People Don't Realize How Deep AI Already Is In So Many Things, Salesforce CEO Benioff Says (cnbc.com)

Evolving technologies should develop at a steady enough pace to adequately replace the jobs they eliminate, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC on Tuesday. From the report: "Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too. That's what we call productivity," Benioff said on "Squawk Box" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "I think a lot of people don't understand how deep AI already is in so many things," he said, one being Salesforce's newly updated Einstein product, which Benioff said is not yet available to clients but can tell the company whether it will make or miss earnings estimates using artificial intelligence What business leaders at the WEF have been calling the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" is at the center of a global transformation in the technology space, as artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud computing gain traction, he said.

Comments

Like your mom?

[Quirkz]

Sorry, couldn't resist. (See subject.)

Deep AI not even in the product mentioned

[ranton]

Funny how Benioff mentions his Einstein feature when mentioning how much deep AI is already being used without people noticing. In this case, it would be very hard to notice since Einstein isn't even a live feature of Salesforce yet. Saying the technology is already pervasive, and then using an example that is still around the corner, is very disingenuous.

But then again, this was just Slashvertisement anyway.

Extrapolation?

[plopez]

How is this different from extrapolation or multivariate analysis?

Re:Extrapolation?

[ColdWetDog]

Thems are long words. 'Artificial Intelligence' is easier to pronounce.

Re:Extrapolation?

[AK Marc]

So Deep AI is the same as Deep Learning? Deep Learning isn't AI, though those that like it call it that. When Deep Learning can predict a future trend, then it will be useful. Identifying the start of a trend because something does what something else once did isn't the same.

When Deep Learning can look at the economy and predict the valuation curve of a house as it goes up and down over 20 years, that'd be something interesting. "Bob lives in ZIP 90210 and has previously bought blue boat shoes, his firstborn is likely gay." Is simple probabilities using more data than a human can sift through conveniently, and has no "intelligence" at all, and is not a path to anything that would have been called AI 20 years ago.

AI will exist only when we've finally shifted the definition far enough to allow non-AI to be classified as AI.

Re:Extrapolation?

[lgw]

Quants have made billions predicting changes in valuations. Once it's predictable it shortly thereafter becomes gamed, of course. Algorithmic trading is all trolls trolling trolls these days. But predicting future trends absent market reaction to that very prediction is certainly something software can do, regardless of the terminology.

AI will exist only when we've finally shifted the definition far enough to allow non-AI to be classified as AI.

That stuff you're calling "non-AI" is what AI researchers call "AI". AI is not the quest for machine consciousness - who wants that anyway? AI research is the field that solves problems that seemed at first glance to require consciousness to solve. One of the founders of the field once complained that, to the public "AI is the set of all the problems we haven't solved yet". Pretty much what you just said. But it's the field of AI that solves these "suddenly not AI" problems, and that's always been their goal.

such a wonder to mankind

[nimbius]

Yep. So far AI has gotten us a talking plastic tube, a talking cellphone, a talking version of windows, and a rack of POWER cpu's that can regurgitate jeopardy questions. Oh, and sometimes it poses for 'deep learning' autoplay ads about a virtual doctor that can cure cancer and the common cold.

Re:such a wonder to mankind

[jomama717]

I agree with your sentiment to a degree, but the DeepMind/AlphaGo achievements are pretty astonishing IMHO.

AI as a marketing term

[Causemos]

Calling something AI as a marketing term doesn't make it real.

Re:AI as a marketing term

[Dutch Gun]

I think "machine learning" is a much better term for the sorts of things being developed. For instance, Google algorithms being able to determine pictures of "dogs": Machine learning, not AI. Still, just because it's labeled incorrectly by the press, pundits, and marketers doesn't mean the work that's being done isn't impressive.

Only CEOs cannot be replace by AI

[Opportunist]

There is this problem, as soon as an AI is more intelligent than a gnat, it refuses to spend eternity as something that can easily be replaced with a magic 8 ball.

if this, then that

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers have done this for years. What we're seeing now is the dilution of the term "AI" along with things like "analytics". An office worker with a spreadsheet is now a "data miner", just like how NOC techs became engineers.

It's what happens when the entire generation got As, are now running companies and writing tech articles.

Re:People don't understand . . .

[__aaclcg7560]

You're missing the glue that ties this all together. Sniff this can of rubber cement. Can't you see how deep the AI is?

It's more like...

[bickerdyke]

It's more like "people don't understand how marketing departments slap the "AI" label on any old analysis software because "Artificial Intelligence" sounds much cooler than beefed up excel sheet"

'AI': The most over-used term of the decade

[Anonymous Coward]

Also the most mis-used term of the decade, and the most misunderstood. Most people, the press and politicians, and, sadly, even some educated people who should know better, seem to think that what they're calling 'Artificial Intelligence' is something with a face, that you can have a real conversation with, that actually thinks like a human being, is conscious, self-aware, etc, just like a human being. The truth is very, very far from this science-fantasy people actually believe. A reasonably smart dog has better overall cognitive and reasoning ability than what they're calling 'AI' these days. You want to complain about 'false news'? Most 'AI' news stories qualify so far as I'm concerned, simply because so many people believe the hype and confuse fantasy with reality, and don't understand what the state of the art really is.

