4 ms·

> The AI industry has a terrible problem: once we create an algorithm for something it's no longer AI, it's just an algorithm. https://news.ycombinator.com/ite

> The AI industry has a terrible problem: once we create an algorithm for something it's no longer AI, it's just an algorithm. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178405

malmsteen 9y ago
Totally agree. In fact i think we need to intebtionally call some stuff ai. Watson was an ai.
eesmith 9y ago
I'm not sure that's true. I remember reading Alex Martelli (famous in the Python world) write about how people now consider methods based on Bayes Theorem (ie, statistical learning) to be part of AI. His view in 2003 was: > considering Bayes' theorem to be part of AI makes just about as much sense as considering addition in the same light, if "expert systems" had been the first context in which you had ever seen numbers being summed. In the '80s, when at IBM Research we developed the first large-vocabulary real-time dictation taking systems, I remember continuous attacks coming from the Artificial Intelligentsia due to the fact that we were using NO "AI" techniques -- rather, stuff named after Bayes, Markov and Viterbi, all dead white mathematicians (it sure didn't help that our languages were PL/I, Rexx, Fortran, and the like -- no, particularly, that our system _worked_, the most unforgivable of sins:-). I recall T-shirts boldly emblazoned with "P(A|B) = P(B|A) P(A) / P(B)" worn at computational linguistics conferences as a deliberately inflammatory gesture, too:-). So we have an algorithm which wasn't considered part of AI by the then-AI practitioners, because it didn't aim for semantic understanding, become part of an expanded definition of AI.
- FiatLuxDave 9y ago
  Since when is Viterbi dead?
  - eesmith 9y ago
    Indeed! Looks like Martelli made a mistake in that quote.
FreakLegion 9y ago
This isn't a recent phenomenon, sadly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect.

malmsteen 9y ago

Totally agree. In fact i think we need to intebtionally call some stuff ai. Watson was an ai.

eesmith 9y ago

I'm not sure that's true. I remember reading Alex Martelli (famous in the Python world) write about how people now consider methods based on Bayes Theorem (ie, statistical learning) to be part of AI. His view in 2003 was: > considering Bayes' theorem to be part of AI makes just about as much sense as considering addition in the same light, if "expert systems" had been the first context in which you had ever seen numbers being summed. In the '80s, when at IBM Research we developed the first large-vocabulary real-time dictation taking systems, I remember continuous attacks coming from the Artificial Intelligentsia due to the fact that we were using NO "AI" techniques -- rather, stuff named after Bayes, Markov and Viterbi, all dead white mathematicians (it sure didn't help that our languages were PL/I, Rexx, Fortran, and the like -- no, particularly, that our system _worked_, the most unforgivable of sins:-). I recall T-shirts boldly emblazoned with "P(A|B) = P(B|A) P(A) / P(B)" worn at computational linguistics conferences as a deliberately inflammatory gesture, too:-). So we have an algorithm which wasn't considered part of AI by the then-AI practitioners, because it didn't aim for semantic understanding, become part of an expanded definition of AI.

FiatLuxDave 9y ago
Since when is Viterbi dead?
- eesmith 9y ago
  Indeed! Looks like Martelli made a mistake in that quote.

FreakLegion 9y ago

This isn't a recent phenomenon, sadly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect.