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Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by alkonaut on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @03:39AM (#23536811)
Many of us have been there. I think what struck me was how low the treshold really is for what's accepted as "AI" in most industries.

Do this:

1. make something that has some "modern" AI such as deep learning in it, but that doesn't do anything much useful (because that's almost impossible in most cases). E.g. predict something trivial based on a time series, and repoort it. We all know how hard this is, so just take some hello world ML project and change some inputs.

2. Find some easy project that actually makes business sense, and that isn't yet done, and can be done with simple logic or some old school "traditional" ML or constraint solving e.g. a scheduling/optimization problem.

3. Make sure these efforts are "merged" so that the fancy AI tech AND the measurable good outcome is the same project. The "AI" moonshot of the company.

4. You can now say you are doing "AI", you have measurable success.

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by hjnilsson on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @05:41AM (#23537333)
It cracks me up that on the new LG TVs (I have a C9), it has “AI preview”. Which means: when I hover the Netflix icon in the dashboard it presents a list of the most recently played shows.

I think the “Open Recent” menu debuted in 1980s? But now it is AI!

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by hartator on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @05:50AM (#23537363)
I thought AI in C9 tvs was about improving upscaling quality?
Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by hjnilsson on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @08:38AM (#23538406)
That too is “AI”. But there is a setting to turn off “AI previews”, that is just pulling some content from services into the dashboard.
Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by hartator on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @09:20AM (#23538814)
Yes that sounds unnecessary confusing.
Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by s3b on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @11:24AM (#23540227)
Maybe the confusion is deliberate.
Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by close04 on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:17PM (#23540915)
To the average person AI makes everything sound more modern, "smarter". So it gets sprinkled in everything. Things that have been using the same logical algorithm since the dawn of computing are now called AI. The worst is hearing people in the field calling every piece of automation and single purpose code that does one thing the same way every time as "AI".

Everyone does it just to attach their old or boring tech to the fancy new trend and have some "cool" rub off on them.

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by aloisdg on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @04:26AM (#23536992)
A "friend" of mine is doing exactly that in its disruptive startup. Their AI part is a joke and handle a part that nobody really care about, but hey they are doing it like every other cool kids.
Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by hejja on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @05:48AM (#23537355)
genuine question here: why is using deep learning to do something useful impossible?

I can think of a bunch of potential use cases for gpt 3 alone.

or do you mean its impossible to build useful models from scratch because all the "easy" problems are solved?

this also seems like a limited mind set.

context: I'm a ML noob

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by huffmsa on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @07:03AM (#23537716)
It's not impossible. But there is a very real gap between "this is cool in a research paper" and "this is deep learning that works in real life".

It's a large gap, covering everything from application topics, to data quality, to the need to actually run the damn think in a production setting with scalability, availability, error handling, etc.

Production applications of deep learning aren't particularly glamorous, they're not the "next big thing" right now. Rather they're improvements of existing applications.

Google's on device live captioning works really well, but still somewhat niche, and requires special / higher end SoC's to run.

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by hejja on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @07:12AM (#23537768)
makes sense. thanks.

models I have used seem to have their usefulness greatly outweighed by performance demands.

scaling and economics are another question entirely.

Perhaps we were spoiled with democratized web tech and it's wishful thinking to want everything to be that.

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by huffmsa on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @07:24AM (#23537850)
It will get there eventually. A lot of it is hardware / deployment constrained.

Search by image and object detection and computer vision in general is cool and potentially useful, but right now, it's cumbersome as fuck to pull out your phone, find the Lens application, take a picture etc. Needs to be baked into a wearable / neuralink type setup.

But self driving applications of CV work because the cameras are always deployed and running. But the hardware is expensive.

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by laichzeit0 on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @06:33AM (#23537564)
> why is using deep learning to do something useful impossible?

This is completely false. Here are some examples: Google translate. It's infinitely useful. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me when I want to quickly check whether my translation into my second language is okay, or I'm not sure I got the meaning right of some translation.

Second example: My home security cameras now uses object classification and only alerts me when there's movement in "high risk zones" and it's human. So many stupid false positives of shadows and stray cats completely gone. I'm pretty sure I can fine-tune it with examples of myself and my family and it will ignore them when it's reasonably confident it's them, but I couldn't be bothered.

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by alkonaut on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @07:00AM (#23537700)
Yes. Google Translate is obviously a useful product, and obviously Google will have thousands of areas where they can apply AI (enough that they'd even write frameworks for it). But 99(.99)% of us work in mundane jobs doing boring CRUD apps. My post was meant in this context.

You work in a company making an intranet product for the paper tissue industry. Your manager wants v3.0 to have some AI in it. No one remembers the fiasco when "Cloud" was added in v2.0

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by hejja on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @07:08AM (#23537745)
so what you're saying is...

you either swallow the CRUD app red pill, or you live long enough to become the "AI a la carte" manager

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by heavenlyblue on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @11:58AM (#23540693)
Google Translate was good before the so-called "AI revolution".
Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by simonw on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @02:17PM (#23542294)
Google Translate today is absolutely spectacular.

A fun game used to be "translate this phrase English to French, then translate it back again and laugh at how meaningless it's made by the round-trip". That doesn't work any more.

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by jtjbdhsjjdnd on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:59PM (#23541371)
As far as I remember it was close to unusable. Even most basic translation to languages besides German, Spanish and French was a nightmare. That was at lest true during my second year at the university (~2010-2011).
Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by rrrrrrrrrrrryan on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @03:07PM (#23542845)
From what I've read, the early translations were really rough (but on par with competing free products), until they fired all their linguists and brought in AI guys.
Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by thu2111 on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @01:06PM (#23553820)
Not exactly. Google Translate was always a statistical approach from day one. That was the reason it was better than the rules engines that dominated before that. The Translate guys really pioneered statistical machine translation.

However it was all done with hand-crafted statistical functions and code. The new stuff using deep learning is the first time it'd have been referred to as "AI".

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by fat-chunk on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @06:53AM (#23537665)
Most of the "useful" tasks AI has helped us with are problems that are domain specific and lend themselves well to machine learning (for example object detection in images and machine translation as another poster mentioned).

However, what I think the poster meant was that just tacking on AI for the sake of it to a problem which most likely doesn't have an applicable use for it (which currently is the case for most existing IT projects or apps) is doomed for failure.