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AI Is in a 'Golden Age' and Solving Problems That Were Once Sci-fi, Amazon CEO Says (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Artificial intelligence (AI) development has seen an "amazing renaissance" and is beginning to solve problems that were once seen as science fiction, according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Machine learning, machine vision, and natural language processing are all strands of AI that are being developed by technology giants such as Amazon, Alphabet's Google, and Facebook for various uses. These AI developments were praised by the Amazon founder. "It is a renaissance, it is a golden age," Bezos told an audience at the Internet Association's annual gala last week. "We are now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades. And natural language understanding, machine vision problems, it really is an amazing renaissance." Bezos called AI an "enabling layer" that will "improve every business."
Can give me an example of complete bullshit from a CEO?
Kindly do the needful and rephrase the headline as a question.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm still waiting for patent reform in the technology space so that inventions don't strangle on the vine as patent trolls and dominant monopolistic companies trample the small innovators underfoot.
Until then, AI will mostly benefit those who can strong-arm everybody else, whether through legal fees or patent fees.
World peace, global warming, my marriage issues .... AI will suddenly solve it all.
Why didn't AI solve it al much earlier?
In order to really take off, AI needs hardware improvements. Right now, most of it runs on GPUs, and requires lots of them. GPUs weren't really made for that task and there is potential for efficiency gains. Things like the Google TPU are delivering much better performance per watt, but sadly right now Google keeps the TPU to themselves, not giving them away. Sort of reminds me of that bitcoin ASIC manufacturing company which ran the ASICS they have ordered for their customers themselves for a while before shipping them to the customer...
In the long term though I'm certain that some hardware manufacturer other than Google will step up and create such a chip. Its a bit sad though that most AI tasks are done in the cloud, making costs for the hardware astronomic. Its not certain whether there will be a "Personal AI" version of that hardware, like there is a "Personal Computer" variant of computers. Until that happens, we are locked in to cloud providers, and that's pretty bad for privacy, freedom, and independence of the individual.
For the most of us, AI is trouble ahead that needs to be stopped and slowed down.
Perhaps Mr. Bezos should read a bit of Herbert's Dune to know what happens when you let technological progress go unchecked. The end result is worse than what it would be if humanity were included.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Once again, someone is talking about soft AI, and the reporter interprets it as hard AI, and mass confusion results. Expect follow-up stories about how AI will take over the world.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This might be the Stone Age, or at the most the Bronze Age, but we are nowhere near the Golden Age or the Renaissance.
The golden age of AI was in the early 1980's when I read all about it Bytes Magazine.
... it would actually be exciting. Unfortunately, it is complete and unmitigated bullshit. There still is zero understanding in machines and the only form of "AI" we have is weak AI, i.e. the "AI" that actually has no intelligence and can only fake it in very limited circumstances. Properly, this is called "automation" and anybody thinking of a mechanical process is right on the mark.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... the AI from the future showed up, to team up with Golden Age AI.
This is just more hype, ignore it.
His assertions stand in stark contrast to what I've heard about developing for Alexa. As I understand, it performs the speech-to-text translation for you, but when it comes to parsing the text and interpreting what it means, you're on your own.
Was he used his Prime account to watch an episode of Star Trek and was too embarrassed to confess he couldn't tell it was a fictional tv show. Such bullshit. Executing instructions is not 'thinking'. A voice interface for search is not an 'assistant'. Technology will never have what we understand as 'consciousness'. There aren't enough 'sarcasm' quotes in the language to drive the point home effectively.
Modern computers are cool, they aren't *that* cool. Bezos is a bozÃs (not really a Spanish word, but apparently everyone just gets to make shit up and claim it as fact without being challenged in the 21st century).
than the same claims of the 70's and 80's....you're only as good as the data you provide and the second was that OOP models to do deep learning basically plateaued always no matter how much compute power you threw at it.
The more current models for deep learning seems to scale much better, but also the sheer amount of data collection (not to mention data storage/cost) is why you are seeing people so jazzed about this.
