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I'm sure the same could be said for early computer graphics before the GPU race. You don't need Moore's Law to make machine learning fast, you can also do it wi

by tensor 8y ago

I'm sure the same could be said for early computer graphics before the GPU race. You don't need Moore's Law to make machine learning fast, you can also do it with hardware tailored to the task. Look at Google's TPUs for an example of this. If you want an idea of where machine learning is in the scheme of things, the best thing to do is listen to the experts. _None_ of them have promised wild general intelligence any time soon. All of them have said "this is just the beginning, it's a long process." Science is incremental and machine learning is no different in that regard. You'll continue to see incremental progress in the field, with occasional demonstrations and applications that make you go "wow". But most of the advances will be of interest to academics, not the general public. That in no way makes them less valuable. The field of ML/AI produces useful technologies with many real applications. Funding for this basic science isn't going away. The media will eventually tire of the AI hype once the "wow" factor of these new technologies wears off. Maybe the goal posts will move again and suddenly all the current technology won't be called "AI" anymore, but it will still be funded and the science will still advance. It's not the exciting prediction you were looking for I'm sure, but a boring realistic one.

digitalzombie 8y ago
> Funding for this basic science isn't going away. What make this 3rd/4th boom in AI different? The other AI winter, the funding for these science went from well funded to little funding. I'm skeptical, with respect of course, on your statement because it doesn't have anything to back that up other than it produce useful technologies. Wouldn't this statement imply that the other previous AI which experience AI Winter (expert system, and whatever else) didn't produce useful enough technologies to have funding? I'm currently on the camp of there is going to be an AI Winter III coming. > None_ of them have promised wild general intelligence any time soon. The post talk about Andrew Ng wild expectation on other things such as radiologist tweet. While it's not wild general intelligence. What I think the main article and also I am thinking is the outrageous speculation. Another one is the tesla self driving, it doesn't seem to be there yet and perhaps we're hitting the point of over promise like we did in the past and then AI winter happen because we've found the limit.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  The previous AI winters were funded by speculative investments (both public research and industry) with the expectation that this might result in profitable technologies. And this didn't happen - yes, "the other previous AI which experience AI Winter (expert system, and whatever else) didn't produce useful enough technologies to have funding", the technologies developed didn't work sufficiently well to have widespread adoption in the industry; there were some use cases but the conclusion was "useful in theory but not in practice". The current difference is that the technologies are actually useful right now. It's not about promised or expected technologies of tomorrow, but about what we have already researched, about known capabilities that need implementation, adoption, and lots of development work to apply it in lots and lots of particular use cases. If the core research hits a dead end tomorrow and stops producing any meaningful progress for the next 10 or 20 years, the obvious applications of neural-networks-as-we're-teaching-them-in-2018 work sufficiently well and are useful enough to deploy them in all kinds of industrial applications, and the demand is sufficient to employ every current ML practitioner and student even in absence of basic research funding, so a slump is not plausible.
  - kokey 8y ago
    I've recently had a number of calls from recruiters about new startups in the UK in the AI space, some of them local and some of them extensions of US companies. Some of them were clearly less speculative (tracking shipping and footfall for hedge funds) while others were certainly more speculative sounding. The increase of the latter gives me the impression that there is a bit of speculation going on at the moment.
    - evgen 8y ago
      A lot of this is because there is a somewhat mis-informed (which we will be polite and not call 'gullible') class of investors out there, primarily in the VC world, that thinks that most AI is magic pixie dust and so 'we will use AI/DL' and 'we will do it on the blockchain' has become the most recent version of 'we will do it on the web' in terms of helping get funding. Most of these ventures will flame out in 6-12 months and the consequences of this are going to be the source of the upcoming AI winter OP was talking about.

by tensor 8y ago

digitalzombie 8y ago

> Funding for this basic science isn't going away. What make this 3rd/4th boom in AI different? The other AI winter, the funding for these science went from well funded to little funding. I'm skeptical, with respect of course, on your statement because it doesn't have anything to back that up other than it produce useful technologies. Wouldn't this statement imply that the other previous AI which experience AI Winter (expert system, and whatever else) didn't produce useful enough technologies to have funding? I'm currently on the camp of there is going to be an AI Winter III coming. > None_ of them have promised wild general intelligence any time soon. The post talk about Andrew Ng wild expectation on other things such as radiologist tweet. While it's not wild general intelligence. What I think the main article and also I am thinking is the outrageous speculation. Another one is the tesla self driving, it doesn't seem to be there yet and perhaps we're hitting the point of over promise like we did in the past and then AI winter happen because we've found the limit.

PeterisP 8y ago
The previous AI winters were funded by speculative investments (both public research and industry) with the expectation that this might result in profitable technologies. And this didn't happen - yes, "the other previous AI which experience AI Winter (expert system, and whatever else) didn't produce useful enough technologies to have funding", the technologies developed didn't work sufficiently well to have widespread adoption in the industry; there were some use cases but the conclusion was "useful in theory but not in practice". The current difference is that the technologies are actually useful right now. It's not about promised or expected technologies of tomorrow, but about what we have already researched, about known capabilities that need implementation, adoption, and lots of development work to apply it in lots and lots of particular use cases. If the core research hits a dead end tomorrow and stops producing any meaningful progress for the next 10 or 20 years, the obvious applications of neural-networks-as-we're-teaching-them-in-2018 work sufficiently well and are useful enough to deploy them in all kinds of industrial applications, and the demand is sufficient to employ every current ML practitioner and student even in absence of basic research funding, so a slump is not plausible.
- kokey 8y ago
  I've recently had a number of calls from recruiters about new startups in the UK in the AI space, some of them local and some of them extensions of US companies. Some of them were clearly less speculative (tracking shipping and footfall for hedge funds) while others were certainly more speculative sounding. The increase of the latter gives me the impression that there is a bit of speculation going on at the moment.
  - evgen 8y ago
    A lot of this is because there is a somewhat mis-informed (which we will be polite and not call 'gullible') class of investors out there, primarily in the VC world, that thinks that most AI is magic pixie dust and so 'we will use AI/DL' and 'we will do it on the blockchain' has become the most recent version of 'we will do it on the web' in terms of helping get funding. Most of these ventures will flame out in 6-12 months and the consequences of this are going to be the source of the upcoming AI winter OP was talking about.