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Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

nytimes.com

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Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#81

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Houshalter wrote: post #76
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? That's a different issue. Spiders, as all insects, don't learn . It seems that insects have some kind of firmware-style programming that can't change, because they don't have the cognitive ability to change it. This firmware can be unbelievably complex, like in the case of Portia spiders…

That's exactly my point. Spiders can't learn. Maybe they are amazing for what they do, but the comparison is apples to oranges. They do fundamentally different things. Of course spiders are complex. Everything in biology is complex. It's been slowly refined over millions and millions of years. Countless trillions of tweaks to its DNA tested and rejected until it hit upon something that worked. No human could design s…

>> Our artificial neural networks are just as complex though.

I don't know about that. I think it depends on how you count the complexity of a model. There's three cases: a) insects are less complex than machine learning models, b) both are equally complex, c) insects are simpler.

If (b) or (c) is the case then we're shafted, because we're failing to reproduce insect behaviour despite building systems at least as complex as theirs. If (c) is the case, we're particularly screwed because it means we're missing a simple, more efficient way to do things.

If (a) is the case then we may have a hope to get to where insects are in terms of complexity and possibly reproduce their behaviour. Still, there's the issue of combining models to perform well at a broad range of tasks, which is far from solved.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#82

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #63
gambler wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, if you could make a completely artificial, controlled environment that presents a problem well-suited for the current flavor of AI, the AI would probably be able to beat a random animal at solving that problem.

Spiders have much better hardware than the state of the art in low cost miniatuarised robotics. However I'm not convinced that if you trained a deep net and gave it access to a spider's sensor suite and effectors, that it would do worse than an actual spider would. A lot worse in terms of efficiency per watt, sure...

How would you train that deep net? What data would you give it? What would you train it to do exactly?

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#83

Post by gpderetta »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #73
Houshalter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that. Spiders can't beat a human at Go. Sure, they weren't evolved to do that. But how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? Whereas if you made a spider hunting video game, I bet researchers could train AI's that could beat it within a few months. Video game playing has actually become a big area of research recently an…

>> how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? That's a different issue. Spiders, as all insects, don't learn . It seems that insects have some kind of firmware-style programming that can't change, because they don't have the cognitive ability to change it. This firmware can be unbelievably complex, like in the case of Portia spiders…

> That's a different issue. Spiders, as all insects, don't learn.

But portia spiders do seem to exhibit learning behavior. While they have preprogrammed strategies for common preys, they do attempt to catch unfamiliar preys and seem to learn from their mistakes and come up with new strategies.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#84

Post by erikb »

I thought we are already over that cliff of becoming forgotten. Yes, we didn't call it AI 2 years ago. But has there been such a big technological change since then with the googles, facebooks and twitters of this world? I think the problem is that it is actually so transparent that you really can't see it when it is applied to you.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#85

Post by mbrock »

eternalban wrote: post #23
intrasight wrote: post #11

I'm still not comfortable calling the thing that is booming "artificial intelligence". It is mostly pattern recognition and classification. Intelligence is something else.

Yes, "signs of intelligence" include creativity , pedagogy , ..., and of course, getting bitten by the bug of existential angst. Accept no subsititute.

It seems pretty likely that we will start to see "General AI" discovering problematic things like the unsolvable nature of ethics questions, the ungroundedness of truth claims, the immense silliness of religions and ideologies, etc.

Which might be a good thing. Terrifying visions of AI are all about certainty and the authoritarianism it creates.

If existential depression is a mental friction from the lack of certainty about what to do, then some measure of it is probably necessary...

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#86

Post by gaius »

blazespin wrote: post #59
Houshalter wrote: post #37

Date Approximate cost per GFLOPS inflation adjusted to 2013 US dollars --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1961 $8.3 trillion 1984 $42,780,000 1997 $42,000 April 2000 $1,300 May 2000 $836 August 2003 $100 August 2007 $52 March 2011 $1.80 August 2012 $0.73 June 2013 $0.22 November 2013 $0.16 December 2013 $0.12 January 2015 $0.06

That's kinda scary for AI, actually. We're plateauing..

