1,960 posts tagged “ai”
"AI is whatever hasn't been done yet"—Larry Tesler
2018
Without deep understanding of the basic tools needed to build and train new algorithms, he says, researchers creating AIs resort to hearsay, like medieval alchemists. "People gravitate around cargo-cult practices," relying on "folklore and magic spells," adds François Chollet, a computer scientist at Google in Mountain View, California.
Reinforcement Learning with Prediction-Based Rewards (via) Fascinating result: by teaching a reinforcement learning agent that plays video games to optimize for "unfamiliar states" - states where it cannot predict what will happen next - the agent does a much better job of playing some games.
... for the first time exceeds average human performance on Montezuma’s Revenge. RND achieves state-of-the-art performance, periodically finds all 24 rooms and solves the first level without using demonstrations or having access to the underlying state of the game.
Relational databases are a commodity now, but they power a much larger fraction of the world’s economy that AI ever will. And no company has a “relational database strategy”.
Text to Image (via) Ridiculously entertaining demo by Cris Valenzuela that feeds any text you type to a neural network that then attempts to generate an image for your text.
Half of the time when companies say they need "AI" what they really need is a SELECT clause with GROUP BY.
The synthetic voice of synthetic intelligence should sound synthetic. Successful spoofing of any kind destroys trust. When trust is gone, what remains becomes vicious fast.
Text Embedding Models Contain Bias. Here’s Why That Matters (via) Excellent discussion from the Google AI team of the enormous challenge of building machine learning models without accidentally encoding harmful bias in a way that cannot be easily detected.
Suppose a runaway success novel/tv/film franchise has "Bob" as the evil bad guy. Reams of fanfictions are written with "Bob" doing horrible things. People endlessly talk about how bad "Bob" is on twitter. Even the New York times writes about Bob latest depredations, when he plays off current events.
Your name is Bob. Suddenly all the AIs in the world associate your name with evil, death, killing, lying, stealing, fraud, and incest. AIs silently, slightly ding your essays, loan applications, uber driver applications, and everything you write online. And no one believes it's really happening. Or the powers that be think it's just a little accidental damage because the AI overall is still, overall doing a great job of sentiment analysis and fraud detection.
2010
Originally, however, speech recognition was going to lead to artificial intelligence. Computing pioneer Alan Turing suggested in 1950 that we “provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.” Over half a century later, artificial intelligence has become prerequisite to understanding speech. We have neither the chicken nor the egg.
2006
Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle. 100 lines of Python illustrating some key concepts in AI.