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Hi, author here: Well first off: letters to investors are among the most biased pieces of writing in existence. Second: I'm not saying connectionism did not s

Hi, author here: Well first off: letters to investors are among the most biased pieces of writing in existence. Second: I'm not saying connectionism did not succeed in many areas! I'm a connectionist by heart! I love connectionism! But that being said there is disconnect between the expectations and reality. And it is huge. And it is particularly visible in autonomous driving. And it is not limited to media or CEO's, but it made its way into top researchers. And that is a dangerous sign, which historically preceded a winter event...

nopinsight 8y ago
I agree that self-driving had/have been overhyped over the previous few years. The problem is harder than many people realize. The difference between the current AI renaissance and the past pre-winter AI ecosystems is the level of economic gain realized by the technology. The late 80s-early 90s AI winter, for example, resulted from the limitations of expert systems which were useful but only in niche markets and their development and maintenance costs were quite high relative to alternatives. The current AI systems do something that alternatives, like Mechanical Turks, can only accomplish with much greater costs and may not even have the scale necessary for global massive services like Google Photos or Youtube autocaptioning. The spread of computing infrastructure and connectivity into the hands of billions of global population is a key contributing factor.
- felippee 8y ago
  > The difference between the current AI renaissance and the past pre-winter AI ecosystems is the level of economic gain realized by the technology I would argue this is well discounted by level of investment made against the future. I don't think the winter depends on the amount that somebody makes today on AI, rather on how much people are expecting to make in the future. If these don't match, there will be a winter. My take is that there is a huge bet against the future. And if DL ends up bringing just as much profit as it does today, interest will die very, very quickly.
  - nopinsight 8y ago
    Because there is a dearth of experts and a lack of deep technical knowledge among many business people, there are still a great many companies that have not yet started investing in deep learning or AI despite potential profits based on current technology. Non-tech sectors of the economy are probably underinvesting at the moment. This is analogous to the way electricity took decades to realize productivity gains in the broad economy. That said, the hype will dial down. I am just not sure the investment will decrease soon.
    - sanxiyn 8y ago
      While I agree there is underinvestment in non-tech sectors, I don't see why that would change and they will use deep learning. There are lots of profitable things in non-tech sectors that can be done with linear regression but not done.
      - cm2187 8y ago
        There are lots of things in the non-tech sector that can be automated with simple vanilla software but isn't. To use AI instead, you need to have 1) sophisticated devs in place, 2) a management that gets the value added, 3) lots of data in a usable format, 4) willingness to invest & experiment. Lots of non-tech businesses are lacking one if not all of these.
      - xamuel 8y ago
        This. And at the end of the day, deep learning is just a more sophisticated version of linear regression. (To listen to some people talking, you'd think if a machine just curve-fits enough data-points, it'll suddenly wake up and become self-aware or something? The delusion is just unbelievable!)
  - sgt101 8y ago
    Just like it did for ecommerce? Expectations we're wildly inflated, there was a bust, the market re adjusted and value was created
- Yaggo 8y ago
  > I agree that self-driving had/have been overhyped over the previous few years. The problem is harder than many people realize. The current road infrastructure (markings, signs) has been designed for humans. Once it has been modernized to better aid the self-driving systems, we don't probably need "perfect" AI.
  - dx034 8y ago
    But current signs designed for humans work well. They're machine readable (traffic sign detection is available from basically all manufacturers) and can (usually) be understood without prior knowledge and don't need much change over decades. I think there are few examples where messages were designed for computers but are easy to understand independent of the system, manufacturer. ASCII encoded text files are the only thing that come to mind.
ehsankia 8y ago
How can something be biased when it's listing facts? Those are actual features that are available today to anyone, that were made possible by AI. Do you think it would be possible to type "pictures of me at the beach with my dog" without AI in such as short time frame? Or to have cars that drive themselves without a driver? These are concrete benefits of machine learning, I don't understand how that's biased.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  How can something be biased when it's listing facts? If there are 100 facts that indicate a coming AI winter, and Brin just talks up the 15 facts that indicate AI's unalloyed dominance, that's definitely biased.
