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How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions
- baybal2 8y agoUnfortunately, the reported AI boom, is of the same kind as Japan's "5th generation" computing was. The when nouveau riches bankrolling the AI party see that no neural algo amount to "money out of thin air" they quickly loose interest, even without finding out what neural algos actually are. The atmosphere in the industry feels very much like pets.com 2.0. Here in Shenzhen, I often ask those intrepid samodelkins "how are you supposed to make money with it?" and never hear back a concise answer. China's real economic strength does not lay with that type of enterprises.
- sigi45 8y agoAi opened already important technology up to a whole new level. Language translation and synteciation. There might be not many people able to use it and you probably need a lot of resources to create useful models but it already makes inovation possible.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoThey get billions of funds for a selve checkout register. PS. The waiting lines with a human are bigger than the selve checkout here in Belgium. Some say it would be better to make room for humans again.
- shanghaiaway 8y agoGenerally the self checkout has a minimum of one staff per check out to show customers how the thing works.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoPer 6 if they are in a cube though
- sarabande 8y agoWhat's an "intrepid samodelkin"?
- sheeshkebab 8y agogp comrade must have some russian background - "samodelkin" roughly translates as DIY
- msamwald 8y agoI don't see how this is a competitive advantage when any company or institution can outsource these kinds of annotation jobs to low-wage countries.
- CardenB 8y agoThere's a lot of work involved in how the data is annotated and how the labelers are managed. You have to minimize the error of the labels, because they aren't perfect and the tasks can be more difficult than you might realize. Secondly, using the data is also difficult. You have to decide what data you need, how you are going to get clean data, and how you are going to use the data. That's the competitive advantage.
- taobility 8y agoUS can always outsourced the work to other countries, and then start some trade war to get back what they lost but didn't notice initially. :)
- RosanaAnaDana 8y agoSay you can do it, out source it to China, mark it up 20%, the aristocats!
- pcurve 8y ago"Two dozen young people go through photos and videos, labeling just about everything they see. That’s a car. That’s a traffic light. That’s bread, that’s milk, that’s chocolate. That’s what it looks like when a person walks." But in the U.S., we do it for free via Captcha. ;-)
- baybal2 8y agoHave you noticed that Google captcha now has photosets from Chinese cities? I can only guess what Google offered Chinese in exchange for permission to use their camera vans. I guess, this is what their recent Chinese campus expansion was about.
- hnphillipj 8y agonever thought of this.
- linkingday 8y agoBut how does Captcha know that your answers are correct? There's likely already a predictive model that knows (within some confidence intervals) which ones are the 'correct' answers - someone had to label that data to begin with! Chicken, meet egg.
- joncrane 8y agoThey display the same pictures to multiple people and have some kind of agreement algorithm.
- oh-kumudo 8y agoFor Captcha, you are pointing out the one or several pictures that doesn't belong to certain category, so that seems to me the service needs to know the answer beforehand, doesn't it? It could be used for QA purpose though.
- agnokapathetic 8y ago
- friedman23 8y agoI'm very skeptical if employed humans labeling will generate enough training data. I don't see how this method is superior to what Google is doing with captcha. Also this is already being done by many American corporations hiring people in countries like Bangladesh.
- linkingday 8y agoAmazon has a mechanical turking service for labelling data already - no need to actually put people on your payroll for doing this.
- stcredzero 8y ago“I used to think the machines are geniuses,” Ms. Hou, 24, said. “Now I know we’re the reason for their genius.” I recall John Searle's Google Tech Talk, when he said outright that AI was nothing more than the automation and repackaging of the output of human intelligence. Most of the room was clearly against him, just a bit short of booing him. Nowadays, the "smart talk" around AI is exactly what he said. For those who may not be aware, John Searle is notorious for his "Chinese Room" argument against hard AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- ThomPete 8y agoThat argument is fundamentally flawed. It correctly points out that the person in the room doesn't know Chinese but it misses the bigger point. Of course, the person in the room doesn't know Chinese just as the individual neuron in the brain doesn't know Chinese. The room or the house (i.e. the feedback loop) is the conscious part. The correct answer is "we don't know". But we do know that we are ourselves the result of emerging complexity built by much simpler structures and that they are built on even simpler structures until in the end some primordial soup. The mistake is isolating any individual element in the feedback loop and claiming that because that doesn't have some "magic" properties the system as a whole can't.
- rjsw 8y agoThe person in the room will also start to recognize patterns in the input messages and the resulting output messages. It isn't the canonical understanding of Chinese but it is "an" understanding If Searle was correct we could do an MRI on a blind person and detect when their brain switched into "symbol processing mode" if a conversation with them covered any visual concepts.
