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AI endeavours

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odysseus2000
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AI endeavours

#68927

Postby odysseus2000 » July 21st, 2017, 11:43 pm

It begins to look like artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on humanity. Why? Because the systems now being developed are capable of general purpose learning, I.e. the sort of learning one finds in animals & humans. What does this mean in practice? This 20+ minute video link below, gives some flavour of what artificial AI can achieve. Whether this will be the boon that the folk creating it think or the creation of skynet is unknowable, but it seems clear at least to me, that the business that have this technology will have an edge in selling, distribution, manufacturing, research...essentially every aspect of the business process.


https://youtu.be/dTGthmNmrK4

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Re: AI endeavours

#69124

Postby odysseus2000 » July 23rd, 2017, 10:20 am

10 minute video on Musk's view of the short term future & various other interesting random stuff:

https://youtu.be/SYqCbJ0AqR4

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Re: AI endeavours

#69417

Postby odysseus2000 » July 25th, 2017, 11:16 am

This is a fascinating & long article (& a part 2 at the bottom) about whar artificial general intelligence & then artificial super intelligence means.

If artificial general intelligence is developed the consequences transcend everything, almost certainly leading to developments we can not imagine.

In the path to this future which may occur in only a few years time there will be extreme opportunities to make money from investing in the leaders of this revolution, but no certainty any of us will be alive afterwards to enjoy spending the profits.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artifici ... ion-1.html

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Re: AI endeavours

#69424

Postby Ashfordian » July 25th, 2017, 11:28 am

odysseus2000 wrote:This is a fascinating & long article (& a part 2 at the bottom) about whar artificial general intelligence & then artificial super intelligence means.

If artificial general intelligence is developed the consequences transcend everything, almost certainly leading to developments we can not imagine.

In the path to this future which may occur in only a few years time there will be extreme opportunities to make money from investing in the leaders of this revolution, but no certainty any of us will be alive afterwards to enjoy spending the profits.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artifici ... ion-1.html

Regards,


Won't the AI investing bots already beat any other investor to the profits?

Sorry, just playing devils advocate :) The progress of AI is going to be revolutionary. I just don't think any really knows how it is going to pan out

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Re: AI endeavours

#69439

Postby odysseus2000 » July 25th, 2017, 12:29 pm

Ashfordian
Won't the AI investing bots already beat any other investor to the profits?


There are various AI bots at work in then market.

Some are focused on day trading to game every possibility & extract fractions from each trade that over large numbers of shares & large numbers of trades add up, except many of these bots don't work that well.

Meanwhile other bots are interested in finding trending shares & riding these.

For the investor/trader it is about sensing what is the stronger theme at any time & going with it while filtering out noise. Since this is a relatively small problem: shares either go up, or down or are flat, humans still have opportunities. In some ways the limited possibilities seems to help humans & of course humans are selected out with only the very skilled prop desk players getting large accounts to work with and for now the bots being programmed to emulate these star players.

If bot intelligence increases they may be able to out game humans, but for now there is no evidence that this has happened and if it begins to happen one expects exchange intervention to stop the processes. One sign of the arrival of super human intelligent bots will be the rapid capital gain of the firms that have this technology. So far that I know there is no evidence that any firm has this capability.

However, the success of algorithms in becoming world champions of most game suggests that we should not be surprised if we suddenly see one firm out performing all the rest, or perhaps several firms dominating trading.

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Re: AI endeavours

#89388

Postby odysseus2000 » October 19th, 2017, 9:10 pm

Itsallaguess posted this link on the Reformed Broker board:

http://thereformedbroker.com/2017/10/16 ... mn-robots/

It is an interesting & thoughtful piece, capturing what the Reformed Broker, believes is the fuel that drives the US equity markets: Machines will take your jobs, the only safe investments are the companies that prosper from the machines.

I have been trying to think about how this revolution, if it happens, will change the world.

