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So PCA, k-means clustering and manual visual inspection counts as AI now? There's no ML involved in the approach, just plain old statistics and feature extract

by qayxc 6y ago

So PCA, k-means clustering and manual visual inspection counts as AI now? There's no ML involved in the approach, just plain old statistics and feature extraction. I fail to see how any of this relates to AI unless we broaden the definition to a point where it becomes useless and everything that uses an algorithm becomes "AI"...

piokoch 6y ago
After years of not working in statistics I've decided to learn something new, so I've purchased a Coursera MOOC course on that new kid on the block - Machine Learning (now rebranded as AI I think). To my surprise (I wanted to learn something new) all the "old stuff" was there, ML turned out to be some variant of statistical inference with all its typical methods applied (like logistic regression, clustering, etc.). The new things were: deep neural networks ("normal" NN but with more layers) and total lack of thinking in terms of model - ML keeps adding more and more variables to the model, as much as data we have, no matter if it make sense or not. If the "model" is over-fitted, then, well, let's add some additional quadratic term to the equation, it seems to be helping... Maybe... Sometimes. So, yes, AI is just old stuff, rebranded and fed with much, much more data. From what I see AI hasn't changed much over the last years. AI seems to be pretty effective in everything that is machine generated data set, as it is easily quantified and has simple representation - That's why it is so good in tracking people - there is a huge amount of data coming from people devices, they are nice and clean. It is also good in picture analysis - again data are pretty clean (pixels) and easily quantified, what is even more important, so it easy to "train" AI. When it comes to something more complicated like, for instance, purchase recommendation we get what we get: you bought a fridge, good, you will see fridge adds for next half a year.
fumblebee 6y ago
Looking beyond the term and you realise the approach is neither impressive or novel. Such rebranding is endemic in article headlines like this. The term “AI” may be in vogue but 99.9% of the time it’s really just putting lipstick on a pig.

by qayxc 6y ago

piokoch 6y ago

After years of not working in statistics I've decided to learn something new, so I've purchased a Coursera MOOC course on that new kid on the block - Machine Learning (now rebranded as AI I think). To my surprise (I wanted to learn something new) all the "old stuff" was there, ML turned out to be some variant of statistical inference with all its typical methods applied (like logistic regression, clustering, etc.). The new things were: deep neural networks ("normal" NN but with more layers) and total lack of thinking in terms of model - ML keeps adding more and more variables to the model, as much as data we have, no matter if it make sense or not. If the "model" is over-fitted, then, well, let's add some additional quadratic term to the equation, it seems to be helping... Maybe... Sometimes. So, yes, AI is just old stuff, rebranded and fed with much, much more data. From what I see AI hasn't changed much over the last years. AI seems to be pretty effective in everything that is machine generated data set, as it is easily quantified and has simple representation - That's why it is so good in tracking people - there is a huge amount of data coming from people devices, they are nice and clean. It is also good in picture analysis - again data are pretty clean (pixels) and easily quantified, what is even more important, so it easy to "train" AI. When it comes to something more complicated like, for instance, purchase recommendation we get what we get: you bought a fridge, good, you will see fridge adds for next half a year.

fumblebee 6y ago

Looking beyond the term and you realise the approach is neither impressive or novel. Such rebranding is endemic in article headlines like this. The term “AI” may be in vogue but 99.9% of the time it’s really just putting lipstick on a pig.