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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."

50 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. The answer's no, by the way by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Kindly do the needful and rephrase the headline as a question.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re: The answer's no, by the way by LifesABeach · · Score: 1

      Stop throwing rocks at it while it mows my front lawn.

  2. Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by sethstorm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by gweihir · · Score: 1

      There is no risk of that happening anytime soon. At this time, it is entirely unclear whether "thinking machines" are even possible in this universe.

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    2. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by sethstorm · · Score: 2

      The key takeaway is not whether we'll have thinking machines, but the consequences of unchecked automation.

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    3. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      At this time, it is entirely unclear whether "thinking machines" are even possible in this universe.

      Implying that human brains are not in fact "thinking machines"?

      I suppose I'll agree with that.

    4. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Go live with the fucking Amish if your so god dam worried about machines (like the fucking computer your on) making your life too easy. And while your at it. Why not throw a spanner into a automated loom.

    5. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      First of all, AI is nowhere near the level he seems to think. If "golden age" is referring to "the earliest age" then sure. If it's referring to the best, absolutely not.

      Second, stopping technology is never the answer. We just have to modify how we manage resources differently than we have in the past. "Redistribution of wealth" should not be seen as a bad thing when it's a mathematical certainty that wealth will automatically concentrate in the hands of a few people. There's literally no way around it. If there's only enough work for 20% of the population because we've done so well as a whole, that's fucking fantastic. But you don't just let the other 80% be poor and die, because then you're going to have the same problem that only 20% of that population needs to work...

    6. Re: Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by TheOuterLinux · · Score: 1

      Though I wouldn't mind riding a sand worm, I do think our technology is evolving faster than our ethics and it is causing a ton of problems most only see when living outside the grip of social Darwinism. I've always seen Facebook as a huge problem, but combine AI with quantum computing and we are all data cattle forced to go to outrageously priced colleges and plunge us all into more debt. Those with an IQ less than 115 won't be able to take full advantage of capitalistic gain unless they know someone.

    7. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by dunkelfalke · · Score: 1

      Which Herbert do you mean? Because Frank Herbert never clearly stated what happened with the thinking machines and in Brian Herbert's shitty books AIs go out of their way to be as sadistic as possible, which never made sense to me - it all sounded like a propaganda piece. Besides even there the actual cause for all that was a bunch of cyborgs who became enforcers for that particular AI, not the AI itself.

      --
      "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
    8. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by Xest · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "At this time, it is entirely unclear whether "thinking machines" are even possible in this universe."

      Um, what do you think we as humans are? magic?

    9. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by PingPongBoy · · Score: 1

      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.

      Progress is checked, just for you, mind.

      There's the quantum mechanical theory of uncertainty. One of the problems is being unable to tell exactly what is the momentum and position of a particle.

      Then there's the speed of light capping everything, like a salary cap in the NHL. Can't buy yourself Stanley.

      To top it off dark energy is making the universe expand. One day, we'll just be cold and alone. Isn't that something you want technologists to get working on posthaste?

      Without progress, we'd just be protoplasm running amok. But with progress rearing its ugly head, you want to draw a line. With Moore's law gasping for air, I'm not getting enough time to visit my pr0n, so clearly, there's not enough progress.

      --
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    10. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      I thought they all got kicked to shit when the Butlerian Jihad happened?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    11. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by johannesg · · Score: 1

      'Dune' did precisely nothing to show that. It asumed that bad things had happened already, that a war had been fought long ago, and that the outcome was a veto on AIs. When the story begins the status quo is that AIs are outlawed, but we are never shown why, or what would happen if they existed. The lack of AIs isn't even central to the plot; it is just a convenient excuse to combine starships with people who live in caves and fight with swords in one story.

      Maybe he should play Mass Effect instead. Although I'm still uncertain if the correct answer to "how do we stop AIs from wiping out organic life" should really be "have AIs wipe out organic life periodically"...

      Even better: have him watch The Terminator...

    12. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by Hartree · · Score: 1

      "I suppose I'll agree with that."

      It doesn't matter if you think that or not. It only matters what the AI running you as a simulation thinks.

    13. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      Negative, I am a meat popcicle

    14. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Well, yes. And what mechanisms society comes up with to keep itself going and to make sure enough wealth is shared to keep society stable. It will be an interesting next few decades. There are just too many people that can be replaced by automation job-wise for this to not be a huge change.