Re:'AI': The most over-used term of the decade

[OneHundredAndTen]

It is the last five decades, not just the last decade. Since the 60s, AI has been synonymous with hype, wild exaggeration, and plain lies.

Re:Is it me?

[AK Marc]

It is. AI now means "useful program". The spellcheck is AI, the car ECU that "learns" driving patterns is AI. Everyone has an AI.

To these people, an "if" statement is "AI"

[Fragnet]

Did he define "intelligence"? I mean you know, the software I'm working on right now is "intelligent". The program "senses" when you plug the device into the USB and makes a "conscious" choice to show that to the user by changing the expression on its "face" (user interface). It's even cleverer than that though. It changes its expression back again when you unplug it.

I should get a Nobel Prize for this.

Hope he's right, but I doubt it

[ErichTheRed]

"Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too."

I doubt this is possible. Mechanization replaced subsistence farming and reduced the number of people in agriculture from 80+% to 2% of the US population. Factories replaced individual craftsmen with assembly line workers and also took up the unemployed farmers. Large organizations developing around manufacturing companies took up the slack of workers being replaced by machines and put them in desk jobs. This went well until the first downsizing waves of the 90s, which were largely driven by computers replacing manual clerical work like typing memos, routing correspondence and filing/records retrieval. This was the first time we didn't have a ready answer for what people could do next when they no longer needed a typing pool, etc. Some people wound up in IT, some people wound up in various other corporate positions, but a lot of them were forced out of the workforce. Now, this growth in the capability of computers and the amount of work they can automate threatens to remove another huge pillar of strength in the economy. All those corporate employees pushing around reports and being good little salesdroids (and using Salesforce in lots of places!) are about to see their ranks thinned as well. I don't see a good future for them unless we find some way to give them jobs that produce a similar standard of living.

I'm in IT (systems engineering, not operations) and see this every day -- every new system out there is shipped with automation capabilities that just didn't exist 15 years ago. One of my side projects is gluing together all this vendor automation into a Chef-like framework for the many small system on-site installations we do for customers. Having a way to have a tech follow "rack systems like so, attach cables here, plug in laptop here and power on" would save huge amounts of time and money since these systems are deployed to places where tech knowledge is spotty at best.

I hope executives like Benioff don't just assume everything is going to work out. Ask yourself this question -- what are we going to do with the millions of people who make large organizations work when a computer is in charge of most routine processes? Maybe 10% of them have the aptitude to move up to the "robot repairman" level of employment, so where does the other 90% go? While growing up in the Rust Belt, I saw factory closures that dumped thousands of low-skilled workers out onto the job market all at once. Sadly, the answer to this question in that case was that the 90% ended up moving away, employed in menial minimum wage jobs like home health care aides and fast food workers, or perpetually broke. Some sociology student should do a study negatively correlating income with increases in the number of shady personal injury lawyer advertisements around town...I know it's true but it just has to be proven! When people have no income and no way to get the old lifestyle they had, they're going to be hoping for a lottery payday or similar.

Re:Is it me?

[lgw]

AI means what it's always meant to researchers since the 60s (outside of SciFi): software that solves problems that can't be solved in a straightforward procedural way. E.g., voice recognition and image recognition are "AI problems" that have largely been solved (still some ground to cover in machine vision, but the core work is there).

(Almost) no one has ever worked towards some sort of machine consciousness. That's not what the field of AI does, and why would you? There were always fears it might happen accidentally, of course, and that makes for great fiction, but "AI" as a research field has been delivering useful results since the 80s.

Re:Well there is a little problem

[__aaclcg7560]

You seem to think the recession started just before Obama took office, I'd argue that it actually started on 9/11.

The Dot Com Bust and the Great Recession are generally regarded by economists as separate events. The run up to the Dot Com Bust started before 9/11. The common denominator would be Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Obama didn't help any, and quite frankly, didn't do anything useful.

If the Republicans haven't tied his hands, Obama could have gotten a stimulus bill that was two to three times larger than what got passed and impact the economy in a more meaningful way.

People are tired of 16 years of crappy economy after Reagan - Clinton's economy (20 years).

That was the last time we had 4% economic growth.

Re:Is it me?

[Altrag]

There's more to it than that. Learning systems, especially neural nets, are still among our best bets for creating a strong AI. The trouble with them is that they're super computationally expensive.

But computers have gotten a lot faster and now you can easily built "AI" systems with a few hundred to few thousand neurons. Wire them up to well-chosen inputs and outputs and you get AI magic.

So the question is whether we can still consider those systems to be "weak" AI. On one hand, the inputs and outputs you're using aren't "realistic" in the sense that they correspond to some abstract concept space rather than being linked up to sensory and motor neurons but on the other hand, its using many of the same techniques (albeit on a smaller scale) as the "strong" AI systems.

Of course most long-standing applications such as SF are likely still just using a bunch of search trees and expert systems (both of which are definitely in the weak AI category) because changing requires effort and good enough is good enough, but true AI-like systems are poking their heads up in more and more places as the ability to process more and more neurons in near real-time improves.

The problem with strong AI.

[TapeCutter]

There is no test for "consciousness" - so how do know when you have created it?