4 ms·
I get why people think it's hype. The core math and CS for soft AI and statistical machine learning (neural nets, decision trees, unsupervised learning, etc) h
by ap22213 10y ago
I get why people think it's hype. The core math and CS for soft AI and statistical machine learning (neural nets, decision trees, unsupervised learning, etc) has been around for a long time, for sure. I did some R&D work with them in the 90s / 2000s. Interesting projects, but they weren't practical or cost effective at the time.
But, very recently, some interesting hardware, software, data sources, and business models have evolved and converged that make 'AI' much more practical and realistic. And, just take a look at recent research papers and popular open sourced projects, and it's clear that many of the smartest people in the industry are working on it. Some very creative and innovative things have been happening in an ambitious space that had been kind of stagnatant for decades.
Think of AI of today like 'The Internet' was like like 1991. Probably more impactful, actually, because the major tech companies are throwing billions at it. There are many more people with skills and knowledge to move it forward. And, we all know that Alphabet is moving toward constructing personal intelligent agents for everyone on the planet. It's going to be a very interesting decade.
- nostrademons 10y agoThe things that major tech companies were throwing money at in 1991 were WebTV, AI, VR and PDAs. Not - other than a few visionaries - the Internet. Come to think of it, it wasn't all that different from today. IMHO, involvement of major corporations throwing billions at it is an anti-signal for the success of a technology. What'll really make AI take off is effective 80/20 solutions combined with novel applications to fields that people consider dead. I have no idea what those solutions or those fields are - I'd be a lot richer if I did - but I'll predict that we won't call them "intelligence" when they arise.
- scholia 10y agoWe had already had an "AI is The Future" boom in the 1970s-1980s, rapidly followed by the "AI Winter". (1) Also, we already had government-backed standard networking with OSI. The US, UK and EU governments were big OSI backers and didn't want TCP/IP. (2) However, 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing ;-) (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter (2) http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet...