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We’ll call it AI to sell it, machine learning to build it
- participant1138 3y agoAn AI Public Service Announcement
- sieste 3y ago... but it's really just linear regression.
- Maken 3y agoWith lots of data.
- bee_rider 3y agoAnd matrix multiplications. Premium GEMMs.
- troelsSteegin 3y agoSo, "We'll call it AI to sell it, Machine Learning to Build it", and regression to make it work.
- raverbashing 3y agoNo, it's like saying "computers are just switches turning off and on". It's a naive take And forgetting all the abstractions that make it work If it was we'd have LLMs 20 years ago. Not even mnist is "just linear regression" (because neither sigmoid nor relu are linear)
- JackFr 3y agoNo, it's not a linear regression, but it is at its heart optimization. And yes, that is indeed like saying a computer is just a bunch of zeroes and ones and logic gates. It's true and beautiful and profound but nearly useless from a practical perspective. And the wonder, like computers when you scale the numbers of transistors to the billions, is that when you scale the number of parameters to the billions, you end up with something amazing.
- Uehreka 3y agoYeah but the people making these comments aren’t trying to point to the wonder of how simple mathematics can underpin large complex systems, they’re doing the opposite: Trying to trivialize the system and its immense potential for good and bad by pointing out that it uses simple mathematics under the hood (and thus can’t be that amazing).
- TeMPOraL 3y agoNo, they're not trying to deny the system is amazing. They're saying that it's not magic, and that we will soon be able to create comparably amazing systems ourselves.
- VHRanger 3y agosigmoid is logistic regression ReLu is truncated regression It's all just GLMs!
- Uehreka 3y agoI don’t get what people are trying to say when they say these kinds of things about AI. That human-level writing is as simple as a linear regression? That we could’ve had computer programs capable of human-level writing decades ago? Have they not used these AIs enough to see how powerful they are? Are they seeing the bad outputs and thinking that AIs are always doing that poorly? Like seriously, if you’re telling me that it was obvious that a “linear regression” could pass the LSAT I’ve got a macvlan to sell you. Edit: they’re also literally not linear regression! https://youtu.be/Ae9EKCyI1xU?feature=shared https://youtu.be/Ae9EKCyI1xU?feature=shared
- VHRanger 3y agoFormally it's a generalized linear model with a constructed feature set. A "kitchen sink" regression with enough polynomial terms (x^2, x^3, etc.) and interaction terms (ab, (ab)^2, etc.) will be a function approximator the same way a neural net is. The computational mechanics are different (there's a reason we dont use it) but in the land of infinite computational power it can be made equivalent.
- hcks 3y agoWhat's the point of this comment seriously. Making universal function approximators is trivial. It's not where the value lies.
- tsroe 3y ago>in the land of infinite computational power it can be made equivalent I.e. they are not equivalent and the original comment was wrong.
- Roark66 3y ago>The computational mechanics are different (there's a reason we dont use it) but in the land of infinite computational power it can be made equivalent. In the land of infinite computational power every computation is just a series of 1s and 0s added and subtracted. You can implement everything with just few more operations. But we don't live in a land of infinite computational power and it took us (as humanity) quite a while to discover things like transformer models. If we had the same hardware 10 years ago would we have discovered them back then? I very much doubt it. We didn't just need the hardware, we needed the labelled data sets, prior art in smaller models etc. Personally I think current AI/ML (LLMs, ESRGANs, and diffusion models) have huge capability to increase people's productivity, but it will not happen overnight and not for everyone. People have to learn to use AI/ML. This brings me to the "dangers of AI". I laugh at all these ideas that "AI will become sentient and it will take over the world", but I'm genuinely fearful of the world where we've became so used to AI delivered by few "cloud providers" that we cannot do certain jobs without it. Just like you can't be a modern architect without Cad software, there may be time when you'll not be able do any job without your "AI assistant". Now, what happens when there is essentially a monopoly on the market of "AI assistants"? They will start raising prices to the point in future paying off your "AI assistant" bill may be higher than your taxes and you'll have a choice of paying or not working at all. This is why we have to run these models locally and advance local use of them. Yes (not at all)OpenAI will give you access to a huge model for a fraction of the cost, but it's like with the proverbial drug dealers that gives you the first hit for free, you'll more than make up for the cost of it once you get hooked up. The "dangers of AI" is that it becomes too centralised, not "uncontrollable"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- extrememacaroni 3y agoIt's basically just math.
- viewtransform 3y agohigh-dimensional non-linear math
- robg 3y agoWhen can we harmonize the two and call it “Statistical Learning”?
- sleepybrett 3y ago'iterative statistics', what exactly is 'learning'
- Legend2440 3y agoLearning is creating computer programs from data. Usually through optimization.
- HPsquared 3y agoAI has always been a "consumer" term... Games have always had various things called "AI", for example.
