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With all the peaks and troughs of AI over the years, don't you think we may be due for another trough, that maybe the reason, to quote: >the experts of yestery

With all the peaks and troughs of AI over the years, don't you think we may be due for another trough, that maybe the reason, to quote: >the experts of yesteryear are almost certainly not the people who will build the autonomous OS of the future is because it will be a very long time before we have anything like a Level 4 vehicle?

Fricken 10y ago
It don't believe we're headed into any kind of AI trough. Very exciting things are happening in the field of deep learning, and the people who are best at understanding and applying all that new theory and research are kids who never leave the lab. Drive.ai is an autonomous driving startup that's made up of mostly unknown Stanford AI lab labmates who dropped out of their PHD programs to build an autonomous OS, and what they're doing is so much more futuristic than what anybody else is doing. They've made more progress in less time with fewer resources than any of the big players. They've got 4 test vehicles, a team of 40 people, they're running on $12 million in venture capital, and they've demoed capabilities that the multi-billion dollar players don't have. They're just pure deep learning guys, they could have gone into fintech or NLP but they went for AVs starting with a blank slate and an abundance of unproven talent. They're still behind Waymo and Cruise, but they're progressing at a higher rate of speed. Everybody in this game is subject to disruption from some nobody coming out of nowhere. Something like transfer learning drops out of the sky, it has the potential to totally revolutionize the way one might think about an Autonomous driving stack, and it all comes down to the genius who figures out how to apply it effectively. That genius could be anyone, no amount of money you spend can buy certainty in this race. Which makes it really fun to watch.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  I'll just be upfront, I'm a total pessimist on the near-term possibility of autonomous driving. >I don't believe we're headed into any kind of AI trough. Why? AI winter is a well-known phenomenon, AI hype has permeated tech, now business and is starting to push into the layman's consciousness. Does it not seem that a bust is near? The laymans perception of autonomous driving is a magic box that will drive them around while they read their phones and that it will be here in 5/10 years. I think that's just unsustainable. A car which can handle northern snow, midwestern winds, country potholes, city traffic, unpredictiable/aggressive drivers and which can do that with a lower accident rate than humans is our generations cold fusion. Fundamental breakthroughs are needed. What strikes me is that we think because we can describe "driving" in one word, we think it is a specific task, but it seems much more general and AI developments on general learning are notoriously fraught. Your thoughts?
  - Fricken 10y ago
    I don't know what people mean when they say 'the near-term possibility of autonomous driving'. Some people mean a car that can go everywhere and do everything a human can. I'm thinking about robotaxis in the Bay area that drive along established circuits and do pick-ups and drop offs in designated zones like bus stops. That's what I'm expecting to see in the 5 year time frame, and being able to apply autonomous driving technology to that limited extent opens a very lucrative new market. Any way you look at the autonomous driving problem it's a hard problem, but every few days it seems there's some paper coming out that demos a new optimization to one aspect or another of the autonomous vehicle development pipeline. The world of modular deep learning systems, where you have various parent and child subsystems that can be quickly trained and swapped out is very much an open and field of research and my bet is on agile teams that can build and test models faster, and can take things from research to implementation in less time than the competition. Drive.ai's best trade secret is the system they have for vastly reducing the amount of training data they need to get a result, and vastly reducing the amount of human labour needed to annotate or clean up said training data. I don't know what the hype is. People are expecting terminator robots or something, that's not going to happen anytime soon. But progress in Machine learning has been steady and driving for a decade and shows know signs of letting up in the forseeable future, because we just keep opening up new frontiers to explore. There's so much to do.
    - baq 10y ago
      I expect a car that can get me to and from work safely and reliably so i don't have to waste an hour a day driving - and i hear i'm lucky that it's only an hour.
  - greenshackle2 10y ago
    I take it you've shorted AI companies then?
  - nl 10y ago
    There is no doubt that AI (like all technologies) will hit the "trough of disillusionment". But that is different to another AI winter. AI is making real companies real money this time.

Fricken 10y ago

It don't believe we're headed into any kind of AI trough. Very exciting things are happening in the field of deep learning, and the people who are best at understanding and applying all that new theory and research are kids who never leave the lab. Drive.ai is an autonomous driving startup that's made up of mostly unknown Stanford AI lab labmates who dropped out of their PHD programs to build an autonomous OS, and what they're doing is so much more futuristic than what anybody else is doing. They've made more progress in less time with fewer resources than any of the big players. They've got 4 test vehicles, a team of 40 people, they're running on $12 million in venture capital, and they've demoed capabilities that the multi-billion dollar players don't have. They're just pure deep learning guys, they could have gone into fintech or NLP but they went for AVs starting with a blank slate and an abundance of unproven talent. They're still behind Waymo and Cruise, but they're progressing at a higher rate of speed. Everybody in this game is subject to disruption from some nobody coming out of nowhere. Something like transfer learning drops out of the sky, it has the potential to totally revolutionize the way one might think about an Autonomous driving stack, and it all comes down to the genius who figures out how to apply it effectively. That genius could be anyone, no amount of money you spend can buy certainty in this race. Which makes it really fun to watch.

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
I'll just be upfront, I'm a total pessimist on the near-term possibility of autonomous driving. >I don't believe we're headed into any kind of AI trough. Why? AI winter is a well-known phenomenon, AI hype has permeated tech, now business and is starting to push into the layman's consciousness. Does it not seem that a bust is near? The laymans perception of autonomous driving is a magic box that will drive them around while they read their phones and that it will be here in 5/10 years. I think that's just unsustainable. A car which can handle northern snow, midwestern winds, country potholes, city traffic, unpredictiable/aggressive drivers and which can do that with a lower accident rate than humans is our generations cold fusion. Fundamental breakthroughs are needed. What strikes me is that we think because we can describe "driving" in one word, we think it is a specific task, but it seems much more general and AI developments on general learning are notoriously fraught. Your thoughts?
- Fricken 10y ago
  I don't know what people mean when they say 'the near-term possibility of autonomous driving'. Some people mean a car that can go everywhere and do everything a human can. I'm thinking about robotaxis in the Bay area that drive along established circuits and do pick-ups and drop offs in designated zones like bus stops. That's what I'm expecting to see in the 5 year time frame, and being able to apply autonomous driving technology to that limited extent opens a very lucrative new market. Any way you look at the autonomous driving problem it's a hard problem, but every few days it seems there's some paper coming out that demos a new optimization to one aspect or another of the autonomous vehicle development pipeline. The world of modular deep learning systems, where you have various parent and child subsystems that can be quickly trained and swapped out is very much an open and field of research and my bet is on agile teams that can build and test models faster, and can take things from research to implementation in less time than the competition. Drive.ai's best trade secret is the system they have for vastly reducing the amount of training data they need to get a result, and vastly reducing the amount of human labour needed to annotate or clean up said training data. I don't know what the hype is. People are expecting terminator robots or something, that's not going to happen anytime soon. But progress in Machine learning has been steady and driving for a decade and shows know signs of letting up in the forseeable future, because we just keep opening up new frontiers to explore. There's so much to do.
  - baq 10y ago
    I expect a car that can get me to and from work safely and reliably so i don't have to waste an hour a day driving - and i hear i'm lucky that it's only an hour.
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  I take it you've shorted AI companies then?
- nl 10y ago
  There is no doubt that AI (like all technologies) will hit the "trough of disillusionment". But that is different to another AI winter. AI is making real companies real money this time.