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I completely forgot about Google Duplex. It looks like it is still around but very limited in terms of what phones you can use, what cities it can be used in, a

by neaden 4y ago

I completely forgot about Google Duplex. It looks like it is still around but very limited in terms of what phones you can use, what cities it can be used in, and what businesses in those cities will accept it. Doesn't appear any progress has really been made in the past few years. I think this is a great point of how companies create something with AI that is initially really cool, but isn't quite there to actually be very usable and gets forgotten when they roll out the next big thing.

version_five 4y ago
The last 10 years of AI is basically defined by proof of concepts like that that were 80% (or whatever) solutions and claimed there was a path to something commercially viable. Turns out that ~20% is always basically impossible - self driving cars being the archetypal example. I work in the field and I think it can be a great tool, but it needs to be acknowledged what its limitations are and how we don't actually know how to address them yet
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Now it seems like you are the one moving the goalposts. There are tons of machine-learned models in production, in translation, text segmentation, image segmentation, image search, predictive text composition, etc. It's just that people forget the novelty of all these things immediately after they were launched. You can point your phone at printed Chinese text and have it read aloud to you in English. That is alien tech compared to 10 years ago.
  - ForHackernews 4y ago
    > You can point your phone at printed Chinese text and have it read aloud to you in English. Yeah, but it's not really that good. Machine translation has improved a great deal, but reading those translations actually involves bringing a lot of human intelligence to the table, "Oh I bet, 'maximum fire alarms spread' on this menu actually means 'very hot sauce'" If all you're claiming is that ML models exist and have useful commercial applications, then I don't think anyone is going to argue against that point. But a lot of these AI promoters go further: in the case of the LessWrong folks some of them are convinced that a superintelligent machine capable of enslaving humanity is right around the corner.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      You’re saying the bear doesn’t dance all that well.
      - ForHackernews 4y ago
        I'm saying the bear was trained to dance, it didn't choose to dance.
- ForHackernews 4y ago
  That might just be a Google problem. Historically, they've had the good fortune to operate in search advertising, where being 80% right half the time translates into billions of dollars. Many other fields (e.g. self-driving cars) are less forgiving.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Shebanator 4y ago
The Hold for Me and Direct My Call features for Pixel's Phone app both use Duplex models running locally on your device, and those features are quite popular. I think that counts as significant progress by any measure, so your point doesn't hold in this case.
- avsteele 4y ago
  Those features are not in the same league as the original promise of e.g. calling a business and making a reservation for you.

by neaden 4y ago

version_five 4y ago

The last 10 years of AI is basically defined by proof of concepts like that that were 80% (or whatever) solutions and claimed there was a path to something commercially viable. Turns out that ~20% is always basically impossible - self driving cars being the archetypal example. I work in the field and I think it can be a great tool, but it needs to be acknowledged what its limitations are and how we don't actually know how to address them yet

jeffbee 4y ago
Now it seems like you are the one moving the goalposts. There are tons of machine-learned models in production, in translation, text segmentation, image segmentation, image search, predictive text composition, etc. It's just that people forget the novelty of all these things immediately after they were launched. You can point your phone at printed Chinese text and have it read aloud to you in English. That is alien tech compared to 10 years ago.
- ForHackernews 4y ago
  > You can point your phone at printed Chinese text and have it read aloud to you in English. Yeah, but it's not really that good. Machine translation has improved a great deal, but reading those translations actually involves bringing a lot of human intelligence to the table, "Oh I bet, 'maximum fire alarms spread' on this menu actually means 'very hot sauce'" If all you're claiming is that ML models exist and have useful commercial applications, then I don't think anyone is going to argue against that point. But a lot of these AI promoters go further: in the case of the LessWrong folks some of them are convinced that a superintelligent machine capable of enslaving humanity is right around the corner.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    You’re saying the bear doesn’t dance all that well.
    - ForHackernews 4y ago
      I'm saying the bear was trained to dance, it didn't choose to dance.
ForHackernews 4y ago
That might just be a Google problem. Historically, they've had the good fortune to operate in search advertising, where being 80% right half the time translates into billions of dollars. Many other fields (e.g. self-driving cars) are less forgiving.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Shebanator 4y ago

The Hold for Me and Direct My Call features for Pixel's Phone app both use Duplex models running locally on your device, and those features are quite popular. I think that counts as significant progress by any measure, so your point doesn't hold in this case.

avsteele 4y ago
Those features are not in the same league as the original promise of e.g. calling a business and making a reservation for you.