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    15. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Find an explanation for consciousness in Physics and then come back to me. And no, "it is an illusion" does not count, because that one is self-referent.

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    16. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by gweihir · · Score: 1

      No. All we have some interface-observations at the outside of a black box. There is a lot of quantum effects going on in the brain, and they would offer a fine interface for something else. Or not. We just do not know enough. From the constant failure to find even a theory how intelligence could be created to consciousness still being completely unexplained (there is no mechanism for it in present-day physics), an explanation of "the brain is a machine and that is all there is to a human being" is not scientifically credible at this time.

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    17. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by gweihir · · Score: 1

      And the earth is flat. Go look outside your window.

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      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    18. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by Xest · · Score: 1

      I think you're conflating separate issues, a definition of consciousness is quite different to where the universe physically supports it - the latter is obviously true, because we're conscious, and if we're conscious, then so could machines be because there's nothing magical about us, we just don't have sufficiently advanced technology to implement it yet.

    19. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by gweihir · · Score: 1

      And you probably have missed where your reasoning is assuming invalid ground-truth. Basically, you assume that because everything must be physical, so must be what thinks and is consciousness. And that is a scientific fail. Science makes no such claim. The only valid scientific claim is that there are interface observations of thinking and conscious entities in this universe, everything else is open.

      BTW, you assumption is called "physicalism" and it is a variant of religion, mostly because it assumes some "truths" as "obvious" without any scientific basis, just as religion does. "Everything is physical" without proof is really not any better than "there is a god" without proof.

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    20. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by Xest · · Score: 1

      Okay - I didn't realise you were a god botherer type who believes in the unprovable. Had I known that I'd have not wasted my time. Keep believing what you want to believe, it has no relevance to actual scientific discussion though and doesn't change the fact you're completely wrong.

    21. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by RespekMyAthorati · · Score: 1

      At this time, it is entirely unclear whether "something that is entirely undefined" is even possible in this universe.

      FTFY.
      And no, you have to define something (sans hand-waving generalities) before you can even consider whether it will ever exist.

    22. Re:Easy to say when it's not his job on the line. by RespekMyAthorati · · Score: 1

      Gweiher is a notorious "superstition is just as good as science" troll.

  3. hard by phantomfive · · Score: 2

    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."
    1. Re:hard by Cipheron · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Soft AI is still capable of building deathbots and the like, but it would lack conciousness. You can't reason with an anthill. Soft AI could well be more dangerous than hard AI.

    2. Re:hard by gweihir · · Score: 2

      Indeed. It seems tech reporters are severely lacking in real intelligence when it comes to reporting on AI.

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      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:hard by freeze128 · · Score: 2

      Thanks to machine learning and A.I., voice assistants can accurately convert your speech into text. Unfortunately, they still are dumber than dirt, and have trouble COMPREHENDING things that even a 2 year old could. It's not artificial intelligence, it's artificial stupidity.

    4. Re:hard by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Thanks to machine learning and A.I., voice assistants can accurately convert your speech into text. Unfortunately, they still are dumber than dirt, and have trouble COMPREHENDING things that even a 2 year old could. It's not artificial intelligence, it's artificial stupidity.

      But is that the fault of the machine or the people programming it? We barely got the faintest idea of how to extract what the brain does and put it in a computer, deciphering it is still cutting edge Nobel prize worthy research. But a two year old doesn't go to class or have it zapped into their brain, they learn. And when we hardly can explain how we do it, we certainly can't explain how we learned it or what enabled us to learn it. They say the brain is super powerful but with petaflops of CPU processing power surely we can simulate something. After all, humans do ~0 FLOPS compared to a computer.

      A lot of the most interesting research has been on not "programming" it in any traditional, instructional way. It simply has a ton of weights that we don't really understand, but then we don't understand them about ourselves. When I look at a cat, I know there's billions of neurons firing about it's size, shape, color, texture, features etc. and what angle I might been looking at and whether it's a live cat, a photo of a cat, a drawing of a cat, a statue of a cat or maybe even a stuffed cat. There's no way I could write a function "bool isCatInPhoto( const Photo &jpg )", so how can I teach a computer.

