The difference between the current AI renaissance and the past pre-winter AI ecosystems is the level of economic gain realized by the technology.

The late 80s-early 90s AI winter, for example, resulted from the limitations of expert systems which were useful but only in niche markets and their development and maintenance costs were quite high relative to alternatives.

The current AI systems do something that alternatives, like Mechanical Turks, can only accomplish with much greater costs and may not even have the scale necessary for global massive services like Google Photos or Youtube autocaptioning.

The spread of computing infrastructure and connectivity into the hands of billions of global population is a key contributing factor.

I would argue this is well discounted by level of investment made against the future. I don't think the winter depends on the amount that somebody makes today on AI, rather on how much people are expecting to make in the future. If these don't match, there will be a winter. My take is that there is a huge bet against the future. And if DL ends up bringing just as much profit as it does today, interest will die very, very quickly.

This is analogous to the way electricity took decades to realize productivity gains in the broad economy.

That said, the hype will dial down. I am just not sure the investment will decrease soon.

So I guess we're waiting for something similar to happen with AI and then get AI 2.0?

The current road infrastructure (markings, signs) has been designed for humans. Once it has been modernized to better aid the self-driving systems, we don't probably need "perfect" AI.

AI is overhyped and overfunded at the moment, which is not unusual for a hot technology (synthetic biology; dotcoms). Those things go in cycles, but the down cycles are seldom all out winters. During the slowdowns best technologies still get funding (less lavish, but enough to work on) and one-hit wonders die, both of which is good in the long run. My friends working in biology are doing mostly fine even though there are no longer "this is the century of synthetic biology" posters at every airport and in every toilet.

Those are actual features that are available today to anyone, that were made possible by AI. Do you think it would be possible to type "pictures of me at the beach with my dog" without AI in such as short time frame? Or to have cars that drive themselves without a driver? These are concrete benefits of machine learning, I don't understand how that's biased.

If there are 100 facts that indicate a coming AI winter, and Brin just talks up the 15 facts that indicate AI's unalloyed dominance, that's definitely biased.

Second, I'm not quite sure that's how it works. Like in mathematics, if your lemma is X, you can give a 100 examples of X being true, but I only need a single counter-example to break it.

In my opinion a single valid modern use-case of AI is enough to show that we're not in an AI winter. By definition an AI winter means that nothing substantial is coming out of AI for a long period of time, yet Brin listed that Google alone has had a dozen in the past few years.

You cannot ask a generic question, then attack the answer based on absence of evidence for a specific example.

>translate over 100 languages in Google Translate;

>caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube;

barely even work. Yeah, it's a difficult problem but it's not even close to being solved.

Google's captioning works well when people speak clearly and in English. Google translate works well when you translate well written straightforward text into English. It's impressive but it's got a long way to go to reach human grade transcription and translation.

I think when evaluating these things people underestimate how long the tail of these problems is. It's always those pesky diminishing returns. I think it's true for many AI problems today, for instance it looks like current self-driving car tech manages to handle, say, 95% of situations just fine. Thing is, in order to be actually usable you want something that critical to reach something like 99.999% success rate and bridging these last few percent might prove very difficult, maybe even impossible with current tech.

Every time I activate it I am in for a good laugh more than anything actually useful.

    Have now, ah! Philosophy,
    Law and medicine,
    And unfortunately also theology
    Thoroughly studied, with great effort.
    Here I am, I poor gate!
    And I'm as smart as before

It's unable to 'understand' that 'I poor gate' makes no sense at all.

Google Translate is the 'poor gate'.

You may think that you can now read German news, but in fact you would not know if the sentence meaning has been preserved in the English translation. The words itself might look as if the sentence makes sense - but the meaning is actually shifted - slight differences, but also possibly the complete opposite.

The translation also does not give you any indication where this might be and where the translation is based on weak training material or where there is some inference needed for a successful translation.

Maybe true but they are words that are about things which are either true or not true. Has nothing to do where the words were shared. Saying they are on an investment letter so not relevant seems very short sighted.

But just looking at the last 12 months it is folly to say we are moving to a AI winter. Things are just flying.

Look at self driving cars without safety drivers or look at something like Google Duplex but there are so many other examples.

Using the list provided, one example

"caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube;" - This doesn't say how accurate the captions acutally are. In my experience youtube captioning even of english dialect isn't exactly great. For one example try turning on the captions on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o

so it's true I'm sure to say they've captioned the videos AI based techniques, but that doesn't mean they're a perfected option.

Also (purely anecodtally) Google translate also isn't exactly perfect yet either...