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

economist.com

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

#71

Post by lambdatronics »

msla wrote: post #44

These days, you can translate text by pointing your phone at it and taking a picture. Thirty years ago, this would have been unambiguously AI, because it would have been not only impossible, but stupid impossible like something out of a soft SF novel where little self-flying robots deliver stuff to your house, or you can ask a computer a question in a natural voice and reasonably expect a civil, natural-language answ…

Yes, but you're missing the point. In 1950's sci-fi, those marvels were possible because there was imagined to be something like a general artificial intelligence behind the technology. We've achieved narrow AI, but the perception is that in order to get it, we would already have general AI, which is why people are disappointed.

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

#72

Post by Barrin92 »

blackbear_ wrote: post #26

This is a good article. I don't understand why people find it questionable and get so defensive about it. It does not deny the fast progress nor the potential of current/future techniques. It is simply an explanation for the layman of things that should be obvious to any practitioner in the field.

> I don't understand why people find it questionable and get so defensive about it

because people in the technology sector have a distorted view of their own importance. Despite the extremely meagre impact of the "computer revolution" on both economic growth and anything outside the world of bits, people in 'tech' fashion themselves to be sort of world-changing figures. AI on top of it is a sort of ersatz religion, the rapture of the nerds as Charlie Stross put it.

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

#73

Post by stephc_int13 »

mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

The trick with so-called exponential growth is that it is almost always an S-curve in disguise.

Is it too soon to tell that we start seeing the asymptote of the AI curve?

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

#74

Post by andbberger »

renewiltord wrote: post #65

It's limited but so effective! The other day a friend asked for photos of her sister (also a friend) that I had because it's her birthday and she wanted to make a collage. I just searched on Google Photos by her name and it found a bunch because of the face classification. That's some good shit.

works great until I add epsilon of adversarial noise and turn your sister into an ostrich

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

#75

Post by spaetzleesser »

mrfusion wrote: post #32

What’s the next big thing after deep learning?

There should be something like an X prize for a recycling device. Take a trash pile, sort through it and get things ready for recycling. This would solve a big environmental and would deliver progress in robotics, vision and AI. I'd be more excited about this than self driving cars.

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

#76

Post by rubber_duck »

MiroF wrote: post #16
mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

Absolutely. To be perfectly honest, it surprises me the extent to which ML naysaying seems to be popular on HN. The evidence of enormous progress seems pretty obvious to me.

I recently watched a podcast with Stephen Wolfram (few months old) where he runs a photo of himself through Wolfram Alpha "ImageIdentify" and it classifies him as a plunger with 50% probability and 8% probability it's a human [1]. He then goes on saying how he's working on systems that would allow a self driving system decide what to do based on if the collision detected is a human or inanimate object, etc.

This was just one particularly ironic example of what I'm seeing with ML - we saw this level of accuracy in classification years ago - where is the enormous progress ? There have been pockets where ML shows it's applicable with encouraging initial results but after that it seems to me that we suck at perfecting those system and the progress has been incremental at best.

The only exception I can see is stuff like self-play where the system can generate insane amount of training data.

[1] https://youtu.be/ez773teNFYA?t=8420

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

#77

Post by megaframe »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #23
mtgp1000 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure how anyone who's watched the exponential growth of a brand new domain can pick a point today to and say that things aren't as good as we expected. What may have happened was that some eager CEOs have overpromised on timelines and resources. But the revolution is coming, ML is already starting to change society. We're building the tech. Right now. The author does not even realise the immeasurable potentia…

Ok, consider me intrigued. What is that we are going to see/experience once you folks had some time? Genuine question! Can you give us a basic idea of the things that you are already sure by now will see the light of day?

One big one is farming, think harvesting machinery. There's a number of startups trying to get that going. I think most are not at the scale to be successful the way the market themselves, but their collective learning will eventually lead to some consolidation.

Why AI for that, it's vision AI to know when fruit is ripe or vegetables are ready for harvest. Then hand eye coordination to not bruise the fruit/vegetables and adjust force/sensitivity as the equipment wears down.

Scaling that will put likely many workers out and transform the business of harvesting. What I think is most plausible is one large manufacturer will consolidate designs and rent the equipment to do the harvesting much like the contract labor used now, but at much lower prices than humans could do.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

cjhanks wrote: post #59

We have also been watching these machine learning models for 6 months: - increase the volatility in virtually every financial market they touched - be exploited by adversarial learning networks to amplify funded propaganda as news - use poorly contrived sentiment analysis to generate incomprehensibly meaningless news headlines These non-linear "function approximators" have absolutely unpredictable and insane non-line…

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by wnoise »

jbay808 wrote: post #18
ur-whale wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, the darn thing still can't reason.

Five years ago we would have said "the darn thing still can't write a cohesive paragraph".

That's still true. It can write a paragraph that's usually grammatical, and can stay on topic, but it's missing things like facts, or even the ability to remember which side of an argument it's taken previously.

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

#80

Post by XCSme »

andbberger wrote: post #74
renewiltord wrote: post #65

It's limited but so effective! The other day a friend asked for photos of her sister (also a friend) that I had because it's her birthday and she wanted to make a collage. I just searched on Google Photos by her name and it found a bunch because of the face classification. That's some good shit.

works great until I add epsilon of adversarial noise and turn your sister into an ostrich

I think that the average user doesn't like ostriches that much.
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