Comment by digitalzombie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by digitalzombie | Hacker News Reader

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> Funding for this basic science isn't going away.

What make this 3rd/4th boom in AI different?

The other AI winter, the funding for these science went from well funded to little funding.

I'm skeptical, with respect of course, on your statement because it doesn't have anything to back that up other than it produce useful technologies. Wouldn't this statement imply that the other previous AI which experience AI Winter (expert system, and whatever else) didn't produce useful enough technologies to have funding?

I'm currently on the camp of there is going to be an AI Winter III coming.

> None_ of them have promised wild general intelligence any time soon.

The post talk about Andrew Ng wild expectation on other things such as radiologist tweet. While it's not wild general intelligence. What I think the main article and also I am thinking is the outrageous speculation. Another one is the tesla self driving, it doesn't seem to be there yet and perhaps we're hitting the point of over promise like we did in the past and then AI winter happen because we've found the limit.

The previous AI winters were funded by speculative investments (both public research and industry) with the expectation that this might result in profitable technologies. And this didn't happen - yes, "the other previous AI which experience AI Winter (expert system, and whatever else) didn't produce useful enough technologies to have funding", the technologies developed didn't work sufficiently well to have widespread adoption in the industry; there were some use cases but the conclusion was "useful in theory but not in practice".

The current difference is that the technologies are actually useful right now. It's not about promised or expected technologies of tomorrow, but about what we have already researched, about known capabilities that need implementation, adoption, and lots of development work to apply it in lots and lots of particular use cases. If the core research hits a dead end tomorrow and stops producing any meaningful progress for the next 10 or 20 years, the obvious applications of neural-networks-as-we're-teaching-them-in-2018 work sufficiently well and are useful enough to deploy them in all kinds of industrial applications, and the demand is sufficient to employ every current ML practitioner and student even in absence of basic research funding, so a slump is not plausible.

I've recently had a number of calls from recruiters about new startups in the UK in the AI space, some of them local and some of them extensions of US companies. Some of them were clearly less speculative (tracking shipping and footfall for hedge funds) while others were certainly more speculative sounding. The increase of the latter gives me the impression that there is a bit of speculation going on at the moment.

A lot of this is because there is a somewhat mis-informed (which we will be polite and not call 'gullible') class of investors out there, primarily in the VC world, that thinks that most AI is magic pixie dust and so 'we will use AI/DL' and 'we will do it on the blockchain' has become the most recent version of 'we will do it on the web' in terms of helping get funding. Most of these ventures will flame out in 6-12 months and the consequences of this are going to be the source of the upcoming AI winter OP was talking about.

Strangely enough he didn’t speak at all about waymo self driving cars that are already hauling passengers without a safety driver. Given that he needs to hide the facts that go against his narrative I don’t really think that what he is convinced of will become reality.

In a very confined area. He mentions similar issues with Tesla's coast-to-coast autopilot ride: The software is not general enough yet to handle it. That seems to be the case for Waymo as well.

And how is this a failure of AI? The most optimistic opinions on where we would see autonomous car were on the 2020s. Instead we have autonomous car hauling people on the streets without any safety driver since 2017. And if everything goes accordingly their plan they will launch a commercial service by the end of the year in several US cities. To me it seems a resounding success, not a failure.

> The most optimistic opinions on where we would see autonomous car were on the 2020s.

Sure, keep moving timelines. It's what makes you money in the area. I am sure when around mid-2019 hits, it will suddenly be "most experts agree that the first feasible self-driving cars will arrive circa 2025".

You guys are hilarious.

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