4 ms·

In the sense of AGI, it's all been hype. We are in an ML summer and have been for the past few years. But "deep learning" is nothing more than that, nothing to

In the sense of AGI, it's all been hype. We are in an ML summer and have been for the past few years. But "deep learning" is nothing more than that, nothing to do with AGI, we're not approaching an AGI winter except for people who were daft enough to fall for the hype. There have been no advances in AGI in decades, it's already winter, and we've long been in it.

zelly 7y ago
> it's already winter, and we've long been in it In terms of research and innovation, yes, but in economic terms, it has not even begun. There is still huuuge VC and government money being pumped into anything with AI on it. The last AI winter started when the financiers discovered the disconnect between the money they put in and delivery on promises. AI went from an obscure hard CS field that only a few graybeards at MIT knew anything about, to this worldwide meme. Before the default thing your grandmother would tell you to study in college was business. Now your grandmother would tell you to study AI. I'm seeing a lot of people enter this space with the vague goal of getting rich quick. This is the same cohort that jumped into tech in the late 90s and the real estate market in the mid-2000s. It's not the AI of the Norvig and Marvin Minsky days. I couldn't be more bearish about AI. I still love it though. I won't stop studying it when it becomes not cool anymore.
- mellosouls 7y ago
  Agree, me too. It's one of the most fascinating problems in the world, and I'll be delighted when "they" decide it's dead and the spotlight moves on.
xenocyon 7y ago
I think we're unfortunately fixated on a very literal reading of the famous Turing test (i.e. cleverly emulating humans = intelligence). Consider language, for instance. Dolphin communication is intelligent, but does not emulate humans well; whereas the computer program ELIZA (1964) lacked intelligence, but was able to emulate humans well enough to entertain many people for quite some time. Our current state-of-the-art NLP is - after copious research, talent, and computation - able to emulate human language somewhat better than ELIZA. But is it intelligence? There's certainly a lot of complexity involved, and neural networks show some interesting building-block patterns, but the lack of these algorithms' ability to generalize into new spaces, grow our fundamental understanding of the world around us, or really do anything besides pretend to be a human makes one wonder whether our current "AI" is just a (very good) party trick - a better version of ELIZA.

zelly 7y ago

> it's already winter, and we've long been in it In terms of research and innovation, yes, but in economic terms, it has not even begun. There is still huuuge VC and government money being pumped into anything with AI on it. The last AI winter started when the financiers discovered the disconnect between the money they put in and delivery on promises. AI went from an obscure hard CS field that only a few graybeards at MIT knew anything about, to this worldwide meme. Before the default thing your grandmother would tell you to study in college was business. Now your grandmother would tell you to study AI. I'm seeing a lot of people enter this space with the vague goal of getting rich quick. This is the same cohort that jumped into tech in the late 90s and the real estate market in the mid-2000s. It's not the AI of the Norvig and Marvin Minsky days. I couldn't be more bearish about AI. I still love it though. I won't stop studying it when it becomes not cool anymore.

mellosouls 7y ago
Agree, me too. It's one of the most fascinating problems in the world, and I'll be delighted when "they" decide it's dead and the spotlight moves on.

xenocyon 7y ago

I think we're unfortunately fixated on a very literal reading of the famous Turing test (i.e. cleverly emulating humans = intelligence). Consider language, for instance. Dolphin communication is intelligent, but does not emulate humans well; whereas the computer program ELIZA (1964) lacked intelligence, but was able to emulate humans well enough to entertain many people for quite some time. Our current state-of-the-art NLP is - after copious research, talent, and computation - able to emulate human language somewhat better than ELIZA. But is it intelligence? There's certainly a lot of complexity involved, and neural networks show some interesting building-block patterns, but the lack of these algorithms' ability to generalize into new spaces, grow our fundamental understanding of the world around us, or really do anything besides pretend to be a human makes one wonder whether our current "AI" is just a (very good) party trick - a better version of ELIZA.