4 ms·

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

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.
- SomethingStars 8y ago
  YouTube captioning in English works surprisingly well, the improvement over the last few years is huge. It still chokes on proper nouns but in general it mostly works.
  - mijamo 8y ago
    Mh no it does not. It is just a source of hilarity apart from a few very specific cases (political speeches mostly, because of their slow pace, good english and prononciation I guess). Every time I activate it I am in for a good laugh more than anything actually useful.
  - simias 8y ago
    I think it's a bit like self-driving cars in the sense that it's good enough to be impressive but not good enough to be actually usable everywhere. Of course self-driving is worse because people seldom die of bad captions. Google's captioning works well when people speak clearly and in English. Google translate works well when you translate well written straightforward text into English. It's impressive but it's got a long way to go to reach human grade transcription and translation. I think when evaluating these things people underestimate how long the tail of these problems is. It's always those pesky diminishing returns. I think it's true for many AI problems today, for instance it looks like current self-driving car tech manages to handle, say, 95% of situations just fine. Thing is, in order to be actually usable you want something that critical to reach something like 99.999% success rate and bridging these last few percent might prove very difficult, maybe even impossible with current tech.
    - SomethingStars 8y ago
      What's important to remember, I think, is that we should not compare YouTube auto captions to human made captions, because auto captions were not created as a substitute for human made captions - if it wasn't for auto captioning, all these videos wouldn't get any captions at all. They may never be perfect, but they're not designed to be, they're creating new value on their own. And IMO they crossed the threshold of being usable, at least for English.

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.

SomethingStars 8y ago
YouTube captioning in English works surprisingly well, the improvement over the last few years is huge. It still chokes on proper nouns but in general it mostly works.
- mijamo 8y ago
  Mh no it does not. It is just a source of hilarity apart from a few very specific cases (political speeches mostly, because of their slow pace, good english and prononciation I guess). Every time I activate it I am in for a good laugh more than anything actually useful.
- simias 8y ago
  I think it's a bit like self-driving cars in the sense that it's good enough to be impressive but not good enough to be actually usable everywhere. Of course self-driving is worse because people seldom die of bad captions. Google's captioning works well when people speak clearly and in English. Google translate works well when you translate well written straightforward text into English. It's impressive but it's got a long way to go to reach human grade transcription and translation. I think when evaluating these things people underestimate how long the tail of these problems is. It's always those pesky diminishing returns. I think it's true for many AI problems today, for instance it looks like current self-driving car tech manages to handle, say, 95% of situations just fine. Thing is, in order to be actually usable you want something that critical to reach something like 99.999% success rate and bridging these last few percent might prove very difficult, maybe even impossible with current tech.
  - SomethingStars 8y ago
    What's important to remember, I think, is that we should not compare YouTube auto captions to human made captions, because auto captions were not created as a substitute for human made captions - if it wasn't for auto captioning, all these videos wouldn't get any captions at all. They may never be perfect, but they're not designed to be, they're creating new value on their own. And IMO they crossed the threshold of being usable, at least for English.