Here is the rub though...you still need the "right kind" of data to correctly train todays deep learning models. One of the biggest mistakes I have seen people make is they train with the wrong type of data. For instance if you want to do facial recognition, so you just grab 10k random faces from snapchat...well, what if your real life image capture is much lower quality? How about race demographics? Your training your model on data that isn't indicative of real life situations, and this is why lots of startup AI fails.
A different model of an Artificial Intelligence centred society might be Asimov's Spacer worlds. Hundreds of robots to each human and, of course, the robots are a high level AI. Some are considered conscious. The people on the Spacer Worlds suffered from one problem. With the robots doing just about everything, most simply had nothing to do and so did nothing.
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
People keep referring to data mining and algorithms as artificial [human] intelligence. It ain't. We we are nowhere near that point.
An awful lot of people out there have *accepted naturalism by presumption and are expecting every observed phenomenon to [theoretically] have an exhaustive material explanation and implicitly, a corresponding abstract model. Intelligence (as we experience it) remains without even a meaningful and objective definition (despite thousands of years of inquiry from many interests and professions) and thus is a great mystery which threatens that naturalistic presumption (though a solution may greatly strengthen it, so long as it does not beg a much deeper problem). The algorithms which are commonly called AI, particularly when explained very poorly and hyped up, are taken by many as promising to provide the missing explanation (and it's a huge and undeniable hole in naturalism, as it leaves the naturalist unable to explain himself within a strictly material world).
(*) It is not just the acceptance of naturalism, but also a defiance of God, a desire to be sovereign, and a refusal to be judged. Where this not so, people would deal much more honestly with the mystery and not constantly try to call it intelligence. Perhaps the algorithms would still be hyped, particularly by those who have something to sell.
Scientific advancement should not be stopped or slowed down because it might put a bunch of low-level functionaries out of a job.
Our economic model needs to adapt to the new technological landscape, and leave the Luddites behind.
I would like to see AI involved in running businesses. ,well now that's some real money!
Replacing 100 low level people saves a fair chunk of the bottom line.
Replacing a CEO earning 500x those low level people
Imagine if AI replaced some of your congress critters, how are the corporates going to buy one of those off - offer some green electricity? Licence maintenance paid for another year?
And yet another example of shit unimaginative and ungrouded sci fi writing. There are plenty of people right now who can do nothing if they wished. Yet that is not what they do.
AI has been in a "golden age" every 15 years or so for the last 60. Soon enough people will become disappointed again, lose interest and the next AI winter begins. Getting an AI enthusiast to acknowledge the winter is like getting a wall street trader to acknowledge a bubble or as Upton Sinclair said, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends upon his not understanding it."
What is being lauded as A.I. is not the sort of A.I. described in most S.F. books and Bezos knows it. He has a product to sell so that's why he's embiggening A.I.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Obviously, he missed the bit about the rise of Sexbots.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Office Space :
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? What would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter Gibbons: I would relax... I would sit on my ass all day... I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit.
People like you are the reason the bots are going to take over and recycle all humans for their base elements.
I think you mean high-level functionaries. It makes very little sense to put low paid people out of the job when you can put high paid ones out of the job.
"Replacing a CEO earning 500x those low level people ,well now that's some real money! "
Considering what these C officers actually do in most organizations I'd think LISA could replace them successfully.
They can still be programmers.
We need a new programming language which automatically implements the three laws. With the ability to add more, and to bypass the 3 laws in code, but they must be in by default; that way we don't have unexpected results in most cases.
In another posting, people were complaining how hard it is to write skills for the Amazon Echo by trying to write the skill so it can catch every possible phrase spoken. They concluded, "this is not A.I." Well, technically, A.I. is a massively complex decision tree, so, yes, it is A.I.
On that note, Amazon Lex is one of the services that you should be looking for if you want to know more about A.I. on AWS to create artificial conversations without writing every possible phrase.
Kriston