- lawlessone 3y agoFunnily game AI is often smoke and mirrors. devs often have really dumb down the game AI to be fair to the players. And they balance out the dumbing down by giving it bonuses. example: game AI's often have unlimited ammo. But their bullets don't hurt the player much.
- jameshart 3y agoIt’s almost like ‘artificial intelligence’ is the simulation of intelligence using artifice. Do people just gloss over the ‘artificial’ part of ‘AI’?
- Izkata 3y agoI think most people read it as artificially created intelligence, not faked intelligence.
- jameshart 3y agoI don’t understand the distinction. Doesn’t artificiality imply both ‘fakeness’ as well as ‘being man made’? Artificial flavorings are both. Artificial limbs are both. Artificial turf is both. Artificial intelligence is faked, manufactured intelligence.
- Izkata 3y agoLook at the sibling comment to your own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848768 That's describing faked intelligence, not artificially created (actual) intelligence. It's using cheats that kinda look like intelligence if you don't know what's really going on. Artificial turf is actually a good example itself - it's plastic (or other materials), it's fake grass. Artificially created grass would be more like https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/genetically-modified-grass-doesnt-need-mowing https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/genetically-mo... Quick edit with another example using terms we already have: An android is a fake human, while a clone is an artificially created human.
- RandomWorker 3y agoI don’t know who said it, but an amazing quote I love is: “they call it AI until it starts working, see autocomplete” I love this because when a company tells me they do AI (as a software engineer) they tacitly say that they have little to no knowledge of where they want to go or what services they will be offering with that AI.
- meowface 3y agoVaguely reminds me of this Steve Jobs quote (whether or not one agrees with him) when he met the Dropbox team: "you have a feature, not a product".
- toomuchtodo 3y agoDropbox laughing in that $10B market cap and $2B+ ARR. Jobs was right about the concept (insert meme about Apple ecosystem devs realizing their product was killed by an Apple feature release), but wrong in that specific instance.
- throwaway290 3y agoDropbox was losing money every year of its existence until 2021.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cowsup 3y agoBy design. If I gave you $250,000,000 to grow a company, and then next year I saw you had $250,050,000 in the bank, then $250,102,000 next year, and so on, I'd be pretty annoyed that I backed you. You have so much money you could be spending on hiring, development, and marketing, and you're instead just slowly chugging along, padding the corporate bank account? What am I paying you for?! Give me my money back. VC-backed companies that spend more than they earn aren't duds. It's the nature of VC-backed corporations.
- avgcorrection 3y agoIsn't ML the only kind of successful AI?
- sirwhinesalot 3y agoNo, just that every other type of successful AI ends up being called something else.
- hunter2_ 3y agoDo you have any examples? I'm charged with figuring out how my organization can benefit from AI, and hearing that there are non-ML options is very relieving. I assume it's not quite so simple as to include any algorithm, right? TFA even sort of refutes that idea, saying I’ve been told that a product was “driven by AI” only to find out it was driven by “if-then” statements.
- progval 3y agoPageRank (search ranking), A* algorithm (pathfinding), simplex (linear optimization), branch prediction (in CPUs), autocomplete
- Tommah 3y agoThere is also a large set of algorithms for adversarial search problems, such as playing board games, that traditionally don't use machine learning. Minimax is the simplest one, and then there are negamax, alpha-beta pruning, negascout, etc. I believe Stockfish (the world's strongest chess program, or close to it) has actually improved its evaluation function using machine learning, but this is a fairly recent development.
- sirwhinesalot 3y agoAny form of constraint solving tech. SAT solvers (used in hardware-synthesis, software verification, math proofs, etc.), Mixed Integer Solvers (usually sold for tens of thousands of dollars) that are used for hardcore optimization problems, Google's Operations Research toolkit (OR-tools), etc. Unlike most algorithms, these things are general purpose, they can solve any* NP-complete problem (*usually in a useful amount of time). My manager refers to these things as "Machine Reasoning" in contrast with "Machine Learning", since they start from the rules instead of from examples.
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- Angostura 3y agoI think it is notable that Apple has kept plugging away calling it machine learning.
- softg 3y ago> In the run up to Uber’s IPO in 2019, venture capital funds were flooded with pitches from startups offering “Uber for X”. Uber for parking spaces. Ugh. The current French president famously proposed to "uberize" the economy, by which he meant less secure jobs that cost less to the employer. The C-- people in my workplace are already talking non stop about generative AI and the like. I don't look forward to hearing more marketing mumbo jumbo about AI-izing everything in the near future.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brookst 3y agoITT: engineers disgusted that marketing uses different language to communicate product benefits to consumers. See also: “posi-trac” (limited slip differential), “alleve” (2-(6-Methoxynaphthalen-2-yl)propanoic acid), Technicolor (usually to describe a 3-strip prismatic camera+film arrangement). In general, consumers are marketing care about the benefits, and engineers care about the methods. Hence AI versus machine learning. It’s nothing to get upset or disgusted about.
