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."

Comments

Hype cycle

[matbury6017]

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.

Re:Hype cycle

[Jawnn]

Yes, we're very much at the start of the new tech hype cycle

Keep in mind that most tech hype is actually correct, even if premature. People laughed in the 1980s when hypers predicted that home computers would be popular, and in the workplace there would be a computer on every desk. But that is what happened. Likewise, people rolled their eyes in the 1990s at the notion that online shopping would be popular, and many people predicted that smartphones and social media were passing fads.

Well, no. I didn't reject the notion of PCs, or ecommerce. I do reject the notion of "AI" becoming a thing in my lifetime. First of all, what's being hyped as AI is not AI, as AI has been defined. At most, we're talking about "machine learning", not the same thing at all.

Hand-typing Forms

[WDot]

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.

Re:Hand-typing Forms

[rockmuelle]

Handwriting, speech recognition, and image processing along with their machine learning foundations do not impress the older /. crowd because they are not new technologies.

Dragon has been doing speech recognition better than Siri for almost 20 years. Simple command-based systems that only recognize a few words have been around longer than that.

Handwriting recognition for constrained tasks is also not new. The US Postal Services has had zip-code OCR systems since the 1980s.

Feature detection in images is not new, either. The only thing that's really changed there is we have the processing power to do it at scale.

Going beyond the applications, all the modern "AI" systems are simply classifiers on steroids. Processing power and great storage capacity allows us work on larger data sets, but in the end, we're just creating complex hyper-planes to bin data in one bucket or another.

Machine learning algorithms are great tools and it's great that we have the compute resources to really leverage them, but there's nothing really new that wasn't obvious 30 years ago. The only question was when we'd have the compute power to start doing the cool things we knew they could be used for.

(ok, I'll give a little credit to the deep learning researchers for bringing neural nets back into vogue, since those were written off 30 years ago during the AI winter, but they're still just classifiers from the mathematical perspective).

-Chris

Re:Hand-typing Forms

[rockmuelle]

And I should reply directly the the parent: statistically stringing together text is also not new. We just have better collections to start training algorithms with.

Re: Hand-typing Forms

[Gilgaron]

Why do you false dichotomy guys always show up in these threads? Of course pattern recognition is AI, and of course it is just an advanced program. Are a lot of programmers dualists instead of physicalists? Your brain went through the same brute force feedback loop when it was wiring itself before you were conscious enough to recognize it. It is also far better than anything we'll be able to make artificially in a variety of ways, but it isn't qualitatively different.

Re:Hand-typing Forms

[Dog-Cow]

Siri uses the Dragon engine for speech to text. It's literally impossible for Dragon to be doing it better.

Re:That's right

[Opportunist]

Yeah, right. I said "make me a ham sandwich" and now I have mustard in my eye and you don't even WANT to know where it put the mayo.

commentsubjectsaredumb

[Falos]

Is anyone going to post the XKCD? Alright, guess I'll grab it, here.

https://xkcd.com/1838/

AI should eat tech pundits

[Rick Schumann]

I'm far from convinced that so-called 'AI' (LOL) is going to 'eat' anything (other than perhaps two-digit IQ venture capitalists' money), but if it's going to eat anything, I'd like to see it eat the jobs of tech pundits who have no bloody idea what they're talking about (and/or are talking out of their asses, just to get the aforementioned VCs' monies flowing in their direction); I think even the half-assed 'deep learning algorithms' (again, LOL) would do a better job than these fools who are continually running off at the mouth.

Re:Not all software...

[Kjella]

Indeed, most software is governed by business rules and being able to explain exactly what the system will do and why is essential. If say budgets over $100k need board approval, the someone has to program exactly that and nothing else. AI is great when the outcome is more important than the reasons behind it, like does this patient have cancer? If it can consult a huge database of cases and make millions of statistical weights we don't really care how it arrives at 83% as long as roughly 83 out of 100 patients end up actually having cancer. Then it's usually back to business rules for further examination/treatment though. More AI = more software work, not less.

Re:I can't wait until the AI hype cycle dies

[Baron_Yam]

>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.

Ooh, Well I Predict

[Greyfox]

Magic is going to eat both of them. What the hell, right? They're all the same to a CEO. I'm sure AI is the silver bullet that will end all software, but magic is the silver bullet that is going to end AI! Because magic! You still have to tell an AI what you want, and a lot of those guys can barely form a coherent thought, much less put it down on paper. They're too busy synergizing their paradigms! Well magic solves that problem! You don't even have to know what you want! You just wave your magic wand and magic will make you crap daisies and unicorns! And isn't that really what they want?