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Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

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giardini·

"The AI Winter Is Coming" (February 23, 2017)

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-skans...

so I don't expect deep learning to save us.

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> And Sandro Skansi says

No one knows who that is.

Namedropping in an authoritative tone about a random person, seems kind of odd.

Doubt it. I've seen a couple instances of experienced devs spooling up some interesting and objectively valuable machine learning systems, going from a lunchroom chat to production code in a very short amount of time. If there is a winter, it will be the result of AI becoming an off-the-shelf commodity; on the other hand, it should be easier to justify investments in research, given the demonstrated value of ML today.

The AI winter of the 80s was caused by over-hype, hardware companies whose markets were too small and whose products quickly fell behind the Moore's Law curve, and funding cuts by the US government.

How are you measuring the "objectively valuable" systems? How much money are we talking?

> If you want a popular AI topic which does require a lot of inference, think of a general-purpose chatbot.

General-purpose chatbot, almost equal to solve AGI. If that is how you define winter...where is summer!?

We're mining a rich vein of techniques that have been opened up by the deep learning revolution. There doesn't seem to be any near-term end in sight, and the pace of improvement is incredible. It's hard just to keep up with the best result in, say, computer vision or NLP.

This is nothing like the 80's where techniques foundered on non-toy problems.

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