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The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

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Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#91

Post by jon_richards »

euske wrote: post #88
robotresearcher wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be ignoring the many, many AI applications that are already working with just fine accuracy in the real world. They are quietly working in the background where you don’t notice them.

Such as...? Please don't go BS like "Google is an AI app" etc. I'd expect an app where AI is the indispensable component. You can make a decent search engine/camera/phone/car/microwave without AI.

The problem is that the definition of AI keeps changing. It essentially means "Things computers can't do". A roomba would have been considered AI not long ago, but now its just a vacuum cleaner that moves around randomly for a while and then goes back to its charger. I'd imagine turn by turn directions would be considered AI if you go back far enough.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#92

Post by jon_richards »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #84
TwoBit wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this idea that the only way to create true AI necessarily results in something that has feelings.

I’d settle for probabilistic, context aware cognition, myself. Sadly (or thankfully, depending on one’s perspective) this won’t happen in my lifetime.

What do we want?

Context aware language processing!

When do we want it?

When do we want what?

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#93

Post by lifeisstillgood »

gliese1337 wrote: post #50
Talyen42 wrote: post #6

The biggest challenge yet unconquered is getting your "average" business ($1-100m revenue, zero AI knowledge) using ML to help with literally anything they do . I'd wager less than 1% of businesses outside of SV even have a clue where to begin, or what to use it for, my employer included. "Do we hire some AI guys?" We'll need to crack the 1%-using-it mark for me to consider the revolution "begun"...

I work for an actual tech company, which actually told me to look into a couple of ML projects to improve our operating efficiency, which actually produced good results and had an obvious and short path to being put into production... and which were promptly shelved. Business people make no sense.

I would also be interested in knowing which projects / applications of ML seemed easy wins - I generally get stumped on "use CV and facial recognition" for a business that has no need of facial recognition.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#94

Post by lifeisstillgood »

zapita wrote: post #8
Talyen42 wrote: post #6

The biggest challenge yet unconquered is getting your "average" business ($1-100m revenue, zero AI knowledge) using ML to help with literally anything they do . I'd wager less than 1% of businesses outside of SV even have a clue where to begin, or what to use it for, my employer included. "Do we hire some AI guys?" We'll need to crack the 1%-using-it mark for me to consider the revolution "begun"...

Considering that the average business is unlikely to be writing any sort of software , other than perhaps basic Excel formulas... I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to use advanced software development techniques such as ML.

I would suggest that not writing any sort of software is a good proxy for going out of business soon.

I also think you would be surprised at how many businesses both do, and really want and value, software - but don't have anyone convincing to do it for them

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#95

Post by nopinsight »

euske wrote: post #88
robotresearcher wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be ignoring the many, many AI applications that are already working with just fine accuracy in the real world. They are quietly working in the background where you don’t notice them.

Such as...? Please don't go BS like "Google is an AI app" etc. I'd expect an app where AI is the indispensable component. You can make a decent search engine/camera/phone/car/microwave without AI.

Image search and categorization require machine learning to work well. Similarly with recommendation engines, speech recognition, and machine translation (the last one still often not too well but much better than in the past).

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#96

Post by TeMPOraL »

8bitsrule wrote: post #71
throwaway84742 wrote: post #69

The main problem with “AI revolution” today is that 95% of things that practitioners tell you it can do are just nowhere close to sufficient accuracy under the range of conditions they’d need to work in in the real world. Easily more than a half of them don’t even work at all outside a demo with hand picked examples. And nobody seems to care. This narrows down the scope of applicability to a tiny sliver where you can…

It has to evolve, not revolve. Like cars did (and they're still -far- from perfect). Our remarkable bodies weren't designed by engineers, they survive now because, earlier, so many didn't. Are we smarter than evolution, because we like to think we are? Time will tell.

> Are we smarter than evolution, because we like to think we are?

Of course we are. We went from "natural state" to spaceflight in mere couple thousand years, of which the most meaningful were last 300.

