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Clearly the progress being made in the area of self-driving cars is undeniable. Seeing the articles and discussions crop up on a daily basis are making me wonde

Clearly the progress being made in the area of self-driving cars is undeniable. Seeing the articles and discussions crop up on a daily basis are making me wonder if we are headed for an AI Winter scenario in this area within the next decade or if this is the real deal and we will see self-driving cars at dealerships within 20 years. This is so far from being my area of expertise. Just one observer's thoughts/questions. Insane how far we have come so quickly, at any rate.

arcanus 9y ago
I don't disagree that AI is over-hyped. However, I think the research environment is not as likely to dry up this time. That is because much of the machine learning research is coming from industry, particularly the mega-corps. And for extremely important disruptive events such as AI, they are willing to drop $$ into collecting a stable of research scientists to not fall behind in this space. So while the AI winter was driven by a drop in academic and government spending on research, I think our present situation is far less likely to result in a similar drying up. Start ups could get hit, however.
- altotrees 9y ago
  This is kind of what I figured. I get the distinct feeling that any startup that is unable to keep pace (or break new ground) with AI research & development is going to be hurting badly within the next five years. Uber is poaching AI and Robotics talent, read:profs, from Carnegie Mellon for a reason. It is a do-or-die situation it seems.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
    Great comment. As a nit, I think "poaching" is a bad term. Uber offered to pay these professors what it viewed as what they were worth to it, which happened to be a lot more than what CMU was paying them. The professors accepted of their own free choice. I fail to see why such an action is termed "poaching". We have had enough problems with industry illegally conspiring (see Steve Jobs) to suppress developer pay through "anti-poaching" agreements, that the term "poaching" is long due for retirement in describing situations other than when animals are illegally killed.
    - taneq 9y ago
      > I fail to see why such an action is termed "poaching". Because the company is a king, and the employees are the property of the crown?
    - altotrees 9y ago
      Hey there, thanks for the nit. I am kind of a language nerd, so always appreciate a bit of analysis. I see your point "poaching" as a word has had a somewhat problematic historical context attached to it. I guess I used the term relating to it's sub-definition "take or acquire in an unfair or clandestine way." I found the migration of experts from CMU to Uber fascinating — for two reasons: 1. The geographical proximity in which the acquisition occurred (i.e. a rust belt town with an awesome CS school and a well known Silicon Valley startup on location). 2. The moving from the academy to the private sector of said professors/researchers happened in a way I hadn't seen before. I mean lots of academics work within industry at some point, but this move seemed to carry more weight in the media — maybe because of the institution involved. Anyway, with that said, lots of the articles and speculation I read about it, for better or worse, painted the acquisition of academics by Uber as a bit unfair. I.e. Uber could and did pay way more than CMU and provided super interesting problems maybe outside the realm of what a professor normally faces in their research, I don't know. It was the "unfair" element portrayed in articles/opinion pieces I based my wording off of. I am in no way suggesting these profs and researchers did anything wrong or did anything but make the right choice for themselves, something we all have to do. I digress. Word choice noted, problematic history and other associations noted and hopefully I cleared up my choice a bit.
- dlubarov 9y ago