  - ehsankia 8y ago
    First, what are said 100 facts? The article looks at fairly mundane metrics such as number of tweets or self-driving accidents... Second, I'm not quite sure that's how it works. Like in mathematics, if your lemma is X, you can give a 100 examples of X being true, but I only need a single counter-example to break it. In my opinion a single valid modern use-case of AI is enough to show that we're not in an AI winter. By definition an AI winter means that nothing substantial is coming out of AI for a long period of time, yet Brin listed that Google alone has had a dozen in the past few years.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      > First, what are said 100 facts? You cannot ask a generic question, then attack the answer based on absence of evidence for a specific example.
- Grue3 8y ago
  Can't speak for the other items, but these >translate over 100 languages in Google Translate; >caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube; barely even work. Yeah, it's a difficult problem but it's not even close to being solved.
tigershark 8y ago
Hi, why in your analysis you spoke only about the companies that are not doing so well in self driving leaving out waymo success story? They are already have been hauling passengers without a safety pilot since last October. I guess without the minimum problem otherwise we would have heard plenty in the news like it happened for Tesla and Uber accidents. Is it not too convenient to leave out the facts that contradict your hypothesis?
- ankurdhama 8y ago
  Is this happening inside google campus or in a city?
  - AndrewDucker 8y ago
    In Arizona, on the streets: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/02/robotaxi-permit-gets-arizonas-ok-waymo-will-start-service-in-2018/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/02/robotaxi-permit-gets-ar...
- EdwardDiego 8y ago
  Where are the Waymo cars running? Everywhere? Are they still veering into buses to avoid sandbags?
  - tigershark 8y ago
    Phoenix, and they plan to start a commercial service by the end of the year in several US cities.
milankovic 8y ago
Very interesting points... The disconnect between the expectations and reality. Well, to some degree you will always have it, but that is a very interesting facet, and I concur that it is somewhat increasing. It has in the recent past, and it still is.. > And it is not limited to media or CEO's, but it made its way into top researchers. Interesting. One would assume that top researchers would be more "immune" than anyone else, but if it's true what you say and it already made its way.. For the record, I think you are onto something here. What would be your favorite pet theory that explains this phenomenon? Do you believe it has something to do with this culture of "fake it till you make it", as if we have forgotten the value of honesty?
jacksmith21006 8y ago
" letters to investors are among the most biased pieces of writing in existence. " Maybe true but they are words that are about things which are either true or not true. Has nothing to do where the words were shared. Saying they are on an investment letter so not relevant seems very short sighted. But just looking at the last 12 months it is folly to say we are moving to a AI winter. Things are just flying. Look at self driving cars without safety drivers or look at something like Google Duplex but there are so many other examples.
- raesene9 8y ago
  Of course Google (or any other company) aren't going to blatently lie in a letter to investors (that kind of thing gets you sued) but it's pretty easy to spin words to sound more impressive than they may actually be. Using the list provided, one example "caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube;" - This doesn't say how accurate the captions acutally are. In my experience youtube captioning even of english dialect isn't exactly great. For one example try turning on the captions on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o so it's true I'm sure to say they've captioned the videos AI based techniques, but that doesn't mean they're a perfected option. Also (purely anecodtally) Google translate also isn't exactly perfect yet either...
  - slow_donkey 8y ago
    ... I don't think I understand that video even with my own ears. YouTube captioning has actually significantly improved from it's previous hilarious state
ptero 8y ago
Making cars that drive safely no current, busy roads is a very difficult task. It is not surprising that the current systems do not do that (yet). It is surprising to me how well they still do. The fact though that my phone understands my voice and my handwriting and does on the fly translation of menus and simple requests is a sign of a major progress, too. AI is overhyped and overfunded at the moment, which is not unusual for a hot technology (synthetic biology; dotcoms). Those things go in cycles, but the down cycles are seldom all out winters. During the slowdowns best technologies still get funding (less lavish, but enough to work on) and one-hit wonders die, both of which is good in the long run. My friends working in biology are doing mostly fine even though there are no longer "this is the century of synthetic biology" posters at every airport and in every toilet.

