The Secret AI Ingredient no one suspects

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46055595
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369384

So what you're telling me is that AI is just smoke and mirrors and it's actually powered by outsourced labor in third world countries instead of super 1337 code?

>>2
obviously

AI's plausibility to those who are not computer worshiping cargo cultists has always been a discussion about its use as a tertiary cognitive layer

>>2
Modern "AI" is neural networks. They require seed data to train their models. That seed data is usually manually selected("Supervised learning"), "unsupervised learning" works in discrete games like Go where goals and winning are certain.
In car driving, there are no discrete metrics and everything can end up in a crash. Thats why it needs humans to prepare training data, on which the AI will find statistical patterns that will serve as driving guidelines.

Select all squares with Stop signs

what if after all the billions spent on these neural networks, they fail to produce reproducible discrete results? the cars will run over people no matter how much training data they are fed. even the top mathematicians have no idea why neural networks work. it's a giant voodoo black box of nonlinearity. the fundamentals of neural networks have not changed since the 80s; all that changed is GPUs got better. AI is far from solved. I think we're already in the second AI winter.

>>6
Ironically the key researchers in the(neural networks) field tend to hold the same position, its oversold as magic AI that solves everything, ignoring that at its core there is only brute-force pattern recognition built on top of matrix math and huge datasets.
Its hyperspecialized(ignoring transfer learning) and really compute intensive.
People are switching to simpler methods all the time, NNs are exceptionally hardware dependent(Nvidia is making a killing on high end GPUs for this) and slow.

>>7
It's not ironic at all really. Using biology in the neologisms made for AI, hell, even saying AI at all has created an endless cascade of misunderstandings. The devil's bargain made by researchers to secure funding and swindle main street (and the governments of every developed nation) has resulted in mass hallucinations and furthered the absurd folk mythology of computer magic. ALL THIS, because of improper naming...

>>8
AI has been sold to the public for years now so it's too late for researchers and developers to admit they have no chance of creating it. Whatever bullshit they can do will now have to be presented as AI. Even if its just automated robots flipping burgers at Burger King.

>>9
Robots that move mechanically (scripted movements that are basically like function calls) are not the same as robots with AI. Some robots, like the kind being developed by Boston Dynamics, can react to their surroundings, or adjust their legs when they slip and are about to fall. Most industrial robots can do only one thing, and they do it well, but they are completely useless outside of that particular situation. A burger-flipping robot would have code for how to flip a burger exactly, doing it the same way every time, but it wouldn't be able to compensate for aberrances.

History repeats itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk