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I'm happy somebody tries to put some sense into the whole absurdly overblown machine learning field.

by jng 11y ago

chillingeffect 11y ago
From the outside, there appear to be significant advances; it's just they seem to come in clusters, rather than linearly. The news has turned into science fiction! It would seem CNNs were a significant step up, but the author hints at inferring structure as the next tack to take.
chillingeffect 11y ago
From the outside, there appear to be significant advances; it's just they seem to come in clusters, rather than linearly. The news has turned into science fiction! It would seem CNNs were a significant step up, but the author hints at inferring structure as the next tack to take.
ghaff 11y ago
I'm not sure it's absurdly overblown but individual advances/findings can be way overhyped or at least over-generalized. ML/AI has been incrementally delivering pretty impressive results within certain constraints. That's great but there's then a widespread tendency to extrapolate those results to the broader case--and then absurd/stupid-looking results happen. We certainly see the same thing with autonomous vehicles. Given very accurate mapping and a particular set of environmental and type-of-road conditions, cars can do so well that it's tempting to say they're 95% of the way to fully-autonomous. But dump them in a Boston snowstorm and you see they're really not even close. (Which isn't to say that bounded use cases can't be very useful.)
- leereeves 11y ago
  Overhype has always been the enemy of AI/ML, leading to unrealistic expectations, then disappointment, then distrust. But it might be different this time...
discardorama 11y ago
I wouldn't call it overblown. It has been applied very successfully in a few places; for example, voice recognition. Right now we're at the stage of the "seven blind men and the elephant". Over time, our eyes will open and things will start making sense.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Voice recognition has gotten a lot better. I'm almost impressed by my Amazon Echo. That said, for an arbitrary recording of say a conference presentation, you need to either use a human transcriber or expect to spend a LOT of time cleaning things up. (A lot probably has to do with switching to more data-based approaches.)
deelowe 11y ago
It's not overblown anymore than "cloud computing" is overblown. Misreported, maybe, but there is a huge shift happening in the industry right now. If not, why else would this exist http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-supercomputing-solutions.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-supercomputing-solutions....?

I'm happy somebody tries to put some sense into the whole absurdly overblown machine learning field.

by jng 11y ago

I'm happy somebody tries to put some sense into the whole absurdly overblown machine learning field.

From the outside, there appear to be significant advances; it's just they seem to come in clusters, rather than linearly. The news has turned into science fiction! It would seem CNNs were a significant step up, but the author hints at inferring structure as the next tack to take.

chillingeffect 11y ago

ghaff 11y ago

I'm not sure it's absurdly overblown but individual advances/findings can be way overhyped or at least over-generalized. ML/AI has been incrementally delivering pretty impressive results within certain constraints. That's great but there's then a widespread tendency to extrapolate those results to the broader case--and then absurd/stupid-looking results happen. We certainly see the same thing with autonomous vehicles. Given very accurate mapping and a particular set of environmental and type-of-road conditions, cars can do so well that it's tempting to say they're 95% of the way to fully-autonomous. But dump them in a Boston snowstorm and you see they're really not even close. (Which isn't to say that bounded use cases can't be very useful.)

leereeves 11y ago
Overhype has always been the enemy of AI/ML, leading to unrealistic expectations, then disappointment, then distrust. But it might be different this time...

discardorama 11y ago

I wouldn't call it overblown. It has been applied very successfully in a few places; for example, voice recognition. Right now we're at the stage of the "seven blind men and the elephant". Over time, our eyes will open and things will start making sense.

ghaff 11y ago
Voice recognition has gotten a lot better. I'm almost impressed by my Amazon Echo. That said, for an arbitrary recording of say a conference presentation, you need to either use a human transcriber or expect to spend a LOT of time cleaning things up. (A lot probably has to do with switching to more data-based approaches.)

deelowe 11y ago

It's not overblown anymore than "cloud computing" is overblown. Misreported, maybe, but there is a huge shift happening in the industry right now. If not, why else would this exist http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-supercomputing-solutions.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-supercomputing-solutions....?