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> my longstanding belief that it’s important to combat exaggerated claims about artificial intelligence. I think Google translate is pretty amazing, but yeah,

by Isamu 9y ago

> my longstanding belief that it’s important to combat exaggerated claims about artificial intelligence. I think Google translate is pretty amazing, but yeah, there's no need to declare game over. We are only beginning. Overestimating progress goes back to the early days of computers. Seeing impressive results, people think the computer must possess something close to human intelligence on some level, because a human would have to be pretty smart to perform that well. But no, with computers with have idiot savants.

koverstreet 9y ago
Yeah, with all the people making ridiculously overstated claims about what deep learning can do I'm pretty sure we've got another AI winter coming. And it's a shame. I really want to see more genuine progress in AI research; I really want to understand _what consciousness is_. But this boom/bust cycle that happens every time there's a tiny bit of real progress is a painfully inefficient way of getting there.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  If there is a winter, I think it's going to be very different than in the past. What people used to call a "winter" was a drying-out of the funding for AI research. However, in the past, this research was funded primarily by public money, and specifically by defense budgets. And it was cut when scientists failed to produce the army of super robots the generals thought they were promised. In the present however, there is a lot of money put into AI research by the industry - Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM, as well as many other, smaller companies. The amount of investment in AI by those companies is simply unprecedented and so is the number of people who -drawn by this river of dosh, like moths to a flame- are pursuing AI as a career (even if that only means the statistical machine learning side of AI that those companies invest into). What this means is that the current branch of AI has become "too big to fail". And that has nothing to do with how successful it is. As long as it can be monetised and the industry leads can show some return to their investment, "AI" will keep growing. A winter, if it comes, will be a winter of knowledge- not of funds. We will end up with so much unusable, meaningless, laughably bad "research" that any significant contribution to knowledge will simply be buried under a ton of rubbish, never to be found out. So the money will keep flowing in. But what will come out the other end will be utter nonsense.
DanielleMolloy 9y ago
> I think Google translate is pretty amazing... (Agreeing with the rest of the comment) Unfortunately, it is not. There are several start-ups naively using it for cheap translations of product descriptions and reviews (e.g. Etsy, TripAdvisor, GoogleMaps reviews). At some point they started to translate everything to the system's language(?) by default, which rarely ever works. Even worse, the translations turn out so bad that it feels as if you are looking at a page made up of badly written spam mails. Not really a good way of gaining customer trust. As - for instance on Etsy - I had a hard time displaying the original English product descriptions after they introduced it (the ones translated to German were simply indecipherable), I really wonder whether their popularity in non-English speaking countries has seen a dip after they introduced this side-widely. I appreciate that Hofstadter explains the difficulty of translating so rigorously, and hope people in charge who have no decent experience with second language usage (and thus think Google Translate already does a "good-enough" job) listen.

by Isamu 9y ago

koverstreet 9y ago

Yeah, with all the people making ridiculously overstated claims about what deep learning can do I'm pretty sure we've got another AI winter coming. And it's a shame. I really want to see more genuine progress in AI research; I really want to understand _what consciousness is_. But this boom/bust cycle that happens every time there's a tiny bit of real progress is a painfully inefficient way of getting there.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
If there is a winter, I think it's going to be very different than in the past. What people used to call a "winter" was a drying-out of the funding for AI research. However, in the past, this research was funded primarily by public money, and specifically by defense budgets. And it was cut when scientists failed to produce the army of super robots the generals thought they were promised. In the present however, there is a lot of money put into AI research by the industry - Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM, as well as many other, smaller companies. The amount of investment in AI by those companies is simply unprecedented and so is the number of people who -drawn by this river of dosh, like moths to a flame- are pursuing AI as a career (even if that only means the statistical machine learning side of AI that those companies invest into). What this means is that the current branch of AI has become "too big to fail". And that has nothing to do with how successful it is. As long as it can be monetised and the industry leads can show some return to their investment, "AI" will keep growing. A winter, if it comes, will be a winter of knowledge- not of funds. We will end up with so much unusable, meaningless, laughably bad "research" that any significant contribution to knowledge will simply be buried under a ton of rubbish, never to be found out. So the money will keep flowing in. But what will come out the other end will be utter nonsense.

DanielleMolloy 9y ago

> I think Google translate is pretty amazing... (Agreeing with the rest of the comment) Unfortunately, it is not. There are several start-ups naively using it for cheap translations of product descriptions and reviews (e.g. Etsy, TripAdvisor, GoogleMaps reviews). At some point they started to translate everything to the system's language(?) by default, which rarely ever works. Even worse, the translations turn out so bad that it feels as if you are looking at a page made up of badly written spam mails. Not really a good way of gaining customer trust. As - for instance on Etsy - I had a hard time displaying the original English product descriptions after they introduced it (the ones translated to German were simply indecipherable), I really wonder whether their popularity in non-English speaking countries has seen a dip after they introduced this side-widely. I appreciate that Hofstadter explains the difficulty of translating so rigorously, and hope people in charge who have no decent experience with second language usage (and thus think Google Translate already does a "good-enough" job) listen.