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Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#61

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

mattnewport wrote: post #58
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My startup analyzes historical sales via LSTM and makes future predictions based on geo location, description of products, price of products, weather and holidays. I did the similar work for IBM 10 years ago and we could hardly accomplish fraction of what my startup can achieve today. Right inventory at right location in right quantity is essential to e-commerce and our ai is helping out a lot in this regard

That sounds like incremental efficiency improvements, not something that will radically change people's lives. Not that that's not valuable and may help us keep economic growth going at reasonable clip but it doesn't seem like the type of thing that will change the character of most people's lives in the way that the Internet and smartphones have.

Our equivalent is Amazon FBA. I think the warehousing and logistics of Amazon has changed the characteristics of most people's lives in the developed world. We aim to the do the same for selling from your own website

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#63

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

rococode wrote: post #5

I think there's an interesting disconnect right now between research and practice. Cutting-edge research does feel like it's reaching a plateau - across most AI fields even "major" breakthroughs are only gaining a couple percentage points and we're probably starting to hit the limits of what current approaches can achieve. When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task, there's only so much room for improvement. Yoav Gol…

Andrej Karpathy showed in the Tesla autonomy day how Tesla had to retrain their DNNs such that they don't get confused by bicycles mounted on vehicles. If 97% means your models get confused by something you see on the road every day, I wouldn't be too pleased about the state of the art.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#64

Post by drongoking »

rococode wrote: post #5

I think there's an interesting disconnect right now between research and practice. Cutting-edge research does feel like it's reaching a plateau - across most AI fields even "major" breakthroughs are only gaining a couple percentage points and we're probably starting to hit the limits of what current approaches can achieve. When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task, there's only so much room for improvement. Yoav Gol…

I'm always bemused by the idea that AI is nothing but machine learning, and ML is nothing but predictive analytics. Equating research in AI with a "boring hyperparameter search" shows how narrow it's become; saying you've "gotten 97% on a problem" refers to, obviously, classification accuracy of a model on a set of labeled instances. "Use AI/ML to solve X" means finding a way to translate X into a prediction task over feature vectors.

There's an old saying "If all you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails." We may see an AI winter come about simply because we run out of things to pound with our hammer.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#65

Post by mattnewport »

ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #61
mattnewport wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like incremental efficiency improvements, not something that will radically change people's lives. Not that that's not valuable and may help us keep economic growth going at reasonable clip but it doesn't seem like the type of thing that will change the character of most people's lives in the way that the Internet and smartphones have.

Our equivalent is Amazon FBA. I think the warehousing and logistics of Amazon has changed the characteristics of most people's lives in the developed world. We aim to the do the same for selling from your own website

But people can already order almost anything from Amazon and have it delivered next day in many cases. No doubt it's a good thing for a business to be able to match that themselves from their own website but it's not like the change from no e-commerce to Amazon.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#66

Post by drongoking »

jean- wrote: post #32
rococode wrote: post #5

I think there's an interesting disconnect right now between research and practice. Cutting-edge research does feel like it's reaching a plateau - across most AI fields even "major" breakthroughs are only gaining a couple percentage points and we're probably starting to hit the limits of what current approaches can achieve. When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task, there's only so much room for improvement. Yoav Gol…

> When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task, there's only so much room for improvement. When models commonly achieve 97% on a task, it means it's time to define a harder task, as it's long stopped providing any useful signal.

I think when performance on a real world task can be expressed as a single percentage, we've over-simplified the hell out of it and it's time to rethink the problem.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#68

Post by dpflan »

tintor wrote: post #33
rococode wrote: post #5

I think there's an interesting disconnect right now between research and practice. Cutting-edge research does feel like it's reaching a plateau - across most AI fields even "major" breakthroughs are only gaining a couple percentage points and we're probably starting to hit the limits of what current approaches can achieve. When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task, there's only so much room for improvement. Yoav Gol…

Difference between 97% and 99.99% in perception is huge for autonomous driving purposes. 300x less likely to cause an accident.

Do you know of any good resources to learn more about this idea of the rate of improvement of perception per percentage point?

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#69

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

mattnewport wrote: post #65
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our equivalent is Amazon FBA. I think the warehousing and logistics of Amazon has changed the characteristics of most people's lives in the developed world. We aim to the do the same for selling from your own website

But people can already order almost anything from Amazon and have it delivered next day in many cases. No doubt it's a good thing for a business to be able to match that themselves from their own website but it's not like the change from no e-commerce to Amazon.

I am trying to de-centralize the ecommerce industry. Most people don't do it primarily because it's hard to find customers and also logistics is hard.

Re: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’?

#70

Post by ncmncm »

We are on the cusp of civilizational collapse[^1]. That would tend to include an AI winter.

[^1]: Most likely scenario is migration from areas newly inhospitable to agriculture drives isolationist / jingoist fascist governments into power at destination countries, leading to war, disruption of commerce and industrial material supply, more war over newly scarce resources, and ultimately global thermonuclear war and population collapse. Loss of CO2 driving could be followed shortly by a cold spell, possibly kicking the climate ultimately into an ice age. Does an ice age count as AI winter?

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