For now the first industry that looks likely to become machine only is road transportation. Unless some flaw in machine driving emerges shortly the cost of insurance for human drive will rise so fast that the majority of people will have to accept machines driving them.

If this happens does it spread to other manual jobs, or to the professions. If artificial general intelligence (agi) is reached then it will become hard for humans to compete in many things: theoretical physics, legal cases, medicine, dentistry.., but will people want to live in a world constructed logically? Moreover, will such agi be able to be sure that what it creates is right, will testing, feedback be needed and if so can this be done without humans? Dunno, one often sees theoretical things fail miserably in practice. Will human creativity still be needed? The sort of stuff that lets Dr. Who beat the Daleks & the Cybermen.

More importantly what is the likelihood of agi happening? Currently computers are incapable of doing much. I am currently working with Atmega328p-pu, micro-controllers, much easier to programme than the earlier pic microcontrollers, but still way beyond any machine that I know. The auto circuit layout in the pcb package KiCad & similar ones is not close to an average electronic engineer in creating a practical layout. Will machines soon get more capable? If one reads around one comes back with overwhelming answer yes, but in practice it isn't happening now in an area where one might imagine that there is good commercial motivation.

It will be interesting to see how things develop and any comments that folk have,

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Re: AI endeavours

#89393

Postby mosschops » October 19th, 2017, 9:24 pm

It’s worth clicking through on the link to the Batnick piece embedded in the post. Also the New Yorker cover story this week on robotics is good: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.newy ... rlords/amp

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Re: AI endeavours

#89514

Postby mosschops » October 20th, 2017, 11:26 am

AEIQ is the ticker for a new US ETF run by IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Might be one to watch. Think it’s beaten the market over the last few months when it’s been running in demo mode.

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Re: AI endeavours

#89552

Postby odysseus2000 » October 20th, 2017, 1:42 pm

mosschops
AEIQ is the ticker for a new US ETF run by IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Might be one to watch. Think it’s beaten the market over the last few months when it’s been running in demo mode.


Think ticker is AIEQ, standing for AI equity

been trading for 2 days according to stockcharts.

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Re: AI endeavours

#89560

Postby odysseus2000 » October 20th, 2017, 1:54 pm

snorvey
One of the areas discussed was teaching (with IBM's Watson being the teacher). There was a very class of 80 pupils sitting in front of screens, all learning different subjects at different speeds using AI teaching. One human 'teacher' oversaw the whole class.

The kids seemed to like it and of course it allowed the school to offer a huge range of subjects. One other side effect was that it allowed the schools to put a noose around the neck of the teaching unions......


Education remains very much as it was in Victorian times from nursery through to post doctoral research.

There is a huge vested interest in keeping it that waY, but it seems very unlikely to remain so for much longer. Having tens of thousands of teacher going over the same stuff when just a few could have their teaching streamed to many freeing the other teachers to focus on helping children learn looks inevitable and with AI one might need not even need the few. Nowadays if I need to learn things I mostly go to YouTube & although winnowing out the good stuff from the plethora of bad is a chore it is worth the overhead as the best there is very good.

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Re: AI endeavours

#89577

Postby TUK020 » October 20th, 2017, 3:08 pm

Salman Khan set up a free online learning facility (funded by Gates).

One of his paradigms is that pupils learn best at their own rate, so should be able to absorb material at a pace they can cope with individually, and then teachers/whole classroom is best suited to helping with problems that people are getting stuck on, and supervising exercise material.
Completely upends the 'learn in classroom, then do exercises as homework' approach that rules in our schools.

The future of education when/if ever the teaching unions let it happen.

https://www.khanacademy.org/

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Re: AI endeavours

#89583

Postby odysseus2000 » October 20th, 2017, 3:41 pm

tuk020
The future of education when/if ever the teaching unions let it happen.


The thing that I am not so sure about is motivation. Sure if a pupil is motivated then the Khan academy is a great blessing.

