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How about the ability to search for objects in your pictures on your phone (granted, this is not a business in itself, but rather a new feature on existing prod

by tommit 7y ago

How about the ability to search for objects in your pictures on your phone (granted, this is not a business in itself, but rather a new feature on existing products), use an online translator to translate almost anything in any language (including idioms) using something like google translate or deepL, fun niche products that give us a glimpse into what could be possible in the not so far future like AI Dungeon ... and that's excluding SaaS businesses that sell solutions to other businesses directly, so as a consumer you wouldn't really hear about it. I've worked at two of those companies in the past. Machine Learning techniques have been applied to numerous different fields. Right now, they're often more subsidizing than a product in itself. But they are out there. And while I agree that a lot of companies are just throwing out buzzwords, it's definitely not all snake oil.

pingyong 7y ago
>ability to search for objects in your pictures on your phone This is pretty cool, can save a lot of time in some cases, and doesn't disappoint because object recognition (even by humans) is unreliable by nature. >use an online translator to translate almost anything in any language (including idioms) using something like google translate That's debatable at best. Google Translate at least is still horrible, to the point where it is actually pretty much completely useless, at translating Asian languages to English. For longer texts, even German to English or Spanish to English produces a lot of nonsense, although it is usually at least somewhat intelligible if you're familiar with the sort of mistakes that Google Translate tends to make. Anecdotally, I don't use Google Translate any differently than I did 7 years ago. It's good for single words or expressions, it's okay for single sentences if you are aware of it's pitfalls, it's pretty useless for large articles unless all you want is getting a general idea of what the article is talking about. >AI Dungeon I mean everything we've seen from AI Dungeon was hilarious because of it's nonsensical flaws. If those flaws can somehow be removed in the future we'll be stuck with a version where every individual sentence kind of makes sense but there is no coherent connection or story line, i.e. a product that nobody would use.
- tommit 7y ago
  You definitely have good points, but since the post I responded to gave Alexa as an initial example, I kind of took that as baseline. I can't really argue with anecdotes, but I can ensure you that a whole lot has changed in Machine Translation in the past 7 years, starting with Google introducing Neural Machine Translation[1] to replace their statistical model, which would often behave in the way you described. That's why I specifically included idioms, which hadn't really been possible until then. It's not yet perfect, but it's crazy good at what it does and only getting better. I know AI Dungeon was really wonky, but I also said it gives us a glimpse of what may be possible. Because the way it interprets natural language is really something else (granted, that's the underlying model, of course). It's really a product still entirely in its infancy. And I don't think AI Dungeon will take the world by storm much more than it has done thus far, but I could imagine countless applications for a similar but improved technology. I don't know, OP was asking for products and services, and I gave some examples. Are they flawless? No. Is most technology flawless? No. Will there be growing market for somewhat imperfect AI-based applications? I surely think so. In the end, humans aren't flawless either. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translat..., https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.08144.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.08144.pdf

by tommit 7y ago

pingyong 7y ago

>ability to search for objects in your pictures on your phone This is pretty cool, can save a lot of time in some cases, and doesn't disappoint because object recognition (even by humans) is unreliable by nature. >use an online translator to translate almost anything in any language (including idioms) using something like google translate That's debatable at best. Google Translate at least is still horrible, to the point where it is actually pretty much completely useless, at translating Asian languages to English. For longer texts, even German to English or Spanish to English produces a lot of nonsense, although it is usually at least somewhat intelligible if you're familiar with the sort of mistakes that Google Translate tends to make. Anecdotally, I don't use Google Translate any differently than I did 7 years ago. It's good for single words or expressions, it's okay for single sentences if you are aware of it's pitfalls, it's pretty useless for large articles unless all you want is getting a general idea of what the article is talking about. >AI Dungeon I mean everything we've seen from AI Dungeon was hilarious because of it's nonsensical flaws. If those flaws can somehow be removed in the future we'll be stuck with a version where every individual sentence kind of makes sense but there is no coherent connection or story line, i.e. a product that nobody would use.

tommit 7y ago
You definitely have good points, but since the post I responded to gave Alexa as an initial example, I kind of took that as baseline. I can't really argue with anecdotes, but I can ensure you that a whole lot has changed in Machine Translation in the past 7 years, starting with Google introducing Neural Machine Translation[1] to replace their statistical model, which would often behave in the way you described. That's why I specifically included idioms, which hadn't really been possible until then. It's not yet perfect, but it's crazy good at what it does and only getting better. I know AI Dungeon was really wonky, but I also said it gives us a glimpse of what may be possible. Because the way it interprets natural language is really something else (granted, that's the underlying model, of course). It's really a product still entirely in its infancy. And I don't think AI Dungeon will take the world by storm much more than it has done thus far, but I could imagine countless applications for a similar but improved technology. I don't know, OP was asking for products and services, and I gave some examples. Are they flawless? No. Is most technology flawless? No. Will there be growing market for somewhat imperfect AI-based applications? I surely think so. In the end, humans aren't flawless either. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translat..., https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.08144.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.08144.pdf