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I think machine learning masquerading as AI is definitely over-hyped. The real revolution is open source predictive modeling and statistical techniques becoming

I think machine learning masquerading as AI is definitely over-hyped. The real revolution is open source predictive modeling and statistical techniques becoming commonplace. Creating statistical models is much more useful and applicable to 99% of the businesses that have a need for analytics, but it seems to be overshadowed by the AI hype.

m_ke 7y ago
AI and machine learning have no business being mentioned in the same sentence. The AI hype is pushed by marketers and journalists because it gets clicks and invites the futurist crowd to chime in. We're decades away from anything that will resemble an AI system and any talk of it now is a waste of time. Machine Learning has made amazing strides in the past decade and will change all aspects of our lives. There will be a ton of startups in the next decade using speech recognition, image recognition, natural language processing and etc to automate all of our repetitive tasks. If hardware keeps up we'll probably see a boom in robotics in the next 5-15 years that will allow us to automate most manufacturing and food production.
- falcor84 7y ago
  This is just semantics. What you're referring to as AI is often given the name AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), while many (most?) would agree that AI includes nowadays common technologies such as maps pathfinding and grammar checking.
  - m_ke 7y ago
    I've been doing machine learning for almost 10 years now and can tell you from experience that when a layman hears AI they think AGI, a magic pixie dust that can solve any problem that they throw it at. AI is a branch of computer science, but outside of A* search it's practically all machine learning.
- CapmCrackaWaka 7y ago
  Sure there will be a (ton??) of startups using these things, but my point is that it will not be nearly as prevalent as general statistics and predictive modeling. Which one do you think will be more common: 1) companies using speech recognition, NLP, Image recognition, etc. 2) companies using R/Python to help guide their business decisions through predictive models / simpler statistics? I believe the demand for companies to actually use the fancier parts of machine learning are going to be much fewer than people think. Number 2, on the other hand, is much more generalizable, and is having a much larger effect on the 'average' business than NLP and image recognition.
  - m_ke 7y ago
    Operations research and business analytics will obviously continue to be important but we'll also start seeing machine learning replacing a lot of labor and augmenting a large portion of our daily tasks. It will change how we interact with computers. I used to work at an image recognition API startup and went through an AI incubator with my own company so I got to see the huge range of applications of this technology. At the incubator we had a company automating customer support (acquired by google), another one automating appointment booking and scheduling, sales call analytics using speech recognition, automatic reading comprehension quizzes for K-12, deep learning for radiology, patient tracking/monitoring at retirement homes and hospitals, imitation learning based robotics, deep learning based hedge fund, amazon go like vending machines, fashion analytics, social media analytics/engagement for brands.
- aianus 7y ago
  > We're decades away from anything that will resemble an AI system I use my Google Home Mini every day and it's just like the computer in Star Trek. If you could show it to someone from the early 90s they would certainly say it resembles an AI system.
  - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
    Google Home is basically the text parser of an early Sierra adventure game with voice recognition in front of it and the internet in back of it.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    It's not, it's a toolchain that has voice recognition, a NLP parser, and a big model to give you answers back that fails for anything remotely like a complex sentence. It's decent, but nothing like an intelligent being that can answer all types of questions like in most SF stories.
    - why_only_15 7y ago
      This is just pushing the meaning of "artificial intelligence" farther up the chain because we understand it better. If you told someone in 1950 computers would be able to win 100 times out of 100 against the best humans in the world, they would call that artificial intelligence. Now we just say it's a MCTS system based on heavily tuned heuristics.
  - rodw 7y ago
    I have travelled here from the early 90s and I gotta say it seems more like a parlor trick (voice recognition plus a much larger, more sophisticated, networked Eliza) than true AI. But that's the AI problem in a nutshell: Once we've figured out how to do something it no longer seems like an AI problem. The computer in Star Trek is just a smart speaker. Lt. Cmdr. Data is AI.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > esemble an AI system and any talk of it now is a waste of time. I think the usual terms we use nowadays is narrow AI and general AI to differentiate both types.

m_ke 7y ago

AI and machine learning have no business being mentioned in the same sentence. The AI hype is pushed by marketers and journalists because it gets clicks and invites the futurist crowd to chime in. We're decades away from anything that will resemble an AI system and any talk of it now is a waste of time. Machine Learning has made amazing strides in the past decade and will change all aspects of our lives. There will be a ton of startups in the next decade using speech recognition, image recognition, natural language processing and etc to automate all of our repetitive tasks. If hardware keeps up we'll probably see a boom in robotics in the next 5-15 years that will allow us to automate most manufacturing and food production.

falcor84 7y ago
This is just semantics. What you're referring to as AI is often given the name AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), while many (most?) would agree that AI includes nowadays common technologies such as maps pathfinding and grammar checking.
- m_ke 7y ago
  I've been doing machine learning for almost 10 years now and can tell you from experience that when a layman hears AI they think AGI, a magic pixie dust that can solve any problem that they throw it at. AI is a branch of computer science, but outside of A* search it's practically all machine learning.
CapmCrackaWaka 7y ago
Sure there will be a (ton??) of startups using these things, but my point is that it will not be nearly as prevalent as general statistics and predictive modeling. Which one do you think will be more common: 1) companies using speech recognition, NLP, Image recognition, etc. 2) companies using R/Python to help guide their business decisions through predictive models / simpler statistics? I believe the demand for companies to actually use the fancier parts of machine learning are going to be much fewer than people think. Number 2, on the other hand, is much more generalizable, and is having a much larger effect on the 'average' business than NLP and image recognition.
- m_ke 7y ago
  Operations research and business analytics will obviously continue to be important but we'll also start seeing machine learning replacing a lot of labor and augmenting a large portion of our daily tasks. It will change how we interact with computers. I used to work at an image recognition API startup and went through an AI incubator with my own company so I got to see the huge range of applications of this technology. At the incubator we had a company automating customer support (acquired by google), another one automating appointment booking and scheduling, sales call analytics using speech recognition, automatic reading comprehension quizzes for K-12, deep learning for radiology, patient tracking/monitoring at retirement homes and hospitals, imitation learning based robotics, deep learning based hedge fund, amazon go like vending machines, fashion analytics, social media analytics/engagement for brands.
aianus 7y ago
> We're decades away from anything that will resemble an AI system I use my Google Home Mini every day and it's just like the computer in Star Trek. If you could show it to someone from the early 90s they would certainly say it resembles an AI system.
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
  Google Home is basically the text parser of an early Sierra adventure game with voice recognition in front of it and the internet in back of it.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  It's not, it's a toolchain that has voice recognition, a NLP parser, and a big model to give you answers back that fails for anything remotely like a complex sentence. It's decent, but nothing like an intelligent being that can answer all types of questions like in most SF stories.
  - why_only_15 7y ago
    This is just pushing the meaning of "artificial intelligence" farther up the chain because we understand it better. If you told someone in 1950 computers would be able to win 100 times out of 100 against the best humans in the world, they would call that artificial intelligence. Now we just say it's a MCTS system based on heavily tuned heuristics.
- rodw 7y ago
  I have travelled here from the early 90s and I gotta say it seems more like a parlor trick (voice recognition plus a much larger, more sophisticated, networked Eliza) than true AI. But that's the AI problem in a nutshell: Once we've figured out how to do something it no longer seems like an AI problem. The computer in Star Trek is just a smart speaker. Lt. Cmdr. Data is AI.
ekianjo 7y ago
> esemble an AI system and any talk of it now is a waste of time. I think the usual terms we use nowadays is narrow AI and general AI to differentiate both types.