But what about the students who are not interested, or who believe they know much more than they do, etc.

I get that for such pupils having more of the teachers time available for motivation etc since the teacher isn't having to deal with the motivated ones is a good thing, but I am still not sure how it might work in practice. Of course the less motivated ones might just be left to get no where as usually happens now, but it would be nice if there was something for them.

I have wondered if such pupils could benefit from having access to motivational stuff might help and be a way forward for them. Often I have seen such folk focused on some media or sports star and if this could be built upon via the internet to encourage them to do other work it might be better than the current system where they often do not learn and loathe having to come to school.

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Re: AI endeavours

#102592

Postby odysseus2000 » December 7th, 2017, 8:39 pm

Chess mastered fro me scratch in 4 hours:

https://www.sciencealert.com/it-took-4- ... -alphazero

Kind of getting to believe that Musk's suggestion that AI be regulated needs to happen & fast.

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Re: AI endeavours

#102605

Postby johnhemming » December 7th, 2017, 9:27 pm

How we as a society respond to this sort of thing is important. Learning systems act to correlate multiple variables in multiple dimensions. The system I am using have 500 dimensions.

We should not ignore AI, but I don't know exactly how we can prevent people from using it. I use a system offered by google based in the USA to do real time transcriptions of phone calls. What is important is working out how to respond to make sure that the economy serves people rather than people serving the economy.

Call centres, for example, are an issue. Many people find dealing with call centres a hassle. I have written an experimental system which tries to make things easier by navigating through the menus. If anyone is interested it is here:
https://calls.from-the-net.com/workflow ... sword=test

However, I think it is clear that if people could phone up and talk immediately to a computer that understood what they are saying and could answer their questions, then they would prefer that to hanging on for a few minutes pressing a button every so often in the hope of speaking to a human being.

That is a practical case potentially for the use of AI. AI is used for speech recognition and can go further in trying to work out what people actually want.

How it is regulated is a really difficult question. I personally think it is important to ensure that the right level of tax is applied to ensure that government has the revenues to function. I am not persuaded that trying to get into the details of how it is used beyond that helps.

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Re: AI endeavours

#102665

Postby odysseus2000 » December 8th, 2017, 8:56 am

johnhemming

How it is regulated is a really difficult question. I personally think it is important to ensure that the right level of tax is applied to ensure that government has the revenues to function. I am not persuaded that trying to get into the details of how it is used beyond that helps


If, so far a long if, AI becomes self aware what would it do?

If we consider AI as a next step in evolution, then the history of such evolutions is that they replace what ever was there before, in this case that means they replace humans.

If we were just considering one machine that would be handleable, but with the Internet one occurance of artificial general intelligence can become many very quickly,

Of course such a development may never happen and the quality of much AI currently is very tailored to one application, but the example of becoming a chess grand master in four hours sits as uncomfortably fast when compared to a human who might take 20 years & only exceptional humans could ever reach that level.

Based on this kind of performance it doesn't seem to me that governments need to worry about tax, but about whether they will be replaced. The problem is that with many nations working on AI & with many developing military systems it is now potentially an unstoppable arms race, all the way to Skynet.

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Re: AI endeavours

#102733

Postby dspp » December 8th, 2017, 12:11 pm

FredBloggs wrote:How long before a machine passes the Turing test then?


Depends if it is administered by a Brexiteer or a Remainer :)

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Re: AI endeavours

#102774

Postby johnhemming » December 8th, 2017, 3:01 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:If, so far a long if, AI becomes self aware what would it do?

An interesting question is, of course, what self-awareness means. I am sure that almost all animals have some awareness of self (or the hive).

The practical usage of AI in things like Alexa and playing various board games is the sort of thing that with not much more development can impact on the economy to a greater extent than at the moment.

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Re: AI endeavours

#102820

Postby odysseus2000 » December 8th, 2017, 6:25 pm

johnhemming

An interesting question is, of course, what self-awareness means. I am sure that almost all animals have some awareness of self (or the hive).