nopinsight 8y ago

I agree that self-driving had/have been overhyped over the previous few years. The problem is harder than many people realize. The difference between the current AI renaissance and the past pre-winter AI ecosystems is the level of economic gain realized by the technology. The late 80s-early 90s AI winter, for example, resulted from the limitations of expert systems which were useful but only in niche markets and their development and maintenance costs were quite high relative to alternatives. The current AI systems do something that alternatives, like Mechanical Turks, can only accomplish with much greater costs and may not even have the scale necessary for global massive services like Google Photos or Youtube autocaptioning. The spread of computing infrastructure and connectivity into the hands of billions of global population is a key contributing factor.

felippee 8y ago
> The difference between the current AI renaissance and the past pre-winter AI ecosystems is the level of economic gain realized by the technology I would argue this is well discounted by level of investment made against the future. I don't think the winter depends on the amount that somebody makes today on AI, rather on how much people are expecting to make in the future. If these don't match, there will be a winter. My take is that there is a huge bet against the future. And if DL ends up bringing just as much profit as it does today, interest will die very, very quickly.
- nopinsight 8y ago
  Because there is a dearth of experts and a lack of deep technical knowledge among many business people, there are still a great many companies that have not yet started investing in deep learning or AI despite potential profits based on current technology. Non-tech sectors of the economy are probably underinvesting at the moment. This is analogous to the way electricity took decades to realize productivity gains in the broad economy. That said, the hype will dial down. I am just not sure the investment will decrease soon.
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    While I agree there is underinvestment in non-tech sectors, I don't see why that would change and they will use deep learning. There are lots of profitable things in non-tech sectors that can be done with linear regression but not done.
    - cm2187 8y ago
      There are lots of things in the non-tech sector that can be automated with simple vanilla software but isn't. To use AI instead, you need to have 1) sophisticated devs in place, 2) a management that gets the value added, 3) lots of data in a usable format, 4) willingness to invest & experiment. Lots of non-tech businesses are lacking one if not all of these.
    - xamuel 8y ago
      This. And at the end of the day, deep learning is just a more sophisticated version of linear regression. (To listen to some people talking, you'd think if a machine just curve-fits enough data-points, it'll suddenly wake up and become self-aware or something? The delusion is just unbelievable!)
- sgt101 8y ago
  Just like it did for ecommerce? Expectations we're wildly inflated, there was a bust, the market re adjusted and value was created
Yaggo 8y ago
> I agree that self-driving had/have been overhyped over the previous few years. The problem is harder than many people realize. The current road infrastructure (markings, signs) has been designed for humans. Once it has been modernized to better aid the self-driving systems, we don't probably need "perfect" AI.
- dx034 8y ago
  But current signs designed for humans work well. They're machine readable (traffic sign detection is available from basically all manufacturers) and can (usually) be understood without prior knowledge and don't need much change over decades. I think there are few examples where messages were designed for computers but are easy to understand independent of the system, manufacturer. ASCII encoded text files are the only thing that come to mind.

ehsankia 8y ago

How can something be biased when it's listing facts? Those are actual features that are available today to anyone, that were made possible by AI. Do you think it would be possible to type "pictures of me at the beach with my dog" without AI in such as short time frame? Or to have cars that drive themselves without a driver? These are concrete benefits of machine learning, I don't understand how that's biased.

