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It's rarely productive to take internet criticism into account, but it feels like AI is an especially strong instance of this. It seems like a lot of folks just

It's rarely productive to take internet criticism into account, but it feels like AI is an especially strong instance of this. It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is. Possibly because of animosity toward big tech, given big tech is driving a lot of the research and practical implementation in this area?

mannykannot 5y ago
I suspect it is more visceral: AGI would demolish human exceptionalism, and also of the human mind as being the last refuge of vitalism.
stephc_int13 5y ago
AI has been over-hyped, that's all. The machine learning techniques that were developed and enhanced during the last decade are not magical, like any other machines/software. But people have different and irrational expectations about AI.
- ianbutler 5y ago
  Has it been over hyped? Some ML created in the last 8 years is in most major products now. It has been transformative even if you don’t see it, is informing most things you use. We’re not close to AGI but I’ve never heard an actual researcher make that claim or the orgs they work for. They just consistently show for the tasks they pick they beat most baselines and in a lot of cases humans. The models just don’t generalize but with transformers we’re able to get them to perform above baselines for multiple problems and that’s the excitement. I’m not sure who has overhyped it for you but it’s delivering in line with my expectations ever since the first breakthrough in 2013/2014 that let neural nets actually work.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    It is overhyped because in the end it has failed to deliver the breakthrough promised years ago. Car drinking cars are a great example. The AI that has taken over google search has made a great product kinda of awful now. What breakthroughs are you referring to?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - sanxiyn 5y ago
      I mean, Zoom can change your background of video in real time, and people all over the world do so every day. This was an unimaginable breakthrough 10 years ago.
      - gambiting 5y ago
        What does that have to do with AI though??
        ianbutler 5y ago
        How do you think that's done?
        gambiting 5y ago
        Definitely not with AI? I mean Photoshop could do that 10+ years ago without "machine learning" even being a thing people talked about.
        ianbutler 5y ago
        And you'd be wrong. The key part here is "live in real time video" Photoshop definitely cannot do that, I know that for a fact. https://towardsdatascience.com/virtual-background-for-video-conferencing-using-machine-learning-dfba17d90aa9 https://towardsdatascience.com/virtual-background-for-video-... There's an example article on the subject.
        gambiting 5y ago
        I just don't see how that's AI , sorry. Machine learning to recognize a background isn't AI.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    It's just that the day to day instances of "AI" that you might run into are nowhere near the level of hype they initially got. For instance all kinds of voice assistants are just DUMB. Like, so so bad they actively put people off using them, with countless examples of them failing at even the most basic queries. And the instances where they feel smart it looks like it's only because you actually hit a magic passphrase that someone hardcoded in. My point is - if you don't actually work with state of the art AI research, then yeah, it's easy to see it as nothing more than overhyped garbage, because that's exactly what's being sold to regular consumers.
    - hrgiger 5y ago
      I agree about the assistants that they are not as much as I would expect but also there are self driving cars heavily using a.i. even at the current state I am personally impressed or indirectly we get the help during pandemic for protein folding/ mRNA vaccine development [1] , I also remember a completed competition for the speeding up the delivery of cold storage mRNA vaccines to quickly figure out which ones could fail [1] https://ai.plainenglish.io/how-ai-actually-helped-in-the-development-of-covid-mrna-vaccine-111c98e3dafb https://ai.plainenglish.io/how-ai-actually-helped-in-the-dev...
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > We’re not close to AGI but I’ve never heard an actual researcher make that claim or the orgs they work for. The fact that the researchers were clear about that doesn't absolve the marketing department, CEOs, journalists and pundits from their BS claims that we're doing something like AGI.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  I mean, it is magical, in a sense that we are not sure how and why it works.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    I'm not sure how it works, but I'm sure it doesn't think. Not till it can choose its own loss function.
    - sanxiyn 5y ago
      Sure, it doesn't think, just as submarines don't swim, as EWD said.
      - sillysaurusx 5y ago
        People always reach for these analogies. "Planes don't fly like birds." "Submarines don't swim like fish." Backpropagation has zero creativity. It's an elaborate mechanical parrot, and nothing more. It can never relate to you on a personal level, because it never experiences the world. It has no conception of what the world is. At least a dog gets hungry. Not persuaded? Try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346972
        mlyle 5y ago
        > Backpropagation has zero creativity. It's an elaborate mechanical parrot, and nothing more. It can never relate to you on a personal level, because it never experiences the world. It has no conception of what the world is. The problem is: it's not really clear how much creativity we have, and how much of it is better explained by highly constrained randomized search and optimization. > It can never relate to you on a personal level Well, sure. Even if/once we reach AGI, it's going to be a highly alien creature. > because it never experiences the world. Hard to put this on a rigorous setting. > It has no conception of what the world is. It has imperfect models of the world it is presented. So do we! > At least a dog gets hungry. I don't think "gets hungry" is a very meaningful way to put this. But, yes: higher living beings act with agency in their environment (and most deep learning AIs we build don't, instead having rigorous steps of interaction not forming any memory of the interaction) and have mechanisms to seek novelty in those interactions. I don't view these as impossible barriers to leap over.
- udbhavs 5y ago
  Most of the stuff featured on https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai looks pretty magical to me
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mrshadowgoose 5y ago