- sdflhasjd 3y agoSee also: Autopilot. I think the disgust can be justified in some circumstances, when marketing is used to oversell or just outright deceive, in this case and others which involves taking advantage of common ignorance.
- bee_rider 3y agoAutopilot is a particularly egregious case, though. Naming an experimental, very limited car feature after the device that flys the plane most of the time, and has for many years, really ought to have been illegal. It sets wildly inappropriate expectations. Most of the other names are just random nice sounding names that they made up. It is more like if they called DayQuil “Tracheotomax,” because you know, it helps you breathe!
- darkwater 3y agoI'm not a Elon fan but the autopilot in a plane does basically the same (if we are saying that planes and cars do the same thing, which is transport people) that Tesla's or many more manufacturers "autopilot" does on highways. Not an aviation expert but I don't think AP is controlling take-offs and landings. It controls cruise speed, altitude and direction. A car AP on a highway does the same (minus altitude).
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoTrue, but that's where the difference in intended usage is problematic. In the sky, autopilot can't accidentally hit another plane or barrier because it got confused about the road paint or construction signs. The stakes are a lot higher on the ground, even though it technically controls less of the vehicle than autopilot in a plane does (acceleration, braking, and steering compared to elevator, trim, roll, pitch, throttle, vector) since cars don't have to worry about 3 dimensional movement much while airplanes do.
- world2vec 3y agoGoes well with the classic joke: "Machine Learning is usually written in Python, AI is written in Powerpoint".
- essive 3y agoIf it passes the Turing Test then it's just semantics after that - linear regression gains artificial consciousness
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoSomething like that. The test demonstrates that we can treat it as if it is a person without much risk. Says nothing about what it 'really' is.
- essive 3y agoRight! And what it 'really' is will push the philosophical 'hard problem' of consciousness. Will we be able to penetrate something human-like to know if it is conscious?
- k_kelly 3y agoPeople pay for holes not drills.
- m3kw9 3y agoOr you can be a saint and call it program but you would sort of grandstanding just for the heck of it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lawlessone 3y agoHasn't scifi and comp science been using AI since the early days? They weren't using as marketing term, and this was before PC's so there wasn't much of a market.
- gwbas1c 3y agoYes: "AI" stands for "Artificial Intelligence." As in a computer mimics human-level intelligence; as opposed to, you know, sitting down and writing a computer program.
- lawlessone 3y agoPersonally I figured ML was a toolset to maybe eventually achieve some form of AI.
- jwozn 3y agoI think that's a good way to look at it. Math is a way to stats, stats and math are a way to do data science, data science is a foundation of machine learning, and machine learning is a tool to create AI.
- izzydata 3y agoWhen science fiction mentions artificial intelligence it is almost always in reference to what we now call general artificial intelligence. Which is very different than the machine learning we now call AI.
- octagons 3y agoThe worst case of AI marketing that I have seen recently was an interview where the interviewee was describing ChatGPT 4’s capabilities. He was describing the model as having an IQ of 180 and comparing it to Einstein’s alleged IQ as well as ChatGPT 3, which had a lower IQ. The subjectivity of IQ combined with the leading premise of being able to quantify a model’s performance with it is extremely disingenuous. I can’t find a link, but I’ll share one if I do. I believe it was with someone in the C-suite at OpenAI.
- lawlessone 3y agoAll the articles about LLMs passing different exams isn't helping. LLM can pass exam X etc.. Of course it can pass exams, so could a database storing the answers. Ask it to try multiply two floating point numbers though and you often get the wrong answer.
- amelius 3y ago... and we post it to a hacker forum to discuss it.
- welder 3y ago> GaaS- trademark pending, thank you, I’ll see myself out That's the best part! We've been needing an acronym for "GPT as a Service"
- rando_dfad 3y agoEven better if you use it to control your smart-home. GaaS-lights!
- datadrivenangel 3y agoGenerative AI as a Service. GaaaS
- ilamont 3y agoInserting tech buzzwords into pitch decks is as old as the Valley itself. Not long ago "powered by blockchain" was all the rage and some of these companies were funded regardless of whether there was any working blockchain behind the curtain. How many have pivoted to "powered by AI," I wonder?
- sandworm101 3y agoI owned a vacuum cleaner back in the 90s with "fuzzy logic", the cool tech buzzword of the time. Who knows what it actually did. I suspect it just meant that the thing has a medium power setting between on and off.
- scottmcdot 3y agoMy lg washing machine from 2010 had fuzzy logic too.
- dendrite9 3y agoI wish my 2015(16?) car had fuzzy logic for the climate control. It seems there may be a small difference between slightly hot and full hot, but there is a distinct switch between slightly cool and slightly hot. Sometimes I just want the fan to move ambient temperature air, not hot or cold.
