Reply to post: Re: at Last

Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

Badbot1999

Re: at Last

As an actual AI researcher who has actually met Adrian Thompson, albeit many years ago... I kinda agree with some of the sentiment of the article: the hype is out of control. But ML research *has* qualitatively improved since the 80s in ways that shouldn't be dismissed. The Bayesian years from mid 90s to 2006 ish radically improved the robustness of robotics. The deep learning era since 2006 has radically enhanced sensing and perception abilities leading to a host of ubiquitous applications. It's not just faster; we now understand the mathematical properties of stochastic gradient descent and why convolutional networks reduce the number of parameters to learn (and why this helps). We understand how gradients need to flow to enable deeper networks to train efficiently. New architectures such as generative adversarial networks are more robust. Deepmind in particular are genuinely pushing the envelope of ML agent based systems with architectures inspired by neuroscience. Yes, their capabilities are exaggerated and extrapolated, but it's unreasonable to claim that no progress is happening.

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