- ForHackernews 8y ago> If Searle was correct we could do an MRI on a blind person and detect when their brain switched into "symbol processing mode" if a conversation with them covered any visual concepts. I think that is true, at least to some extent: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667661/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667661/ particularly for people who weren't blind from birth.
- cyberpunk0 8y agoIt's AI because this bullshit is what marketing agents have branded it to the world when they decided machine learning would take off in like a year. Almost all of these image problems directly stem from marketing and advertising camps because they dont give a damn about the tech enough to learn about it, so long as they can sell it to some poor sap and rake in more money. In the words of Bill Hicks, "if you work in marketing or advertising, do me a favor... Kill yourself." Good riddance to the lot of them.
- nitwit005 8y ago> But the ability to tag that data may be China’s true A.I. strength, the only one that the United States may not be able to match. Why would the United States need to match it? Presumably some of these companies are doing outsourced work for foreign firms.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoAfricans are actually labelling data for multinationals right now. Seems like FOMO article
- ardy42 8y agoPart of the benefit is that Chinese taggers would have Chinese cultural knowledge, which is probably required for problems like the bakery one mentioned in the article (Africans probably don't eat steamed pork buns and wouldn't be able to correctly tag them). However that would also mean the Chinese "AI" would have reduced effectiveness outside of China where different cultural knowledge is needed.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoSomething to think about: > “It was the same work, same movement, day after day,” said Yi Zhenzhen, a 28-year-old Ruijin employee who once worked at an electronic component company. “Now I have to use my brain a little bit.”
- contingencies 8y agoObservation: It's highly inefficient to place everyone in the same physical space when you can just use their cellphones. By the article's reckoning, that's at least $21,000 loss per year on a business doing $2,000 projects.
- billylindeman 8y agoIt's not just china. Numerous bay area AI companies employ similar methods.
- heinrichf 8y ago"Tech companies pay poor Kenyans to produce training data for AI" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369384
- bgee 8y agoI'm really surprised that nobody has mentioned ImageNet and its use of Mechanical Turk (Amazon crowdsourcing platform) to label 14 million images [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet
- will_brown 8y agoDoesn’t Google captcha leverage free labor to train ai? Every time I get one of their picture puzzles (click on all the pictures with cars, stores, mountains,etc...)I get about 2 wrong every time on purpose. Even government services like business searches in the state of Delaware, I constantly conclude, I’m being forced to train Google’s self driving cars, so I figure I’ll do the only thing in my power as a protest (unfortunately I can’t boycott the government systems). I purposely leave one or two unclicked and click a false. I have often wondered how my behavior is classified and if at scale it would have any impact. My reasoning may be misguided and I’m sure impact nil, but it serves as a reminder to think about these systems, the things I do and why I do them. I also do similar things with chatbots, and sometimes I’ll add “thanks yous” and really try to interact genuinely, as though I don’t know I’m talking to a bot. I like to think the chatbot devs are somewhere highfiving putting screenshots of my chat in their slide decks.
- b_tterc_p 8y agoYou would be better served clicking on ads and to punish their metrics if you must oppose google in some way. Self driving car data is important, will save lives, and might reasonably enter the public domain some day.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jake_the_third 8y ago> I get about 2 wrong every time on purpose. I do the same, but actually get google to accept bad data as good. The trick is to get the system to trust you (e.g. by supplying one honest answer), then selecting answers that the system is likely to be unsure about. If done correctly, you can get them to accept a lot of bad input this way. Like you, I am under no illusion that this will have some sort of effect on the correctness of the resulting ML models, but I like to think that I am at least delaying or otherwise decreasing the training rate. Have google adopted stackoverflow's model of making the result of our unpayed work available to us, I would have answered these challenges honestly.
- jaimex2 8y agoThis is machine learning not AI.
- cwyers 8y agoPretty much every popularized AI advancement of the past decade has been machine learning. EDIT: To be clear, I think you're right that the term AI is being used carelessly here, but that ship has sailed.
- rahimnathwani 8y agotl;dr - supervised learning requires labelled data - some companies specialise in labelling data for other companies
- qbig 8y agoCheap Labor is driving everything in China, not just XXX-evil-sounding-taking-over-the-world-ambition.. Is it just me or the nytimes is running out of shitty PR about China to write about ..
- Tsubasachan 8y agoDont worry Americans us Euros will always prefer flying into California to Shenzhen. We will stick with you until the end of... wait this Xiaomi smart home is 50% cheaper?
- microwork 8y agoI'm the founder of an image labelling company, happy to answer any questions you might have.