      The downside is that we don't really know what it's "thinking", we don't know what the reasons are for the choices it makes. That's okay for a Chess or Go board, an industrial robot in a safety cage or even a second opinion at the doctor's office, but not for say a self driving car. Much like actual people there's always the risk of incomprehensible failure, if that's not acceptable we need a more restrained form of programming.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:hard by RespekMyAthorati · · Score: 1

      You can't reason with an anthill.

      And that anthill will absolutely not stop until you are dead!

  4. Wrong Age by RumGunner · · Score: 1

    This might be the Stone Age, or at the most the Bronze Age, but we are nowhere near the Golden Age or the Renaissance.

    1. Re:Wrong Age by ArylAkamov · · Score: 1

      Wololo

  5. Uh, no.... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

    The golden age of AI was in the early 1980's when I read all about it Bytes Magazine.

    1. Re:Uh, no.... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      You poser! It was Byte Magazine.

      Bite me. :p

  6. More HYPE by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

    This is just more hype, ignore it.

  7. developing for Alexa by Zobeid · · Score: 1

    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.

  8. Re:AI hardware by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    No, GPUs were made for a very similar task: parallel iamge processing. It is similar in the same way that your visual cortex, used for input, is arranged in much the same way as a GPU is, for output. The potential for efficiency gains from using GPUs better has barely been scratched. Sure, some special purpose code like s-expression evalutation can be accelerated by ASIC, but it would be a serious mistake to assume that is all there is to AI.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  9. Re:Hey Alexa by LifesABeach · · Score: 1

    I'm very concerned right now; I find myself nodding to the comments of an A/C.

  10. There are 2 major reasons why this is different by CaptnCrud · · Score: 1

    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.

  11. Re:And if any of that were true... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

    I was impressed by Apple's phone system.

    I said a sentence, and it out me right to the correct place.

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  12. Re:No, sir. by jezwel · · Score: 1

    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.
    Replacing 100 low level people saves a fair chunk of the bottom line.
    Replacing a CEO earning 500x those low level people ,well now that's some real money!

    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?

  13. bollocks! by RotateLeftByte · · Score: 1

    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.
  14. Re:No, sir. by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1
    With the robots doing just about everything, most simply had nothing to do and so did nothing.

    Obviously, he missed the bit about the rise of Sexbots.

    --
    Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  15. Re:No, sir. by ixidor · · Score: 1

    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.

  16. Re: Enabling, until the patents come home to roost by batukhan · · Score: 1

    Or they put you in a position where you have no choice.. "Take our $10 million or we'll fight you forever"

  17. Re:No, sir. by shaitand · · Score: 1

    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.

  18. Re:No, sir. by shaitand · · Score: 1

    "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.

  19. Re:And if any of that were true... by gweihir · · Score: 1

    If it is possible at all. There has been zero progress in the direction of "strong" AI (the version that actually has intelligence in the sense of understanding) in the last 30 years or so and that unfortunately includes theory. The theory we have today just does not include anything that can generate intelligence and hence for that question "faster" does not make one bit of difference. Sure, automation is becoming useful in more areas due to speed and memory increases, but qualitatively it has not changed.

    For example, when I wen to university, there was an expectation that today the majority of mathematical proofs would be done by machines. That did not happen at all. What happened is that mathematicians how have systems they can explain the details of a proof to and the machine can (mechanically) verify that the steps are correct, fit together and deliver the expected result. Very useful, but the idea has to be supplied by actual intelligence, i.e. by a human being.

    That there has not been any progress on strong AI in the last few decades can mean two things though: a) It is actually impossible. This would mean we have a fundamental gap in understanding what intelligence is. That is a possibility, though in what direction actual explanations would go is unclear. Certainly some sort of "magic" would be required. And b), it is possible, but some fundamental idea is missing. In that case we could still end up at something like a), because if the idea needed is way to complex for humans, then we are not going to find it. Alternatively, in the next few 100 years, some smart person may have the right idea.

    Personally, I started out thinking strong AI is possible, but likely with the usual drawbacks, i.e. consciousness, personality, not smarter then humans and has to be motivated somehow. Over the years of following AI research, I have mostly moved my expectations to "likely not possible", because a lot of very smart people have not made any progress at all. Something seem to be missing in this picture and the explanation "human brains do it" does not cut it either, because on that front there was also no progress in finding out how intelligence is done. Sure, _automation_ in the brain is beginning to be understood, but that is not intelligence.

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  20. Amazon Lex is an A.I. on AWS by kriston · · Score: 1

    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