jessaustin 8y ago
How can something be biased when it's listing facts? If there are 100 facts that indicate a coming AI winter, and Brin just talks up the 15 facts that indicate AI's unalloyed dominance, that's definitely biased.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  First, what are said 100 facts? The article looks at fairly mundane metrics such as number of tweets or self-driving accidents... Second, I'm not quite sure that's how it works. Like in mathematics, if your lemma is X, you can give a 100 examples of X being true, but I only need a single counter-example to break it. In my opinion a single valid modern use-case of AI is enough to show that we're not in an AI winter. By definition an AI winter means that nothing substantial is coming out of AI for a long period of time, yet Brin listed that Google alone has had a dozen in the past few years.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > First, what are said 100 facts? You cannot ask a generic question, then attack the answer based on absence of evidence for a specific example.
Grue3 8y ago
Can't speak for the other items, but these >translate over 100 languages in Google Translate; >caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube; barely even work. Yeah, it's a difficult problem but it's not even close to being solved.

tigershark 8y ago

Hi, why in your analysis you spoke only about the companies that are not doing so well in self driving leaving out waymo success story? They are already have been hauling passengers without a safety pilot since last October. I guess without the minimum problem otherwise we would have heard plenty in the news like it happened for Tesla and Uber accidents. Is it not too convenient to leave out the facts that contradict your hypothesis?

ankurdhama 8y ago
Is this happening inside google campus or in a city?
- AndrewDucker 8y ago
  In Arizona, on the streets: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/02/robotaxi-permit-gets-arizonas-ok-waymo-will-start-service-in-2018/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/02/robotaxi-permit-gets-ar...
EdwardDiego 8y ago
Where are the Waymo cars running? Everywhere? Are they still veering into buses to avoid sandbags?
- tigershark 8y ago
  Phoenix, and they plan to start a commercial service by the end of the year in several US cities.

milankovic 8y ago

Very interesting points... The disconnect between the expectations and reality. Well, to some degree you will always have it, but that is a very interesting facet, and I concur that it is somewhat increasing. It has in the recent past, and it still is.. > And it is not limited to media or CEO's, but it made its way into top researchers. Interesting. One would assume that top researchers would be more "immune" than anyone else, but if it's true what you say and it already made its way.. For the record, I think you are onto something here. What would be your favorite pet theory that explains this phenomenon? Do you believe it has something to do with this culture of "fake it till you make it", as if we have forgotten the value of honesty?

jacksmith21006 8y ago

" letters to investors are among the most biased pieces of writing in existence. " Maybe true but they are words that are about things which are either true or not true. Has nothing to do where the words were shared. Saying they are on an investment letter so not relevant seems very short sighted. But just looking at the last 12 months it is folly to say we are moving to a AI winter. Things are just flying. Look at self driving cars without safety drivers or look at something like Google Duplex but there are so many other examples.

raesene9 8y ago
Of course Google (or any other company) aren't going to blatently lie in a letter to investors (that kind of thing gets you sued) but it's pretty easy to spin words to sound more impressive than they may actually be. Using the list provided, one example "caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube;" - This doesn't say how accurate the captions acutally are. In my experience youtube captioning even of english dialect isn't exactly great. For one example try turning on the captions on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o so it's true I'm sure to say they've captioned the videos AI based techniques, but that doesn't mean they're a perfected option. Also (purely anecodtally) Google translate also isn't exactly perfect yet either...
- slow_donkey 8y ago
  ... I don't think I understand that video even with my own ears. YouTube captioning has actually significantly improved from it's previous hilarious state

ptero 8y ago

Making cars that drive safely no current, busy roads is a very difficult task. It is not surprising that the current systems do not do that (yet). It is surprising to me how well they still do. The fact though that my phone understands my voice and my handwriting and does on the fly translation of menus and simple requests is a sign of a major progress, too. AI is overhyped and overfunded at the moment, which is not unusual for a hot technology (synthetic biology; dotcoms). Those things go in cycles, but the down cycles are seldom all out winters. During the slowdowns best technologies still get funding (less lavish, but enough to work on) and one-hit wonders die, both of which is good in the long run. My friends working in biology are doing mostly fine even though there are no longer "this is the century of synthetic biology" posters at every airport and in every toilet.