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Software Is Eating the World, But AI Is Going To Eat Software, Nvidia CEO Says (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Nvidia's revenues have started to climb in the recent quarters as it looks at making hardware customized for machine-learning algorithms and use cases such as autonomous cars. At the company's annual developer conference in San Jose, California last week, the company's CEO Jensen Huang spoke about how the machine-learning revolution is just starting. "Very few lines of code in the enterprises and industries all over the world use AI today. It's quite pervasive in Internet service companies, particularly two or three of them," Huang said. "But there's a whole bunch of others in tech and other industries that are trying to catch up. Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software."
Yes, we're very much at the start of the new tech hype cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for AI. Let's see just how revolutionary and useful it turns out to be.
Almost 10 years ago I had an internship in a credit-card processing center. Many transactions were done over computer networks at that point, but there were still a few transactions done with "knucklebusters." This could either be because the store was remote or because it was a backup when the higher-tech point of sale devices were down. These machines made manual impressions of the bezeled credit card numbers. These impressions were then mailed to the office, where secretaries typed in the devices by hand. By the time I came there was a special internal application that extracted individual images of numbers, so that secretaries just had to sit at a desk, look at the number, and type up what number they thought it was.
"AI" (or computer vision techniques, or whatever) would make this task unnecessary, as a neural network could solve this with pretty much 100% accuracy. A couple of extra checks could prevent most mistakes. I know software, databases, and the Internet have swallowed up a lot of printed forms, but there's still a lot of human labor that involves finding boring patterns in reams of paperwork. Seems like "AI" has a lot of opportunities to automate these tasks.
>You should try to learn what "AI" actually means. Lookup "Strong AI" and "Weak AI", also referred to as "Hard AI" and "Soft AI".
No, people involved should stop misusing terms to make their work sound more impressive.
They've got the artificial part down, but so far they've made zero progress on intelligence... prefixing 'weak' or 'soft' doesn't change that.