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This is well deserved, but IMO it also signals an upcoming AI winter. This cycle has happened several times before: 1) Some scrappy researcher on a low budget

This is well deserved, but IMO it also signals an upcoming AI winter. This cycle has happened several times before: 1) Some scrappy researcher on a low budget develops a new AI technology that shows promise in a specific area. 2) More researchers take that idea and successfully apply it more broadly. 3) Massive investment in research happens, pushing PhD candidates into extracting every possible nuance out of that technology. 4) Researchers, encouraged by the broad success, begin to think we've found the one true key in the quest towards general intelligence. Suddenly all the researchers are Neats. The research funding is now mostly businesses instead of governments and non-profits. They grow overconfident that it can be used for virtually anything, funding everything in sight. 5) Starry-eyed futurists start lionizing the founders of the new revolution as geniuses, publishing flowery bullshit about how the world will be forever changed and how the General AI revolution is only 5-10 years away. 6) Surprise! It actually can't be used that broadly. Improvements stall, and CEOs start to realize that they can't just dump data in and get money out. It becomes a commercial disappointment, triggering disinvestment. 7) The Neats, disappointed that their glamorous and simplistic theory of general intelligence, start to disappear. Newspapers begin to make fun of all of the visionaries, comparing them to the people that said flying cars were 5-10 years away. 8) A handful of Scruffies take over the now low-funding AI winter, working hard on minimal budgets until a new breakthrough is found and we return back to #1. This article is showing that we're solidly within stage 5, and we're already seeing signs of stage 6. When everybody is buying, it's time to sell.

mindcrime 8y ago
There's good reason to think that the AI Winter / AI Spring cycle is done. AI techniques are now creating so much real world value (more so than in the 80's / 90's) that there may well not be any more "AI Winter" events. Or perhaps they will be, but they'll be less pronounced. Maybe an "AI Fall" instead of "AI Winter". Part of that too, is that I think people now realize that narrow AI is sufficient to create tremendous value, and that it doesn't necessarily matter if the "AGI breakthrough" happens anytime soon or not. It's hard to be sure, but I don't see the kind of collapse that happened in the past happening anytime soon.
- darksaints 8y ago
  AI winter doesn't mean people stop using it. AI winter and spring aren't a phenomenon specific to AI...in essence it's the same dynamic found in economic bubbles. In almost every economic bubble we see actual economic benefit underlying the hype, but the hype grows bigger than the benefit can account for, triggering eventual collapse of the hype. The thing that you should notice is that when the bubble collapses we don't stop buying, we just stop overinvesting. We haven't stopped buying tulips, trains, stocks, technology, or real estate. And just as well, we haven't stopped using symbolic AI, single-layer neural nets, ensemble models, expert systems, or logic programming languages. The new topological enhancements to Neural Nets won't ever go away either...but that doesn't mean we won't see a drop in investment once the general public realizes that your neural nets aren't going to learn how to do double-entry accounting any time soon. The AI winter isn't characterized by the technology going away, it is characterized by lofty idealism being shattered and investment dropping back to reflect reality.
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    AI winter doesn't mean people stop using it. ... The thing that you should notice is that when the bubble collapses we don't stop buying, we just stop overinvesting. Right, but that doesn't match the way I feel the term "AI Winter" has been used. Now I could be mis-interpreting things, but I've always looked at an "AI Winter" as a period of underinvestment, created as an over-reaction to the mechanics you're referring to. but that doesn't mean we won't see a drop in investment once the general public realizes that your neural nets aren't going to learn how to do double-entry accounting any time soon. Right, but again, I don't think most people use "AI Winter" to mean a simple "drop in investment". If it were something that straightforward, there would be no need for the "Winter" metaphor. And that's why I say there may indeed be a drop... an "AI Fall" if you will, that still represents a pull-back of sorts, but perhaps just a less pronounced and extended pullback like we've seen in the past.
    - mindcrime 8y ago
      D'oh. Too late to edit, but this: less pronounced and extended pullback like we've seen in the past. should read: less pronounced and extended pullback than we've seen in the past.
bernardopires 8y ago
The assumption here is that 6) "can't be used broadly" is true. What evidence do you have for this? It turns out this technology is already being used everywhere: text translation, image recognition, autonomous vehicles, text generation and so on. It's already generating huge value which is why so many companies are investing so much in it. There isn't going to be any Winter coming anytime soon.
- darksaints 8y ago
  You've identified four areas where it excels. Only a few billion more areas to go. And sure, we can now have algorithms that can categorize dogs based on collections of pixels better than humans can. Get back to me when they've figured out double entry accounting, splitting atoms, building bridges and spaceships, or improve upon TCP-IP.
  - bernardopires 8y ago
    This is a computer science award, nobody is claiming that AI will revolutionize the fields you mention (which are at best loosely related to CS). It doesn't have to be useful literally everywhere to have value.
    - darksaints 8y ago
      Yes, people actually are claiming that these new NNet advancements are the key that will unlock AGI, which by its very nature implies that they will be as advanced, or more advanced, than humans in all forms of intelligence. They're lightyears away from that, but now the general public is buying into the hype and thinking it's a decade or two away. NNets are already a disappointment to nearly any applied researcher that isn't sitting on petabytes of data. It won't be long before the CEOs realize it and put their research funding somewhere else.
      - mindcrime 8y ago
        Yes, people actually are claiming that these new NNet advancements are the key that will unlock AGI, which by its very nature implies that they will be as advanced, or more advanced, than humans in all forms of intelligence. Who are "people" in this context? Are you talking about the general public, or misinformed journalists who are writing about things they don't understand? Because from what I've seen, by and large, the researchers working on Deep Learning are not claiming that DL (alone) is sufficient to achieve AGI, nor do they posit that AGI is anywhere close to reality. Read, for example, Martin Ford's book Architects of Intelligence[1] and note how the various researchers interviewed talk about AGI. That list, BTW, includes all three of LeCun, Hinton, and Bengio, as well as many others. [1]: http://book.mfordfuture.com/ http://book.mfordfuture.com/