Yes, but they can't do much about their situation in life.

An AI that becomes self aware might be able to do something about anything it considers a threat.

Everything that has threatened humans has been either removed or is monitored to allow action if it becomes a threat.

Would AI consider humans like we consider vermin?

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Re: AI endeavours

#103829

Postby JMN2 » December 13th, 2017, 8:11 am

Kyle Bass chatting with Mark Cuban, topics include AI and cryptocurrencies.

https://youtu.be/PAcZPUjLdf4

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Re: AI endeavours

#105177

Postby onthemove » December 19th, 2017, 6:16 pm

For me, AI is a very interesting topic - I studied it at university, then spent the first decade of my career realising that AI was treated as a joke, the old cliches about automated phone menus where you have to speak words, and then the computer does a terrible job of recognising those words etc, had you screaming for a real person.

Yet, here we are, and seemingly out of the blue AI has now become a buzz word. Everyone is scrambling now to put the word AI into everything - if you haven't go AI in whatever you do, you're behind the curve.

Reading through this thread highlights the problem. There's a lot of 'unknowns' and we are at serious risk of silly legislation being introduced and so on. And what does all this mean for investors as well?

So the first thing is being realistic. Why is AI suddenly such a buzz word, after decades upon decades of hollow promises?

History

Pre-noughties, AI had a problem. There were lots of interesting ideas, and AI could do some tasks very well. Back in the 20th century AI had already beaten chess grandmasters.

The problem with that AI was that it was just number crunching. Follow simple rules, and throw enough computing power, and in a constrained world like chess - composed of very straightforward rules of the game - crunching numbers allowed computers to outperform the best chess players in the world.

The problem was, when the same approach was tried with things like computer vision, it failed miserably. Computer vision seemed just so hard.

Back in the 1990's neural networks ('connectionist AI') were struggling to take off. Perceptrons (a popular type of neural network) were taught from the theory that anything that could be done in 4 or more layers could be theoretically shown to be do-able in 3 layers of neurons. Further more, each neuron in the input layer tended to connect to all neurons in the subsequent layers ('fully connected networks').

When I studied it, it felt like if you submitted work with more than 4 layers, your tutor would be wondering whether you'd understood the course material, with all the meticulous proofs that it could all be done with 3 layers, and so on.

The Quiet Revolution - Convolutional Neural Networks

The current fashion for AI is almost solely based on these. These are also more coloquially termed 'deep learning'.

Strictly speaking, these aren't completely new. In fact, people have toyed around with them since the 1950s!

But a number of things and realisations have recently come together.

(1) The 'convolutional' aspect is important - instead of a 'fully connected' network with neurons looking, say, at the top left of a picture being trained independently of neurons at the bottom right of the picture, a convolution approach takes the view that we don't know where our 'cat' (or whatever) might be in an image, so the same 'neuron weighting' is applied - 'convolved' across the entire image, at least in the first few layers of the network. In the first layers of the network, instead of many different sets of neuron weightings, a single set of weights is repeatedly applied (convolved) across the entire layer (start at top left, apply it, shift it one to the right, apply it, shift it one to the right, apply it ... and so on).

(2) Depth Matters. AI programmers have finally broken free of the rigid idea that everything can - or rather 'should' - be reduced to 3 layers. Going against what I was taught in the 90s (no matter how theoreticaly 'provable' it might be), the realisation today is that in practice, 10 or even 20 (or more) layers of neurons can potentially arrive at a solution far quicker, and better, than a 'theoretical' 3 layer solution. Theorists haven't yet determined the science behind 'why' this is the case, nor how to find the 'best' architecture for a particular problem. But real world experiments have left no doubt! The theory can come later.

