Artificial Intelligence and the New Normal: Over Promising and Under Delivering

June 15, 2018

IBM has the world’s fastest computer. That’s intriguing. Now Watson can output more “answers” in less time. Pity the poor user who has to figure out what’s right and what’s no so right. Progress.

Perhaps a wave of reason is about to hit the AI field. Blogger Filip Piekniewski forecasts, “AI Winter is Well on its Way.” While the neural-networking approach behind deep learning has been promising, it may fall short of the hype some companies have broadcast. Piekniewski writes:

“Many bets were made in 2014, 2015 and 2016 when still new boundaries were pushed, such as the Alpha Go etc. Companies such as Tesla were announcing through the mouths of their CEO’s that fully self-driving car was very close, to the point that Tesla even started selling that option to customers [to be enabled by future software update]. We have now mid 2018 and things have changed. Not on the surface yet, NIPS conference is still oversold, the corporate PR still has AI all over its press releases, Elon Musk still keeps promising self driving cars and Google CEO keeps repeating Andrew Ng’s slogan that AI is bigger than electricity. But this narrative begins to crack. And as I predicted in my older post, the place where the cracks are most visible is autonomous driving – an actual application of the technology in the real world.”

This post documents a certain waning of interest in deep learning, and notes an apparently unforeseen limit to its scale. Most concerning so far, of course, are the accidents that have involved self-driving cars; Piekniewski examines that problem from a technical perspective, so see the article for those details. Whether the AI field will experience a “collapse,” as this post foresees, or we will simply adapt to more realistic expectations, we cannot predict.

Cynthia Murrell, June 15, 2018

Comments

2 Responses to “Artificial Intelligence and the New Normal: Over Promising and Under Delivering”

  1. Miguel Groene on June 18th, 2018 3:43 am

    Don’t wear seat belts lest you drown in your own urine?

  2. ürgüp escort on August 14th, 2018 8:23 am

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