Winter is coming...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#87

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

apsec112 wrote: post #45
vonnik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is moving fast. Faster than it has in a long time. In research circles, "supervised learning", or data classification problems, are considered solved. Consider the magnitude of that statement: If we have sufficient labeled data, we can predict those labels accurately on data we haven't been exposed to: fraud, faces, diseases, you name it. AI is moving fast for three reasons, which Andrew Ng summarizes neatly: 1) W…

"the way the French decided to fight German panzers with mounted cavalry in WWI" Quick note: I think this is historically inaccurate. In World War One, the Germans had essentially no tanks, unlike the British and French. In World War II, there's a popular rumor that Polish (not French) cavalry forces charged German tanks at Krojanty, but this is itself a myth (the cavalry attack was against infantry, tanks arrived af…

>> In World War II, there's a popular rumor that Polish (not French) cavalry forces charged German tanks at Krojanty, but this is itself a myth (the cavalry attack was against infantry, tanks arrived afterwards).

Not just any cavalry- Polish winged hussars:

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

Obviously, they could totally take a tank single-handedy, but they have now ascended into heaven to party with the Valkyries.

(It is known.)

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#88

Post by singularity2001 »

Animats wrote: post #53
SapphireSun wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the first time it started doing that, I've been amazed that that works so well in a production system. Every. Time.

The first time I saw it, I thought they had people in some call center doing the reading. But they don't, at least not often. The US Postal Service used to have 55 centers where humans tried to read envelopes that the machines couldn't. They're now down to one. "We get the worst of the worst. It used to be that we’d get letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren’t good enough to read them. Now we get l…

very interesting

>> equipment that can read nearly 98 percent of all hand-addressed

that number must be pretty outdated

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#89

Post by Houshalter »

Cybiote wrote: post #79
Houshalter wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no mathematical distinction between different "tasks". Playing Go requires thousands or even millions of different heuristics and pieces of knowledge. Each of those is a "task" in and of itself. The same technology which beat Go could also, in principle, be used to play a real time video game that requires hunting and stalking things. Insects are indeed tiny. But they are highly specialized . They can't lear…

> The same technology which beat Go could also, in principle, be used to play a real time video game that requires hunting and stalking things. If you generalize things enough to mean application of linear algebra, the chain rule and map, then yes that's true. However, the fact is that Neural networks still take a huge amount of skill and experimentation to design new architectures. The more powerful deeplearning bec…

>If you generalize things enough to mean application of linear algebra, the chain rule and map, then yes that's true. However, the fact is that Neural networks still take a huge amount of skill and experimentation to design new architectures. The more powerful deeplearning becomes, the less skill will be required to do complicated things.

Sort of. Hyperparameter tuning is indeed difficult, but in principle it can be automated and there has been great work on this in the past few years. But I never claimed that it was just plug and play. The point is it's the same underlying technology in speech recognition or self driving cars or face recognition. Even if the number of layers and convolution sizes and learning rates are totally different, the principles are the same.

>The AlphaGo bot was very data inefficient... David Silver points out how they broke correlations by brute forcing millions of games while only keeping one move per game.

This problem was solved in the past with temporal difference learning. Maybe there are technical reasons they didn't do that, I don't know. At the very least they could pick a random move from each game per batch, instead of discarding the rest of the moves. I don't really see how that helps solve anything.

>Recognizing the weaknesses of our models instead of glossing over them is how we get to AI!

There is a huge difference between recognizing weaknesses, and the AI Effect. Where AI solves problem X, and people disregard it "because it can't do Y".

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#90

Post by Houshalter »

Cybiote wrote: post #80
Houshalter wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my point. Spiders can't learn. Maybe they are amazing for what they do, but the comparison is apples to oranges. They do fundamentally different things. Of course spiders are complex. Everything in biology is complex. It's been slowly refined over millions and millions of years. Countless trillions of tweaks to its DNA tested and rejected until it hit upon something that worked. No human could design s…

The large majority of deployed machine learning algorithms actually can't learn. The bias is so large that most (all?) specialized hardware assumes that only inference will be done. In contrast, there is evidence for online adaptability in insects^ ^ http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/5PHddkgYYKaduPp4CcN5/ful...

They learn just fine during training.
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