
blazespin wrote: post #37

An AI winter will not happen. We are past the point of no return. The vast majority of research is net positive research. The only risk is misappropriation of investment, but that has already been smoothed over quickly. I’d get the complaint if AI was not doing anything useful as it wasn’t in ‘74, but it simply is. For example, plate recognition, drones and facial recognition. These are brutally efficient technologie…

This is primarily deep learning which is not general purpose AI

We’re talking about AI here. And deep learning is AI. If you go to university and research or study AI that’s what you’d currently be learning. AGI does not currently exist and is a word used mostly by laymen and the media who don’t understand the current state of AI.
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