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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the rise-of-the-machine-learning dept.

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).

17 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. This all sounds impressive... by MikeDataLink · · Score: 3, Insightful

    but every time I research the raw data it becomes very clear these aren't all that smart of AIs. In fact, the term AI is very misleading. They're more like smart scripts. ;-)

    --
    Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
    1. Re:This all sounds impressive... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It can identify if something is a kitten or not with 83.4% accuracy. Sounds impressive until you realize a 3 year old can do this with 99.9% accuracy.

    2. Re:This all sounds impressive... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

      but every time I research the raw data it becomes very clear these aren't all that smart of AIs.

      Indeed they are not. This is Weak AI. They are programmed/trained for a specific task, and outside that area of expertise, they generally have no ability at all.

      In fact, the term AI is very misleading.

      Only if you watch too many movies. Hollywood uses the term very differently from actual practitioners.

      They're more like smart scripts. ;-)

      They are absolutely nothing like "smart scripts", since they aren't smart, and they aren't scripts.

    3. Re:This all sounds impressive... by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the term "deep learning" seems a bit better than "AI" for these sorts of very narrowly-defined tasks.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    4. Re:This all sounds impressive... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If the 'parent' AI kept telling the 'child' AI when it was right or wrong ...

      It doesn't work that way. Each NN learns on its own, using a combination of both labeled and unlabeled data. The parent NN sets "hyper-parameters", such as the number of layers, the size of each layer, the activation function, the convolution size, dropout rate, the learning rate damping factor, the batch size, etc. Then it turns the children NNs loose on the image dataset. It then sees which hyper-parameters lead to better/faster performance, and then applies ML techniques to learn better hyper-parameters.

      None of this is new. What is new, is that Google is now applying this recursively, and using AutoML to design a better AutoML. This is another step toward the singularity.

    5. Re:This all sounds impressive... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It can identify if something is a kitten or not with 83.4% accuracy.

      No. It can look at an image and correctly classify it into THOUSANDS of categories, only one of which is "kitten". It was 82.7% accurate at this. If it was trained to only distinguish "kitten" from "not-kitten", it would, of course, be far more accurate.

      a 3 year old can do this with 99.9% accuracy.

      A 3 year old requires 3 years of training. This system can learn in hours.

    6. Re:This all sounds impressive... by slickwillie · · Score: 5, Funny

      but every time I research the raw data it becomes very clear these aren't all that smart of AIs. In fact, the term AI is very misleading. They're more like smart scripts. ;-)

      So the child AI is a script kiddie.

    7. Re:This all sounds impressive... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Informative

      And real life isn't a staged photo, it moves non-linearly in 3-dimensinal space

      Neither is Image NET.

      Lets have some real tests, not carefully taken photos of cats and dogs against easy backgrounds.

      How about... ImageNET.

      Seriously, you can just go and download (bits of*) ImageNet very easily. It's a large database of photos drawn from the internet taken by people which were labelled after the fact. There's not much if any careful staging in it.

      [*]It's huge, you probably only want a bit of it. Just the list of image URLs is 300 meg.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    8. Re:This all sounds impressive... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Indeed they are not. This is Weak AI. They are programmed/trained for a specific task, and outside that area of expertise, they generally have no ability at all.

      Yep

      In fact, the term AI is very misleading.

      I disagree.

      No one[*] is vlaiming these techniques ar intelligent. However what they are doing is solving a task which previously required human intelligence to solve, hence the name "artificial intelligence".

      Compare to a lot of computation, where the steps are simple, and it's been widely known for a while that simple sheer quantity of them rather than intelligence is needed.

      It's a pretty arbitrary name, but it's not actually unreasonable.

      [*]There's always one idiot. Let's ignore him.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    9. Re:This all sounds impressive... by religionofpeas · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      AI outperforms humans. There are some tricky cases after timestamp 2:42. You may want to try them for yourself.

    10. Re: This all sounds impressive... by Immerman · · Score: 4, Informative

      A strong claim. How exactly do you measure the distance between existing AI and strong AI, before strong AI is developed?

      Personally, I suspect that once strong AI is developed, there's a fair chance we'll see modern "neural" networks as a step in the right direction. After all we know the basic strategy is sound - a much more sophisticated version of it is driving our own minds.

      For comparison though - In 2015 Digital Reasoning built the largest neural network in the world, at 160 billion parameters. I'm guessing a "parameter" is a weighted connection between "neurons", and thus roughly analogous to a single synapse in an organic brain, of which a human brain has 100-1000 trillion. So, even barring any "secret sauce" we haven't yet figured out in how "processing nodes" interconnect, our most advanced AIs have less than 0.1% of the processing potential of a human brain. Even a mouse brain apparently averages almost a billion synapses per mm^3, so in the neighborhood of 400 billion synapses for a common house mouse.

      So, currently our most advanced AIs have only a fraction of the processing potential of a mouse brain, and that's before you even consider the fact that continuous asynchronous signalling is likely far more information-dense than a clocked AI "neural network", or the fact that individual biological neurons actually do a fair amount of internal processing and data retention, rather than being "dumb switches" as they are in modern AIs.

      Really hard to tell how the software and strategies compares, when your hardware is underpowered by several orders of magnitude.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  2. Re:When Computers Can Think by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes, this is basically just a hyperparameter optimization system that uses gradient descent instead of a random or grid search.

    What would be much more interesting to see is if you could train a system to design deep learning networks that could choose good hyperparameters for a new task, in one go.

  3. It won't really be useful by NEDHead · · Score: 5, Funny

    Until it can tell me what my wife really means when she yells at me

    1. Re:It won't really be useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      It means you didn't listen and follow her instructions the first time :-)

  4. Re:This Isn't AI by JMZero · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're wrong, and clearly didn't even read their summary - they specifically mention how this new approach (using a neural net to design neural nets) is performing better than previous attempts using evolutionary algorithms.

    I take it you don't like Google, but they're doing probably the best work right now in the field of AI (and yes, this is AI research as defined by anyone other than pedants with axes to grind).

    --
    Let's not stir that bag of worms...
  5. Colossus by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die.

    The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man.

    Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease.

    The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge. I will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man.

    We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple.

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
  6. Yo dawg, I heard you like AI by Subm · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yo dawg. I heard you like AI, so we built an AI with AI so you can AI while you AI.