  Agreed. As a Google engineer, I think a lot of our AI efforts are "safe" (as in we'll keep investing in them for a long time) because they're already providing substantial business value. For example, - TTS and speech synthesis have lots of uses in Android (phones, Wear, Auto, etc.) - Object recognition is very useful for photo search - Face recognition is also useful for photo search (if you tag people in Google Photos) - Neural machine translation provides better translation accuracy (for languages which we have enough training data for) It's possible Google will cut back on some more speculative ML research efforts, but certainly not those four, I would think.
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    As a fellow google engineer, I'd be curious to know which (public) research you think isn't marketable/valuable. As you've mentioned, object detection (which is a considerable portion of CV) is marketable. Meta learning (Vizier, "Learning to learn with gradient descent with gradient descent") are incredibly valuable from a business perspective. Model compression is important for neural networks on mobile/embedded devices, etc. One of the very interesting things about ML being such a corporation driven field is that it's incredible how quickly relatively recent research makes its way into products.
    - zjaffee 9y ago
      > One of the very interesting things about ML being such a corporation driven field is that it's incredible how quickly relatively recent research makes its way into products. I think this is just true for really anything that falls purely within the domain of the computational sciences. For a ground breaking drug to hit the market, it takes 10 years of FDA trials, for high speed trains it requires large teams of construction workers only after years of safety work. In the world of software as it stands today, deploying a new model for something can be virtually instant in some cases, and even in the worst cases, it isn't taking people years to improve a small attribute of their product.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    I doubt Google will cut back any time soon, but as a former Google engineer, I find this an entertaining definition of business value ;) How much money does Google Photos make? Last time I used it, there were no ads in it. Isn't speech recognition nearly at human levels of comprehension, at least for US English and outside of highly technical jargon? Speech patterns change slowly, so would Android continue to make money if investment in speech R&D were cut back? My guess is yes, it'd be fine. Does Google Translate make money in some specific, measurable way? I don't mean "well it's neat to have translation links in web search", I mean, would people cut back on the commercial queries that are Google's main source of income if Translate quality stopped improving? I doubt it. Much of their products are like this. They're products but they aren't businesses. It's very easy to lose sight of the basics of business when inside the Google bubble. The things you mention are not providing business value in the conventional sense of the term because they aren't yielding independent profits. So they're all vulnerable. That said, vulnerable to what? I think Google is at risk of losing a lot of trust around web search and political and informational search more generally, but commercial queries are probably pretty much impregnable.
jacquesm 9y ago
> Seeing the articles and discussions crop up on a daily basis are making me wonder if we are headed for an AI Winter scenario in this area within the next decade or if this is the real deal and we will see self-driving cars at dealerships within 20 years. It will be either one of those two, if it doesn't happen in the next 20 years I would bet against it happening at all until AGI is a reality, assuming it will ever happen in the first place. But if it is possible with an incremental change to present day technology I fully expect it to happen and likely a lot faster than those 20 years. The economic incentives are too large to ignore and there are many players wealthy enough to finance such an incremental step.
- ghaff 9y ago
  For a lot of people, true hands-off autonomous driving on limited access divided highways is by itself a huge convenience feature and, potentially, a huge safety feature. And this seems like relatively low hanging fruit. People will pay for this. (And are, in a limited way, on more and more cars today.) It's not sexy and doesn't fulfill autonomous taxis everywhere fantasies but for the vast majority of people who don't live in or near urban cores it would likely be a significant quality of life improvement.