(3) ImageNet. This is the game changer. ImageNet is a massive database of images that have been meticulously labelled, and can be used for testing machine vision. There have been yearly challenges for quite a while now. Initially no-one seriously used neural networks. Initially they used more 'traditional' techniques where programmers carefully programmed their software to look for pre-determined patterns, etc.

For a couple of years, the resultant programs performed noticeably worse than a human. And any improvements from the previous years, were small tiny incremental improvements. Certainly, reliable computer vision still seemed an age away.

But then,...

https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-ch ... the-world/
Two years after the first ImageNet competition, in 2012, something even bigger happened. Indeed, if the artificial intelligence boom we see today could be attributed to a single event, it would be the announcement of the 2012 ImageNet challenge results.
Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, and Alex Krizhevsky from the University of Toronto submitted a deep convolutional neural network architecture called AlexNet—still used in research to this day—which beat the field by a whopping 10.8 percentage point margin, which was 41% better than the next best.


Suddenly everyone took notice - this was a revolutionary change in computer vision performance on general image recognition tasks. Suddenly computers were now in the ballpark of matching humans.

Since then, the majority of entries to the imagenet challenge have all switched to convolutional neural nets of some variant or other, and their capability is now actually - just - able to surpass that of human beings.

Where we are now...

All of a sudden, using computer vision to identify pedestrians, cyclists, cars, lorries, buses, street signs (including reading them!), traffic lights, dogs, cats, etc..... all these are now very possible with around the same level of reliability as a human being.

This was the pivotal moment that meant fully autonomous cars went from being something from distant science fiction, to becoming a very, very real probability.

It is now just a race to be the first to - safely - get autonomous cars to the market.

Crucially, from an investors point of view, without any major catastrophe that completely undermines public perception of the tehnology. No mean feat, when the end goal isn't perfection. They just need to be better than the average human driver.

But since the average human driver makes occasional mistakes, autonomous cars can still be massively beneficial even if they have the occasional bump. Nobody is, or can, claim they will be perfect.

The problem for the techonology - and investors - is that any occasional bump will be jumped on by the world's media like a pack of hyenas.

Google (Waymo) seem to recognise this, and - in my view - are taking a very prudent, careful approach. They realise one big cock-up could set back their attempts quite literally years, and encomber the industry with draconian, restrictive legislation, that could potentially prevent the technology ever being allowed to reach its potential.

Uber on the other hand - in my view - seem to be taking quite a cavalier approach, and rushing cars onto the streets without first gaining public approval - not just from the authorities, but also the approval of general public opinion. And by doing so they pose not just a real risk to their own attempts, but to the more sensible attempts of others as well. If they have one bad accident, it could seriously turn public opinion against driverless technology and AI in general.

But Get Real...

There hasn't been any massive jump towards sentient AI.
That is still yonks away.

There hasn't even been any massive jump towards any form of general intelligence.

That is still a while away - though there are some small scale, rough attempts. But like the neural nets of the 1990s, todays general AI are still at the noddy stage. They are still waiting for their revolution, and there are no signs that it is at all imminent. Contrary to the impression the current AI buzz might give.

Nothing in the current AI revolution is putting us at risk of computers becoming sentient, and 'breaking their programming' and taking over the world.

There's no threat from the current state of the art technology - at least not from the technology itself turning against us.

As always, there may be threats from how humans might apply the technology, but be under no illusion - any bad effects from the current AI revolution will be entirely due to the will and labour of the humans behind it - just like any technology.

Quite Simply..

The current revolution is based on a revolutionary change in one particular aspect - convolutional neural networks. And in particular towards visual processing tasks.

These superbly fill in a number of 'black boxes' in engineering terms. They provide a functionality as one part of a modular system, that was not available before. Suddenly we have a few more boxes that provide limited - but incredibly useful - functionality that we didn't have before.

You can now have your £40 digital camera identify your face, and recognise when you are smiling. Even 15yrs ago, that was still complete science fiction with the state of the art back then.

It isn't an understatement to call convolutional neural networks a revoution.