mindcrime 8y ago

There's good reason to think that the AI Winter / AI Spring cycle is done. AI techniques are now creating so much real world value (more so than in the 80's / 90's) that there may well not be any more "AI Winter" events. Or perhaps they will be, but they'll be less pronounced. Maybe an "AI Fall" instead of "AI Winter". Part of that too, is that I think people now realize that narrow AI is sufficient to create tremendous value, and that it doesn't necessarily matter if the "AGI breakthrough" happens anytime soon or not. It's hard to be sure, but I don't see the kind of collapse that happened in the past happening anytime soon.

darksaints 8y ago
AI winter doesn't mean people stop using it. AI winter and spring aren't a phenomenon specific to AI...in essence it's the same dynamic found in economic bubbles. In almost every economic bubble we see actual economic benefit underlying the hype, but the hype grows bigger than the benefit can account for, triggering eventual collapse of the hype. The thing that you should notice is that when the bubble collapses we don't stop buying, we just stop overinvesting. We haven't stopped buying tulips, trains, stocks, technology, or real estate. And just as well, we haven't stopped using symbolic AI, single-layer neural nets, ensemble models, expert systems, or logic programming languages. The new topological enhancements to Neural Nets won't ever go away either...but that doesn't mean we won't see a drop in investment once the general public realizes that your neural nets aren't going to learn how to do double-entry accounting any time soon. The AI winter isn't characterized by the technology going away, it is characterized by lofty idealism being shattered and investment dropping back to reflect reality.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  AI winter doesn't mean people stop using it. ... The thing that you should notice is that when the bubble collapses we don't stop buying, we just stop overinvesting. Right, but that doesn't match the way I feel the term "AI Winter" has been used. Now I could be mis-interpreting things, but I've always looked at an "AI Winter" as a period of underinvestment, created as an over-reaction to the mechanics you're referring to. but that doesn't mean we won't see a drop in investment once the general public realizes that your neural nets aren't going to learn how to do double-entry accounting any time soon. Right, but again, I don't think most people use "AI Winter" to mean a simple "drop in investment". If it were something that straightforward, there would be no need for the "Winter" metaphor. And that's why I say there may indeed be a drop... an "AI Fall" if you will, that still represents a pull-back of sorts, but perhaps just a less pronounced and extended pullback like we've seen in the past.
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    D'oh. Too late to edit, but this: less pronounced and extended pullback like we've seen in the past. should read: less pronounced and extended pullback than we've seen in the past.

bernardopires 8y ago

The assumption here is that 6) "can't be used broadly" is true. What evidence do you have for this? It turns out this technology is already being used everywhere: text translation, image recognition, autonomous vehicles, text generation and so on. It's already generating huge value which is why so many companies are investing so much in it. There isn't going to be any Winter coming anytime soon.

darksaints 8y ago
You've identified four areas where it excels. Only a few billion more areas to go. And sure, we can now have algorithms that can categorize dogs based on collections of pixels better than humans can. Get back to me when they've figured out double entry accounting, splitting atoms, building bridges and spaceships, or improve upon TCP-IP.
- bernardopires 8y ago
  This is a computer science award, nobody is claiming that AI will revolutionize the fields you mention (which are at best loosely related to CS). It doesn't have to be useful literally everywhere to have value.
  - darksaints 8y ago
    Yes, people actually are claiming that these new NNet advancements are the key that will unlock AGI, which by its very nature implies that they will be as advanced, or more advanced, than humans in all forms of intelligence. They're lightyears away from that, but now the general public is buying into the hype and thinking it's a decade or two away. NNets are already a disappointment to nearly any applied researcher that isn't sitting on petabytes of data. It won't be long before the CEOs realize it and put their research funding somewhere else.
    - mindcrime 8y ago
      Yes, people actually are claiming that these new NNet advancements are the key that will unlock AGI, which by its very nature implies that they will be as advanced, or more advanced, than humans in all forms of intelligence. Who are "people" in this context? Are you talking about the general public, or misinformed journalists who are writing about things they don't understand? Because from what I've seen, by and large, the researchers working on Deep Learning are not claiming that DL (alone) is sufficient to achieve AGI, nor do they posit that AGI is anywhere close to reality. Read, for example, Martin Ford's book Architects of Intelligence[1] and note how the various researchers interviewed talk about AGI. That list, BTW, includes all three of LeCun, Hinton, and Bengio, as well as many others. [1]: http://book.mfordfuture.com/ http://book.mfordfuture.com/