Re:Most companies developing AI capabilities have yet to gai...
by ashtonkem on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @03:12PM
(#24841252)
1) It’s entirely probable that self driving cars are over hyped, and that it’ll be decades before we hit level IV or V self driving cars. Lane keeping is nice, but it’s hardly revolutionary.
2) Audio and image identification is indeed an area where great strides have been made, and if those are relevant to your business, then you’re in great luck, and you should absolutely leverage that. But this goes back toward my “it should be aimed at a specific use case” statement; image identification is much much more narrow than how AI is being hyped.
3) Personally I’m less than impressed with the progress that voice assistants have made; they present great, but they have utterly failed to make a dent in my day to day living. It seems like end users regularly oscillate between “this is amazing”, “this is stupid”, and “this is incredibly creepy”. In my opinion this area saw a great big leap forward about 5-6 years ago and progress has basically stopped.
If you read back about older AI bubbles, what you’ll find is that there are bits and pieces left over from those bubbles that are unquestionably improvements on what came before. But critically these improvements fell well short of the grandiose promises made by AI boosters at the time. It’s entirely probable that this AI boom will follow a similar pattern; a massive cycle of hype and collapse that leaves behind useful techniques and tools that nonetheless fall well short of what was promised during the cycle.
As far as what is and is not considered to be “AI”; that definition has changed readily over the years. Ground breaking techniques are regularly called “AI” until they stop being called that and get new names. We’re already seeing this process work now with ML.
2) Audio and image identification is indeed an area where great strides have been made, and if those are relevant to your business, then you’re in great luck, and you should absolutely leverage that. But this goes back toward my “it should be aimed at a specific use case” statement; image identification is much much more narrow than how AI is being hyped.
3) Personally I’m less than impressed with the progress that voice assistants have made; they present great, but they have utterly failed to make a dent in my day to day living. It seems like end users regularly oscillate between “this is amazing”, “this is stupid”, and “this is incredibly creepy”. In my opinion this area saw a great big leap forward about 5-6 years ago and progress has basically stopped.
If you read back about older AI bubbles, what you’ll find is that there are bits and pieces left over from those bubbles that are unquestionably improvements on what came before. But critically these improvements fell well short of the grandiose promises made by AI boosters at the time. It’s entirely probable that this AI boom will follow a similar pattern; a massive cycle of hype and collapse that leaves behind useful techniques and tools that nonetheless fall well short of what was promised during the cycle.
As far as what is and is not considered to be “AI”; that definition has changed readily over the years. Ground breaking techniques are regularly called “AI” until they stop being called that and get new names. We’re already seeing this process work now with ML.