  > The machine learning techniques that were developed and enhanced during the last decade are not magical, like any other machines/software. You might be using a different definition of "magical" than what others are using in this context. Of course, when you break down ML techniques, it's all just math running on FETs. So no, it's not extra-dimensional hocus pocus, but absolutely nobody is using that particular definition. We've seen unexpected superhuman performance from ML, and in many cases, it's been inscrutable to the observer as to how that performance was achieved. Think move 37 in game #2 of Lee Sedol vs. AlphaGo. This move was shocking to observers, in that it appeared to be "bad", but was ultimately part of a winning strategy for AlphaGo. And this was all done in the backdrop of sudden superhuman performance in a problem domain that was "safe from ML". When people use the term "magic" in this context, think of "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" mixed with the awe of seeing a machine do something unexpected. And don't forget, the human brain is just a lump of matter that consumes only 20W of energy to achieve what it does. No magic here either, just physics. Synthetically replicating (and completely surpassing) its functionality is a question of "when", not "if".
  - visarga 5y ago
    If recent philosophy taught us anything it's that brains are special. The hard problem of consciousness shows science is insufficient to raise to the level of entitlement of humans, we're exceptions flying over the physical laws of nature, we have free will, first person POV, and other magical stuff like that. Or we have to believe in panpsychism or dualism, like in the middle ages. Anything to lift the human status. Maybe we should start by "humans are the greatest thing ever" and then try to fit our world knowledge to that conclusion. We feel it right in our qualia that we are right, and qualia is ineffable.
    - maroonblazer 5y ago
      > The hard problem of consciousness shows science is insufficient to raise to the level of entitlement of humans, we're exceptions raising over the physical laws of nature, we have free will and other magical stuff like that. That's not my understanding of the 'hard problem of consciousness'. Admittedly, all I know about the subject is what I've heard from D Chalmers in half-a-dozen podcast interviews. Can you point to a definitive source?
- password321 5y ago
  If anything is overhyped in AI it's deep reinforcement learning and its achievements in video games or the millionth GAN that can generate some image. But when it solves a big scientific problem that was considered a decade away, that's pretty magical.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    The GANs are backdooring their way into really interesting outcomes, though. They're fantastic for compression: You compress the hell out of an input image or audio, then use the compressed features as conditioning for the GAN. This works great for super-resolution on images and speech compression. eg, for speech compression: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03312 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03312
  - visarga 5y ago
    I believe modelling the space of images deserves a bit more appreciation, and the approach is so unexpected - the generator never gets to see a real image.
323 5y ago
> It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is. Possibly because of animosity toward big tech It's much more simple, and more deep: most humans believe they are special/unique/non-machine like spiritual beings. Anything suggesting they could be as simple as the result of mechanical matrix multiplications is deeply disturbing and unacceptable. There is a rich recent anti-AGI literature written by philosophy people which basically boils down to this: "a machine could never be as meaningful and creative as I am, because I am human, while the AGI is just operations on bits".
- visarga 5y ago
  There was a time when we were proud that Earth was the center of the universe, nobody dare say otherwise!
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    though at the same time, and in the same population, the existence of other planets full of conscious beings was basically non-controversial: Life, as it exists on Earth in the form of men, animals and plants, is to be found, let us suppose in a high form in the solar and stellar regions. Rather than think that so many stars and parts of the heavens are uninhabited and that this earth of ours alone is peopled—and that with beings perhaps of an inferior type—we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference of all stellar regions. Of the inhabitants then of worlds other than our own we can know still less having no standards by which to appraise them. Nicholas of Cusa, c1440; Cardinal and Bishop
password321 5y ago
Well in this case I think many programmers just see it as a direct assault to their identity.
ma2rten 5y ago
It's because you have to pay really close attention to tell if it's real or hype. It's really easy to make a cool demo in machine learning, cherrypick outputs, etc.
kristjansson 5y ago
It’s like a lot of the crypto stuff. The research is really cool, and making real progress toward new capabilities. Simultaneously there are a lot of people and companies seizing on that work to promote products of questionable quality, or to make claims of universal applicability (and concomitant doom) that they can’t defend. Paying attention in this sort of ecosystem basically requires one to be skeptical of everything.
runarberg 5y ago
> but it feels like AI is an especially strong instance of this. It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is. I presume the amount of hype AI research has been getting for the past 4 decades might be at least part of the reason. I also think AI is terribly named. We are assigning “intelligence” to basically a statistical inference model before philosophers and psychologists have even figured out what “intelligence” is (at least in a non-racist way). I know that both the quality and (especially) the quantity of inference done with machine learning algorithms is really impressive indeed. But when people are advocating AI research as a step towards some “artificial general intelligence” people (rightly) will raise questions and start poohing you down.
- visarga 5y ago
  It doesn't matter if we call it "intelligent" or "general", the real test is if it is useful. A rose by any other name...
  - runarberg 5y ago
    The naming does indeed matter here. The concept of general intelligence is filled with pseudo-science and has a history of racism (see Mismeasure of Man by Stephen J. Gould). Non-linear statistical inference with very large matrices could be assigned intelligence as it is very useful, but it is by no means the same type of intelligence we ascribe to humans (or even dogs for that matter). If your plant actually looks like a moss you probably shouldn’t call it a rose. (Even though your moss is actually quite amazing).