- nerdix 3y agoSo I get passing off if-then statements, mechanical turk/human intervention, or ChatGPT API calls as "AI". But is there a problem saying that a product that incorporates machine learning techniques is powered by AI? I ask because I'm starting to see people separate "ML" from "AI". Where ML is basically everything pre-generative AI (recommendation systems, computer vision, machine translation) and AI is generative AI. Where as I've always viewed ML as a subcategory of "soft" AI. Is there a generally accepted difference between ML and AI?
- PeterisP 3y agoFrom a scientific perspective, AI is the name of the general field that studies systems that try to exhibit intelligent behavior, and ML is a strict subset of that - it's the one that's currently more popular, but the study of, for example, planning algorithms or logic reasoning algorithms are other subfields of AI that have nothing to do with ML.
- tsumnia 3y agoIn my classes, I tell students that "AI" is the general population term for machine learning, data science, and "traditional" AI (pathfinding, planning, logic proofs, etc). They all touch on a part of AI, but the differences are hard to explain to non-tech people. People will interchange ML with AI and still mean the umbrella "all of it" concept. That's one of the reasons the article talks about getting more concrete tools that are used in the workflow. Laypeople might think a switch statement is AI and their potential customers also think its AI, that doesn't mean its really AI. I'm actually booked to give an AI talk for business managers later this month and this is something I'm planning to cover. The article does a good job at outlining what to look for when you get those "AI for X" sales pitches.
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- onesphere 3y agoConflictascope?
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- pierat 3y ago"AI" means: 1. My data is gobbled up without any real choice. And, when a org is being sly about using data for training, you won't even know until they come out with "Super AI Cloud" garbage. 2. My data is forever part of some black box ELIZA that I can never purge. Only way to do that now is to delete training data and retrain. (lolnope they wont do that per deletion request) 3. This ELIZA black box will at some later date spit out my personal information. And again, I cant even interrogate it to see my data and how it uses my data. 4. There is no real consent on acquisition, ingestion, or processing. 5. The damned thing isn't deterministic. Rerunning gives different results, which is exactly the opposite thing I want for a computer. And destroys any sort of troubleshooting. 6. I don't trust the creators of these AI black boxes. We don't know the rules that are put in. Only way to really test is to do a massive probabilistic test of thousands or millions of things, and you MIGHT find the problems.
- meerita 3y agoAI for me is an umbrella term.
- ternaus 3y ago"People who write it in Python call it machine learning, people who write it in PowerPoint call it AI."
- aftoprokrustes 3y agoWhat I find funny is how it seems what we called "AI" shifted from what we actually mean when we speak of a human as "intelligent" to what we definitely do not consider a part of intelligence. Take the robots from Boston Dynamics as an example. We do not consider a human intelligent because they can distinguish a cat from a chair, or walk without tripping or do a backflip. But we would consider them intelligent if they were able to make creative use of their physical ability, based on the data they have, to solve a problem. But when we marvel at the "AI" in things like robots, my understanding is that the "AI" is mostly in the perception (going from raw sensor data to a labelled model of the world) and the actuation (going from an instruction as "move one meter forward" or "do a backflip" to an actual sequence of action of the actuators). But the actual "intelligence" (the decision to open the door in order to go fetch the peanut butter and bread in the other room, and bring it back to complete the task "make me a peanut butter sandwich") is mostly classic if-then logic, or given by a human operator. I see a similar pattern with things like ChatGPT: one might be impressed by the capacity of some students to learn textbooks by heart and parrot them perfectly, but those are not the students we call "intelligent". An intelligent student is one who might have forgotten the proof of a theorem or the exact definition of some term, but is able to creatively come to a correct and creative solution when presented a new problem (to which "parrot students" tend to fail miserably).
- robofanatic 3y ago> An intelligent student is one who might have forgotten the proof of a theorem or the exact definition of some term, but is able to creatively come to a correct and creative solution when presented a new problem brain needs to be able to retain some basic information to build upon.
- __loam 3y agoAI researchers joke that AI is just whatever a computer can't do.
- Legend2440 3y agoA huge portion of your brain is dedicated to perception and motor control tasks; these are not easy problems! Intelligence is more than just reason. Just walking across the room to pick up an object requires significant brainpower.
- sleepybrett 3y ago... and in actual fact it's neither.
- gschoeni 3y agoI agree and like to think of it as machine inference vs machine learning: https://blog.oxen.ai/machine-inference-machine-learning/ https://blog.oxen.ai/machine-inference-machine-learning/
- malkosta 3y agoAm I the only one who prefers "non-linear function approximation by brute-force"?
- neverdot 3y agoI like it! I'm going to use that!
- mrjin 3y agoThere is no such a thing as Artificial Intelligence yet, period.