Google's AI Built an AI that Outperforms Any Made By Humans (sciencealert.com)

schwit1 quotes ScienceAlert: In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that's capable of generating its own AIs. More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a 'child' that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts... For this particular child AI, which the researchers called NASNet, the task was recognising objects -- people, cars, traffic lights, handbags, backpacks, etc. -- in a video in real-time. AutoML would evaluate NASNet's performance and use that information to improve its child AI, repeating the process thousands of times.

When tested on the ImageNet image classification and COCO object detection data sets NASNet was 82.7 percent accurate at predicting images on ImageNet's validation set. This is 1.2 percent better than any previously published results, and the system is also 4 percent more efficient, with a 43.1 percent mean Average Precision (mAP).

Comments

Re:This all sounds impressive...

[HiThere]

Saying they aren't smart depends on your definition of smart.

And the GP criticizing them as scripts caused me to wonder how much of what he does could be considered scripted.

Most discussion of AI that isn't extremely technical is so full of fuzzy terms that it's almost meaningless. What you can say is what it does:
This thing learns to do object recognition to a reasonable quality rather more quickly than prior ones did...and it was written by a program designed to write other programs. I suspect that it can't do anything else, but that, alone, is impressive.

FWIW, I don't believe that "general intelligence" exists. I believe that what we think of as intelligence is composed of lots and lots of narrow AIs, some of which specialize in routing problems to the appropriate "program", etc. And from any intelligence I'm rather certain that GÃdel's Incompleteness theorem implies that there are classes of problems that it cannot solve. This isn't a direct implication, as no system is going to have an infinite amount of storage, whatever meaning of infinite you choose to use, but I believe it's an indirect implication. Certainly everyone I've ever met has a limited ability to handle nested recursive problems.

Simple example (Many people can solve this, but it displays the problem):
You see a man standing beside a picture and he says to you:
"Brothers and sisters have I none, but that man's father is my father's son".

Re:This all sounds impressive...

[ShanghaiBill]

The thing to remember is that weak AI has absolutely no understanding or concept of what it is doing.

That is a meaningless assertion. It depends entirely on how you define "understanding" and "concept". The chemicals and neurons that make up the human brain also don't "understand" what they are doing.

It just sums up details and gets a number.

That is also what biological neurons do.

but it is not intelligent.

Define "intelligent". Is a human intelligent? What about a monkey? A dog? An insect?

Hence it is better called by its traditional name "automation".

"Automation" is used to describe assembly lines, not systems that can learn and adapt.

Re:This all sounds impressive...

[gweihir]

You seem to be lacking actual intelligence as well. Well, more likely you have it but are not using it. A common failure in humans. Nobody knows how or whether human brains create intelligence. The closer we look, the less likely that seems though. All we have is an interface observation. No, not even fMRI gives us more. And yes, that is the scientific state-of-the-art. What you say is belief (and a stupid one), not science.

Incidentally, "automation" is exactly the right term. These systems cannot "learn" or "adapt" in the way these terms are commonly understood.