mannykannot 5y ago

I suspect it is more visceral: AGI would demolish human exceptionalism, and also of the human mind as being the last refuge of vitalism.

stephc_int13 5y ago

AI has been over-hyped, that's all. The machine learning techniques that were developed and enhanced during the last decade are not magical, like any other machines/software. But people have different and irrational expectations about AI.

ianbutler 5y ago
Has it been over hyped? Some ML created in the last 8 years is in most major products now. It has been transformative even if you don’t see it, is informing most things you use. We’re not close to AGI but I’ve never heard an actual researcher make that claim or the orgs they work for. They just consistently show for the tasks they pick they beat most baselines and in a lot of cases humans. The models just don’t generalize but with transformers we’re able to get them to perform above baselines for multiple problems and that’s the excitement. I’m not sure who has overhyped it for you but it’s delivering in line with my expectations ever since the first breakthrough in 2013/2014 that let neural nets actually work.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  It is overhyped because in the end it has failed to deliver the breakthrough promised years ago. Car drinking cars are a great example. The AI that has taken over google search has made a great product kinda of awful now. What breakthroughs are you referring to?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    I mean, Zoom can change your background of video in real time, and people all over the world do so every day. This was an unimaginable breakthrough 10 years ago.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      What does that have to do with AI though??
      - ianbutler 5y ago
        How do you think that's done?
        gambiting 5y ago
        Definitely not with AI? I mean Photoshop could do that 10+ years ago without "machine learning" even being a thing people talked about.
        ianbutler 5y ago
        And you'd be wrong. The key part here is "live in real time video" Photoshop definitely cannot do that, I know that for a fact. https://towardsdatascience.com/virtual-background-for-video-conferencing-using-machine-learning-dfba17d90aa9 https://towardsdatascience.com/virtual-background-for-video-... There's an example article on the subject.
        gambiting 5y ago
        I just don't see how that's AI , sorry. Machine learning to recognize a background isn't AI.
- gambiting 5y ago
  It's just that the day to day instances of "AI" that you might run into are nowhere near the level of hype they initially got. For instance all kinds of voice assistants are just DUMB. Like, so so bad they actively put people off using them, with countless examples of them failing at even the most basic queries. And the instances where they feel smart it looks like it's only because you actually hit a magic passphrase that someone hardcoded in. My point is - if you don't actually work with state of the art AI research, then yeah, it's easy to see it as nothing more than overhyped garbage, because that's exactly what's being sold to regular consumers.
  - hrgiger 5y ago
    I agree about the assistants that they are not as much as I would expect but also there are self driving cars heavily using a.i. even at the current state I am personally impressed or indirectly we get the help during pandemic for protein folding/ mRNA vaccine development [1] , I also remember a completed competition for the speeding up the delivery of cold storage mRNA vaccines to quickly figure out which ones could fail [1] https://ai.plainenglish.io/how-ai-actually-helped-in-the-development-of-covid-mrna-vaccine-111c98e3dafb https://ai.plainenglish.io/how-ai-actually-helped-in-the-dev...
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > We’re not close to AGI but I’ve never heard an actual researcher make that claim or the orgs they work for. The fact that the researchers were clear about that doesn't absolve the marketing department, CEOs, journalists and pundits from their BS claims that we're doing something like AGI.
sanxiyn 5y ago
I mean, it is magical, in a sense that we are not sure how and why it works.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I'm not sure how it works, but I'm sure it doesn't think. Not till it can choose its own loss function.
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    Sure, it doesn't think, just as submarines don't swim, as EWD said.
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      People always reach for these analogies. "Planes don't fly like birds." "Submarines don't swim like fish." Backpropagation has zero creativity. It's an elaborate mechanical parrot, and nothing more. It can never relate to you on a personal level, because it never experiences the world. It has no conception of what the world is. At least a dog gets hungry. Not persuaded? Try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346972
