4 ms·

More gimmick than magic. At best they can do a crappy job of emulating specific human behaviours on carefully curated training datasets.

oh-kumudo 9y ago
> At best they can do a crappy job of emulating specific human behaviours ...With better performance than human, that is pretty magical.
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  In certain cases, perhaps. But that's the exception, not the rule. You can't simply apply a neural net to every problem and magically get great results.
infinite8s 9y ago
What about Alpha Go Zeros approach of reinforced learning based on self play? Arguably the game of go has really simple, explicit rules, and evaluating the final end state is also easy, but it shows that with enough compute NNs can identify important features without supervision or labeling.
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  What about what about Given enough time, energy, and computing power, you could just precompute every possible outcome and call it a neural network. You'll be praised as a genius.
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    This is like saying "given enough time, energy, and computing power, you could just factor large semiprimes by exhaustive search." It's both true and uninteresting because nobody has or ever will have that much time, energy, and computing power.
  - chillee 9y ago
    Ah yes, I forgot. Deepmind just secretly computed all 10^100 board states for alphago... Neural nets have been very successful for a lot of things while also being overhyped, but dismissing it all as marketing hype is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
  - Bjartr 9y ago
    Where "enough" is "more than is available in the universe". The number of outcomes you'd need to precompute exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.
- a_imho 9y ago
  Arguably the game of go has really simple, explicit rules, and evaluating the final end state is also easy, but it shows that with enough compute NNs can identify important features without supervision or labeling. AFAIK we don't know how much of that generalizes.

oh-kumudo 9y ago

> At best they can do a crappy job of emulating specific human behaviours ...With better performance than human, that is pretty magical.

brndnmtthws 9y ago
In certain cases, perhaps. But that's the exception, not the rule. You can't simply apply a neural net to every problem and magically get great results.

infinite8s 9y ago

What about Alpha Go Zeros approach of reinforced learning based on self play? Arguably the game of go has really simple, explicit rules, and evaluating the final end state is also easy, but it shows that with enough compute NNs can identify important features without supervision or labeling.

brndnmtthws 9y ago
What about what about Given enough time, energy, and computing power, you could just precompute every possible outcome and call it a neural network. You'll be praised as a genius.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  This is like saying "given enough time, energy, and computing power, you could just factor large semiprimes by exhaustive search." It's both true and uninteresting because nobody has or ever will have that much time, energy, and computing power.
- chillee 9y ago
  Ah yes, I forgot. Deepmind just secretly computed all 10^100 board states for alphago... Neural nets have been very successful for a lot of things while also being overhyped, but dismissing it all as marketing hype is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- Bjartr 9y ago
  Where "enough" is "more than is available in the universe". The number of outcomes you'd need to precompute exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.
a_imho 9y ago
Arguably the game of go has really simple, explicit rules, and evaluating the final end state is also easy, but it shows that with enough compute NNs can identify important features without supervision or labeling. AFAIK we don't know how much of that generalizes.