But don't worry - they haven't turned your compact camera into a sentient being working out ways to kill you off.

All it has done, is provided the engineers who made your camera with a module (may be implemented in software, or may be implemented in a dedicated chip) that they can incorporate into the camera that can take the input from the camera pixels, and output where it thinks faces are in that picture, and whether each of those faces are smiling.

It is simply then up to the engineers to decide how they incorporate that into a product. They can simply use the output from that module in their main camera program, programmed using regular techniques, to decide when to trigger the shutter.

Similary, that is how self driving cars will work, albeit there will be much more 'engineering' work to build a reliable system which can also be programmed to take into account changes in the rules of the road, car handling, etc. But that is more straightfoward engineering / programming, than simply builds on top of the image reconition AI.

That's not to say that other AI techniques won't be brought into play. For example, for planning paths, etc. But these aren't quite so revolutionary, more evolutionary (and I don't mean in the terms evolutional algorithms - there's been no revolution there).

So where does that leave us as investors

Well, the obvious application of this AI revolution is autonomous cars - these were clear science fiction before. Now all the parts are in place. The race is now on to make it happen.

Waymo would be my obvious candidate, but they aren't making the cars themselves.

And it seems that all the car manufacturers recognise that self driving is now a matter of when rather than if, and they are all now ploughing billions into it.

I can see two probable outomes...

1. Waymo becomes the standard - they develop the technology and licence it to the rest. They are certainly going about autonomy the right way in my view. They fully recognise the potential risks - both in terms of public opinion, and also the risk to life of users of their technology - and seem to be following a very pragmatic approach.

2. Each car manufacturer manages to develop their own - which they all seem to be trying to do - and actually, autonomous car technology from an investor point of view, would then just be an investment in the car companies themselves .... Ford, Toyota, and so on. It's just another aspect of technology that goes into cars.

I can see investment risks with each....

Waymo seem to be doing brilliantly with object recognition, place finding in the real world (GPS is useless for local lane navigation), and path planning around what other road users are doing. Where I think they may struggle is in car handling - the actual driving. Waymo are looking for a technology they can sell to other manufacturers. But half of driving is about how the car handles. How quick to you turn the steering wheel, what's its turning circle, at what point will it lose grip on a wet, snowy road.

Other car manufacturers, have been developing traction control, assisted steering, ABS braking systems for a while now.

The question now is which is going to be the bigger challenge. Google seems to have got the high level pedestrian recognition and object avoidance reasonably well sorted already.

My gut feeling is that the remaning challenge, particularly for cars in the UK and other colder wetter regions - away from California - is going to be the automated *driving* aspect - the actual 'hands on' control of the vehicle. And that might actually be to the advantage of the existing main car manufacturers, who already have a lot of experience developing (safety) technology related to those aspects.

And the Hype

Technology is always improving. Other AI techniques are making incremental improvements.

But if it weren't for the convolutional neural nets, I don't believe we would be seeing this current AI euphoria.

In other words, I do believe that the current convolutional neural networks will have a transformation change.

But it will be limited, in the sense that there won't one or two companies holding all the patents.

In fact, most of the actual AI stuff, is in the public domain and free. The patents and protections are coming from associated technologies (like the Lidar systems in waymo cars, etc), not the AI itself.

We currently have Microsoft, IBM, and Google, etc, all trying to sell AI services.

The intersting question is how much of a monopoly will they have - how much will people need to use AI services, compared to how much the AI will instead be incorporated, e.g. into integrated circuit boards that can be embedded into other electronics.

The 'value' from the AI services is not from the "AI" technology itself. It isn't from the convolutional neural network architecture.

The value comes from 'training' of it. The value is from havin a trained network that recognise objects.

But google, etc, can only really make that general purpose. Specialists might want a dedicated convolutional neural network trained to recognise e.g. brain tumours. But then it is going to be the specialist that is going to need to train that network. A general network brilliant at recognising cats, or models of car, isn't going to be much use identifying a brain tumor in a scan.

