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Facebook's AI Research Labs
- meeper16 10y agoGoogle's is 100x facebooks
- joe_the_user 10y agoHonest question: Is making advertising effective where the battle for the best AI is really going to be fought? I think feel like it's important to somehow measure the level of progress being made by the current explosion of deep learning processes. I'm personally not that impressed by translation applications or Google search innovations - the translations I see still seem barely functional, noticeably better than purely literal translation but not very much more useful than purely literal translation. Alphago was definite progress. Are there that many problems that could be approached in a similar way? Clearly, making ads work is important to a company's bottom line. But it seems like there are going to be hard limits to just extrapolating patterns - I know youtube's recommendation engine has gotten worse for me over time and it seems like the smartest entity in the world can only figure out so much future buying from past online surfing and past purchases combined. And even more, there's only so much ads in particular are going change this.
- projectramo 10y agoHonest answer: I think it is hard to predict where the next ML/AI breakthrough will come from because almost all the algorithms are hard to predict and non-linear. So they try one method, small improvement, try another, small improvement, try a third and suddenly they have a breakthrough in some field. Trouble is that right now you don't know what technique will work in what field. That means that it could be in Go, or learning what to eat, or driving cars, or cancer diagnosis etc. So wherever the next breakthroughs happen to be is probably where one of the "battles for AI" will be waged. The one exception to this rule is an AI that can create other AI. If that happens, the war for AI is over. Whether it has been lost or won depends on your POV.
- joe_the_user 10y agoIt's fair to say we don't know how progress will go in increasing the effectiveness of the various algorithms. But it's there also the question of how much progress is possible in improving the answer to a given question. Some problems might present a situation where "you can't squeeze blood from a stone". There is also the factor that those situations where humans still do better than computers are situations where we know progress is theoretically possible at some level whereas in situations where computers already outperform human, it is harder to have a theoretical reason to think further progress is possible.
- vintermann 10y agoYour last point. Man, there are so many people who don't grasp that, who think AI is guaranteed to grow into the heavens.
- joe_the_user 10y agoWell, Humans have made immense progress in the last 10K years, surpassing all other animals in capabilities, etc. And individual geniuses have at times pushed a given field forward beyond what was otherwise expected (For example Kary Mullis or Craig Venter in biology). That would lead one to imagine entity with a broad intelligence that surpasses humans could do amazing things. All that said "artificial intelligence" still isn't going to be a super box that you can point at a context-free stream of data and get magic predictions from.
- Consultant32452 10y ago>Honest question: Is making advertising effective where the battle for the best AI is really going to be fought? No, the real battle for the best AI is being fought on the various global stock exchanges. The vast majority of trades are AI now. In this way AI virtually already controls the price of all globally traded goods.
- nibs 10y agoFurther I would say that AI is controlling the flow of goods through businesses. The system we make for food companies tells the human users what to buy, when to buy it, where to put it, when to process it and who to sell it to. Mostly the humans just move stuff around and exchange the paperwork.
- dmix 10y ago> Mostly the humans just move stuff around and exchange the paperwork. Don't forget meetings. Lots and lots of meetings.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago> Honest question: Is making advertising effective Yes. You haven't been paying attention, that has been the name of the game since Locke. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine The Facebook burrowing everywhere -- forever."
- freyir 10y agoThe battle will be fought where the money is. Right now, that's online advertising and stock trading, two shining beacons of the modern U.S. economy.
- mathattack 10y agoThe ad market is tiny compared to Real Estate, Capital Markets, Auto and Health Care. It's just so inefficient and lightly regulated that it's an easy target.
- projectramo 10y agoI appreciate that they took the time to set up two different labs to differentiate AI from ML. To my mind, the former is largely (though not exclusively) based on logical reasoning (as in formal logic) and the latter is largely (though not exclusively) based on statistical reasoning. I hope one of these articles will take some time to bring us up to date on the recent developments in contrast to the other.
- argonaut 10y agoYou're reading too much into the names. FB AI Research works on ML/AI research. Applied ML works on ML/AI application. Both work on ML and AI.
- projectramo 10y agook.
- mturmon 10y agoClearly the examples of AT&T Research and MSR are close to LeCun and Candela's minds.
- personjerry 10y agoFrom the words of my professor who was around at the time, there was nothing quite like Bell Labs[0] when AT&T was still a monopoly. Because as a monopoly they earned a fixed % of their spending, Bell Labs had essentially unlimited funding, and a lot of their work really paved the way for all of the amazing technology we have today, especially the Internet.
- mathattack 10y agoUnlimited funding and limited push to commercialize due to the same regulatory constraints. It was like a tenured professorship minus the teaching. Eventually competition crushed it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]