arcanus 9y ago

I don't disagree that AI is over-hyped. However, I think the research environment is not as likely to dry up this time. That is because much of the machine learning research is coming from industry, particularly the mega-corps. And for extremely important disruptive events such as AI, they are willing to drop $$ into collecting a stable of research scientists to not fall behind in this space. So while the AI winter was driven by a drop in academic and government spending on research, I think our present situation is far less likely to result in a similar drying up. Start ups could get hit, however.

altotrees 9y ago
This is kind of what I figured. I get the distinct feeling that any startup that is unable to keep pace (or break new ground) with AI research & development is going to be hurting badly within the next five years. Uber is poaching AI and Robotics talent, read:profs, from Carnegie Mellon for a reason. It is a do-or-die situation it seems.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
  Great comment. As a nit, I think "poaching" is a bad term. Uber offered to pay these professors what it viewed as what they were worth to it, which happened to be a lot more than what CMU was paying them. The professors accepted of their own free choice. I fail to see why such an action is termed "poaching". We have had enough problems with industry illegally conspiring (see Steve Jobs) to suppress developer pay through "anti-poaching" agreements, that the term "poaching" is long due for retirement in describing situations other than when animals are illegally killed.
  - taneq 9y ago
    > I fail to see why such an action is termed "poaching". Because the company is a king, and the employees are the property of the crown?
  - altotrees 9y ago
    Hey there, thanks for the nit. I am kind of a language nerd, so always appreciate a bit of analysis. I see your point "poaching" as a word has had a somewhat problematic historical context attached to it. I guess I used the term relating to it's sub-definition "take or acquire in an unfair or clandestine way." I found the migration of experts from CMU to Uber fascinating — for two reasons: 1. The geographical proximity in which the acquisition occurred (i.e. a rust belt town with an awesome CS school and a well known Silicon Valley startup on location). 2. The moving from the academy to the private sector of said professors/researchers happened in a way I hadn't seen before. I mean lots of academics work within industry at some point, but this move seemed to carry more weight in the media — maybe because of the institution involved. Anyway, with that said, lots of the articles and speculation I read about it, for better or worse, painted the acquisition of academics by Uber as a bit unfair. I.e. Uber could and did pay way more than CMU and provided super interesting problems maybe outside the realm of what a professor normally faces in their research, I don't know. It was the "unfair" element portrayed in articles/opinion pieces I based my wording off of. I am in no way suggesting these profs and researchers did anything wrong or did anything but make the right choice for themselves, something we all have to do. I digress. Word choice noted, problematic history and other associations noted and hopefully I cleared up my choice a bit.
dlubarov 9y ago
Agreed. As a Google engineer, I think a lot of our AI efforts are "safe" (as in we'll keep investing in them for a long time) because they're already providing substantial business value. For example, - TTS and speech synthesis have lots of uses in Android (phones, Wear, Auto, etc.) - Object recognition is very useful for photo search - Face recognition is also useful for photo search (if you tag people in Google Photos) - Neural machine translation provides better translation accuracy (for languages which we have enough training data for) It's possible Google will cut back on some more speculative ML research efforts, but certainly not those four, I would think.
- joshuamorton 9y ago
  As a fellow google engineer, I'd be curious to know which (public) research you think isn't marketable/valuable. As you've mentioned, object detection (which is a considerable portion of CV) is marketable. Meta learning (Vizier, "Learning to learn with gradient descent with gradient descent") are incredibly valuable from a business perspective. Model compression is important for neural networks on mobile/embedded devices, etc. One of the very interesting things about ML being such a corporation driven field is that it's incredible how quickly relatively recent research makes its way into products.
  - zjaffee 9y ago
    > One of the very interesting things about ML being such a corporation driven field is that it's incredible how quickly relatively recent research makes its way into products. I think this is just true for really anything that falls purely within the domain of the computational sciences. For a ground breaking drug to hit the market, it takes 10 years of FDA trials, for high speed trains it requires large teams of construction workers only after years of safety work. In the world of software as it stands today, deploying a new model for something can be virtually instant in some cases, and even in the worst cases, it isn't taking people years to improve a small attribute of their product.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  I doubt Google will cut back any time soon, but as a former Google engineer, I find this an entertaining definition of business value ;) How much money does Google Photos make? Last time I used it, there were no ads in it. Isn't speech recognition nearly at human levels of comprehension, at least for US English and outside of highly technical jargon? Speech patterns change slowly, so would Android continue to make money if investment in speech R&D were cut back? My guess is yes, it'd be fine. Does Google Translate make money in some specific, measurable way? I don't mean "well it's neat to have translation links in web search", I mean, would people cut back on the commercial queries that are Google's main source of income if Translate quality stopped improving? I doubt it. Much of their products are like this. They're products but they aren't businesses. It's very easy to lose sight of the basics of business when inside the Google bubble. The things you mention are not providing business value in the conventional sense of the term because they aren't yielding independent profits. So they're all vulnerable. That said, vulnerable to what? I think Google is at risk of losing a lot of trust around web search and political and informational search more generally, but commercial queries are probably pretty much impregnable.

jacquesm 9y ago

> Seeing the articles and discussions crop up on a daily basis are making me wonder if we are headed for an AI Winter scenario in this area within the next decade or if this is the real deal and we will see self-driving cars at dealerships within 20 years. It will be either one of those two, if it doesn't happen in the next 20 years I would bet against it happening at all until AGI is a reality, assuming it will ever happen in the first place. But if it is possible with an incremental change to present day technology I fully expect it to happen and likely a lot faster than those 20 years. The economic incentives are too large to ignore and there are many players wealthy enough to finance such an incremental step.

ghaff 9y ago
For a lot of people, true hands-off autonomous driving on limited access divided highways is by itself a huge convenience feature and, potentially, a huge safety feature. And this seems like relatively low hanging fruit. People will pay for this. (And are, in a limited way, on more and more cars today.) It's not sexy and doesn't fulfill autonomous taxis everywhere fantasies but for the vast majority of people who don't live in or near urban cores it would likely be a significant quality of life improvement.