      - mlyle 5y ago
        > Backpropagation has zero creativity. It's an elaborate mechanical parrot, and nothing more. It can never relate to you on a personal level, because it never experiences the world. It has no conception of what the world is. The problem is: it's not really clear how much creativity we have, and how much of it is better explained by highly constrained randomized search and optimization. > It can never relate to you on a personal level Well, sure. Even if/once we reach AGI, it's going to be a highly alien creature. > because it never experiences the world. Hard to put this on a rigorous setting. > It has no conception of what the world is. It has imperfect models of the world it is presented. So do we! > At least a dog gets hungry. I don't think "gets hungry" is a very meaningful way to put this. But, yes: higher living beings act with agency in their environment (and most deep learning AIs we build don't, instead having rigorous steps of interaction not forming any memory of the interaction) and have mechanisms to seek novelty in those interactions. I don't view these as impossible barriers to leap over.
udbhavs 5y ago
Most of the stuff featured on https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai looks pretty magical to me
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mrshadowgoose 5y ago
> The machine learning techniques that were developed and enhanced during the last decade are not magical, like any other machines/software. You might be using a different definition of "magical" than what others are using in this context. Of course, when you break down ML techniques, it's all just math running on FETs. So no, it's not extra-dimensional hocus pocus, but absolutely nobody is using that particular definition. We've seen unexpected superhuman performance from ML, and in many cases, it's been inscrutable to the observer as to how that performance was achieved. Think move 37 in game #2 of Lee Sedol vs. AlphaGo. This move was shocking to observers, in that it appeared to be "bad", but was ultimately part of a winning strategy for AlphaGo. And this was all done in the backdrop of sudden superhuman performance in a problem domain that was "safe from ML". When people use the term "magic" in this context, think of "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" mixed with the awe of seeing a machine do something unexpected. And don't forget, the human brain is just a lump of matter that consumes only 20W of energy to achieve what it does. No magic here either, just physics. Synthetically replicating (and completely surpassing) its functionality is a question of "when", not "if".
- visarga 5y ago
  If recent philosophy taught us anything it's that brains are special. The hard problem of consciousness shows science is insufficient to raise to the level of entitlement of humans, we're exceptions flying over the physical laws of nature, we have free will, first person POV, and other magical stuff like that. Or we have to believe in panpsychism or dualism, like in the middle ages. Anything to lift the human status. Maybe we should start by "humans are the greatest thing ever" and then try to fit our world knowledge to that conclusion. We feel it right in our qualia that we are right, and qualia is ineffable.
  - maroonblazer 5y ago
    > The hard problem of consciousness shows science is insufficient to raise to the level of entitlement of humans, we're exceptions raising over the physical laws of nature, we have free will and other magical stuff like that. That's not my understanding of the 'hard problem of consciousness'. Admittedly, all I know about the subject is what I've heard from D Chalmers in half-a-dozen podcast interviews. Can you point to a definitive source?
password321 5y ago
If anything is overhyped in AI it's deep reinforcement learning and its achievements in video games or the millionth GAN that can generate some image. But when it solves a big scientific problem that was considered a decade away, that's pretty magical.
- sdenton4 5y ago
  The GANs are backdooring their way into really interesting outcomes, though. They're fantastic for compression: You compress the hell out of an input image or audio, then use the compressed features as conditioning for the GAN. This works great for super-resolution on images and speech compression. eg, for speech compression: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03312 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03312
- visarga 5y ago
  I believe modelling the space of images deserves a bit more appreciation, and the approach is so unexpected - the generator never gets to see a real image.