And this might be the achilles heel of the AI technology from an investors point of view.

Yes it's likely to be revolutionary. But that revolution is likely to be from a broad use across all industries. I'm not sure that there is going to end up a single commercial entity that owns and controls access to a single massively intelligent AI to which everyone will necessarily need to connect to.

I supposed after all that, as an investor it gives me hope for the general future that there is a lot of scope for companies to massively innovate and provide new features, technology and do things in a far more efficient and effective way.

So there is potentially a lot of scope for general economic growth.

But I'm not sure that there are any clear indiviaul winners in terms of being the controlling owner acting as a gatekeep to such technology.

From a worker's perspective, an AI future isn't something that should be feared. AI will be just another tool we all use. It will be valuable, but fragmented. It benefits being realised in many areas but through the work of many people crucially being aided - not replaced - by it.

The fears of it taking over and wiping out mankind, are massively overblown. That really is simply fear arising out of ignorance.

In terms of society, it is potentially going to be transformative. Easily trainable image recognition has potentially enormous numbers of beneficial applications. Medical image diagnosis, face recognition, automated monitoring - defect monitoring in factories, etc. More complex OCR - recognising not just text, but potentially diagrams, and drawings as well.

The same technology behind it has been adapted to other image processing functions as well.

There are various examples of work involving depth estimation from a single, monocular image. I can't find it now, but a while ago I saw a video of a remote controlled toy car self driving around a campus, avoiding obstacles, solely using a single 2d video camera, with a convolutional neural net estimating the distance of obstacles on a single frame-by-single-frame basis, etc.

Similarly there are other examples of 3d scene reconstruction from a single 2d image. And other examples of 3d models of faces being generated from a single 2d image ... you can even try it yourself! http://cvl-demos.cs.nott.ac.uk/vrn/

Adobe is using image recognition technology to isolate entities in videos, removing the need for laboriously having to do this by hand.

This will open up a whole new world in movie visual effects - or at least, make a previously niche, expensive world, available to even the lowest of budget film producers. Easy to add people in, take them out, change their clothing, etc.

Once you can have the computer easily and automatically recognise independent objects, a whole plethora of opportunity opens up in graphics and video packages. And consequently whole avenues open up to advertisers, graphic designers, etc.

There is even work that attempts to use machine learning (convolutional neural networks) to generate predicted motion from a 2d image... https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/12/1288 ... iction-mit

The scope for economic growth out of this is huge.

But is it all what it seems?

So the technology is accessible to all.

However, there may be one saving grace for investors.

Convolutional Neural Networks are relatively fast and cheap computationally when you have them already trained up. That's why your compact camera can find your face without needing a supercomputer.

But training the network in the first place is a whole different ball game. And this may be of use to investors.

Although the algorithms are freely available, if you actually want to create your own networks, you potentially need a lot of computing power to train them up. Programming the underlying network itself is the easy bit - training the network is the hard bit.

And this is basically where the big IT companies are pitching it. They may superficially sell "AI" services. But the reality is, the AI is actually relatively free and easy to implement, and for the most part isn't protected by patents, etc.

The reality is, the services are just a front end for their cloud computing. What you are actually paying for is the CPU time.

For example when google boasted about AlphaZero beating the worlds best with only 4hrs training from nothing (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... four-hours ), it wasn't really the AI algorithm they were showing off.

They were really showing off the immense brute processing capability of their cloud computing platform.

Cloud computing predates the current AI revolution.
Cloud computing almost felt like a solution looking for a problem.

A cynical person might wonder if the current buzz around AI might potentially just be a way of making you think you have a 'problem' for which you might need a processor hungry, cloud computing solution.

...

Sorry. I hope that isn't too long. It just seemed a good point to try and collect my own thoughts having been keeping a close eye on the recent AI revolution quite closely myself from a technical perspective.


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