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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

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.

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.