323 5y ago

> It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is. Possibly because of animosity toward big tech It's much more simple, and more deep: most humans believe they are special/unique/non-machine like spiritual beings. Anything suggesting they could be as simple as the result of mechanical matrix multiplications is deeply disturbing and unacceptable. There is a rich recent anti-AGI literature written by philosophy people which basically boils down to this: "a machine could never be as meaningful and creative as I am, because I am human, while the AGI is just operations on bits".

visarga 5y ago
There was a time when we were proud that Earth was the center of the universe, nobody dare say otherwise!
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  though at the same time, and in the same population, the existence of other planets full of conscious beings was basically non-controversial: Life, as it exists on Earth in the form of men, animals and plants, is to be found, let us suppose in a high form in the solar and stellar regions. Rather than think that so many stars and parts of the heavens are uninhabited and that this earth of ours alone is peopled—and that with beings perhaps of an inferior type—we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference of all stellar regions. Of the inhabitants then of worlds other than our own we can know still less having no standards by which to appraise them. Nicholas of Cusa, c1440; Cardinal and Bishop

password321 5y ago

Well in this case I think many programmers just see it as a direct assault to their identity.

ma2rten 5y ago

It's because you have to pay really close attention to tell if it's real or hype. It's really easy to make a cool demo in machine learning, cherrypick outputs, etc.

kristjansson 5y ago

It’s like a lot of the crypto stuff. The research is really cool, and making real progress toward new capabilities. Simultaneously there are a lot of people and companies seizing on that work to promote products of questionable quality, or to make claims of universal applicability (and concomitant doom) that they can’t defend. Paying attention in this sort of ecosystem basically requires one to be skeptical of everything.

runarberg 5y ago

> but it feels like AI is an especially strong instance of this. It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is. I presume the amount of hype AI research has been getting for the past 4 decades might be at least part of the reason. I also think AI is terribly named. We are assigning “intelligence” to basically a statistical inference model before philosophers and psychologists have even figured out what “intelligence” is (at least in a non-racist way). I know that both the quality and (especially) the quantity of inference done with machine learning algorithms is really impressive indeed. But when people are advocating AI research as a step towards some “artificial general intelligence” people (rightly) will raise questions and start poohing you down.

visarga 5y ago
It doesn't matter if we call it "intelligent" or "general", the real test is if it is useful. A rose by any other name...
- runarberg 5y ago
  The naming does indeed matter here. The concept of general intelligence is filled with pseudo-science and has a history of racism (see Mismeasure of Man by Stephen J. Gould). Non-linear statistical inference with very large matrices could be assigned intelligence as it is very useful, but it is by no means the same type of intelligence we ascribe to humans (or even dogs for that matter). If your plant actually looks like a moss you probably shouldn’t call it a rose. (Even though your moss is actually quite amazing).