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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 mac
by 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 agoHas 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 agoIt 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?
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- sanxiyn 5y agoI 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 agoWhat does that have to do with AI though??
- ianbutler 5y agoHow do you think that's done?
- gambiting 5y agoDefinitely not with AI? I mean Photoshop could do that 10+ years ago without "machine learning" even being a thing people talked about.
- ianbutler 5y agoAnd 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 agoI just don't see how that's AI , sorry. Machine learning to recognize a background isn't AI.
- ianbutler 5y agoA. Most people still think Google search is good. B. Unless you work for Google specifically on that search team I'm going to say you don't know what you're talking about. So we can safely throw that point away. I've implemented a natural language search using bleeding edge work, the results I can assure you are impressive. Everything from route planning to spam filtering has seen major upgrades thanks to ML in the last 8 years. Someone mentioned the zoom backgrounds, besides that image generation and the field of image processing in general. Document classification, translation. Recommendations. Malware detection, code completion. I could go on. No one promised me AGI so idk what you're on about and that certainly wasn't the promise billed to me when things thawed out this time but the results have pretty undeniably changed a lot of tech we use.
- erwincoumans 5y agoOne of Deepmind's goals is AGI, so it is tempting to evaluate their publications for progress towards AGI. Problem is, how do you evaluate progress towards AGI? https://deepmind.com/about https://deepmind.com/about "Our long term aim is to solve intelligence, developing more general and capable problem-solving systems, known as artificial general intelligence (AGI)."
- ianbutler 5y agoAGI is a real problem but the proposed pace is marketing fluff -- on the ground they're just doing good work and moving our baselines incrementally. If a new technique for let's say document translation is 20% cheaper/easier to build and 15% more effective that is a breakthrough. It is not a glamorous world redefining breakthrough but progress is more often than not incremental. I'd say more so than the big eureka moments. Dipping into my own speculation, to your point about how to measure, between our (humanity's) superiority complex and with how we move the baselines right now I don't know if people will acknowledge AGI if and until it's far superior to us. If even an average adult level intelligence is produced I see a bunch of people just treating it poorly and telling the researchers that it's not good enough. Edit: And maybe I should amend my original statement to say I've never heard a researcher promise me about AGI. That said that statement from DeepMind doesn't really promise anything other than they're working towards it.
- password321 5y agoIf we are going to start saying "but it hasn't achieved X yet when Y said it would" as a way to classify a field as overhyped then I don't know what even remains.
- gambiting 5y agoIt'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 agoI 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 agoI mean, it is magical, in a sense that we are not sure how and why it works.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoI'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 agoSure, it doesn't think, just as submarines don't swim, as EWD said.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoPeople 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 agoMost of the stuff featured on https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai looks pretty magical to me
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- 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 agoIf 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 agoIf 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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.