We design, build and test things on a scale that's orders of magnitude shorter than gene-driven biological evolution. Still, that doesn't mean everything gets perfected instantly, and we humans are quite an impatient bunch (no surprise here, given our short lifespans).

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#97

Post by paganel »

laythea wrote: post #24

Where is the end game? The problem with this kind of AI revolution is that it relies on data about us. And this is responsible for the feverish attitude towards collecting or scraping data, sometimes from the public domain, but more than usually, from us. I for one, am having none of it.

It will probably not end very soon. The author did mention some concerns about privacy, but only once, and then moved forward with his reasoning like nothing had happened. Also, it’s disheartening to see that his reaction to a piece of technology that could have probably killed his unborn kid (the medical device at the beginning which was fed bad data) was to say “we should use more technology!”, he was not questioning the underlying premises behind the whole operation at all: like, is it ok to “let” a machine help decide a technological untrained person (the doctor) if my unborn kid should support a life-threatening intervention or not?

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#98

Post by make3 »

euske wrote: post #88
robotresearcher wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be ignoring the many, many AI applications that are already working with just fine accuracy in the real world. They are quietly working in the background where you don’t notice them.

Such as...? Please don't go BS like "Google is an AI app" etc. I'd expect an app where AI is the indispensable component. You can make a decent search engine/camera/phone/car/microwave without AI.

Google Assistant voice recognition, Google translate, Google Assistant voice generation (wavenet), Google Assistant question answering, Google keyboard word prediction, Google search, YouTube video suggestions, Dropbox ocr, Spotify & Amazon product suggestions, self driving cars (even if they're not perfect), same things as Google Assistant but for alexa & cortana, a huge bunch of new diagnosis tools, etc

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#99

Post by TeMPOraL »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #94
zapita wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that the average business is unlikely to be writing any sort of software , other than perhaps basic Excel formulas... I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to use advanced software development techniques such as ML.

I would suggest that not writing any sort of software is a good proxy for going out of business soon. I also think you would be surprised at how many businesses both do, and really want and value, software - but don't have anyone convincing to do it for them

I increasingly feel that almost every business would benefit from having someone with programming experience on-board. This comes from observing that businesses tend to have a lot of ad-hoc processes and unique requirements, for which there is no software package to buy - not without throwing away huge parts of the processes and rebuilding them in a "standard" way. However, a lot of those unique areas could be improved with a help of someone who's capable of writing small programs and scripts to glue things together.

A random example: my SO often works with high-res photos of their products, and sometimes this involves modifying them to suit the random requirements of other businesses. Something I currently solve for her by running ImageMagick one-liners if she needs more than a few photos modified. A person with basic familiarity of shell scripting and CLI tools could improve their workflow and keep improving it on-demand, as the requirements change.

Re: The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

#100

Post by victorNicollet »

Talyen42 wrote: post #6

The biggest challenge yet unconquered is getting your "average" business ($1-100m revenue, zero AI knowledge) using ML to help with literally anything they do . I'd wager less than 1% of businesses outside of SV even have a clue where to begin, or what to use it for, my employer included. "Do we hire some AI guys?" We'll need to crack the 1%-using-it mark for me to consider the revolution "begun"...

The answer is, indeed, to "hire some AI guys". Many of your challenges are likely shared with your competitors, which means there's a market that some specialized "AI guys" can serve.

My employer does supply chain optimization, because many "average" businesses have supply chains that need to be optimized. We have specialized AI tools based on deep learning and differential programming, and we have human supply chain experts that can fit those tools to the specifics of a customer's situation.

I would say that despite our best marketing efforts, many of our customers don't know that we're doing this "AI" thing they've been hearing about.

The anti-pattern with "Do we hire some AI guys?" is that, if you have to teach those guys how a supply chain works, you've already lost. Pick someone who is already specialized in the problem you're trying to solve.

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