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Comment by usaphp | Hacker News Reader

I might be skeptical, but every single AI experiment or showcase I see either online or on google experiments list is nothing that impressive. The whole AI thing is so overhyped these days...

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Is it overhyped? I feel so. Every startup seems to have a machine learning engineering position available and for what? I have friends hired just to do data analysis (which is necessary for machine learning because you need a clean dataset that can be consumed for training purpose), but beyond a couple simple rules, he's not doing the kind of machine learning the cool kids are celebrating. So the hype is everywhere, but everyone's job is different, a lot of people don't do the "cool" AI stuff.

Most importantly, AI and machine learnings are not synonym at all. People should regard AI as the overall goal, wanting computer to do something really smart on its own, very little to no instruction.

Going back 5-7 years ago when Siri first came out, it was quite a noise. But I honestly never found a compelling reason to use Siri until I started driving and I needed to call somebody. The problem is that I have some accent and I have a lazy tongue so I blur on words, so Siri does not always understand what I want to say. I am surprised the voice-to-text feature in Message is quite accurate (it can auto-correct by learning the next phrase and understands pauses so it waits for you to speak again), but Siri doesn't. So while I appreciate virtual assistant, their capabilities are very limited to a set of commands.

I do feel the AI community has made some good progress, from beating Mario game, beating top Go players, to self-driving car, the technologies supporting these initiatives are getting more sophisticated than ever (and I feel the tooling too is getting too competitive, too many choices). I am working on some simple home automation involving NLP (for speaking to the program), image recognition (who's in the house), and a couple self-execution routines such as make sure all nights are off if no one is in the house or reminds me doctor appointment every Wednesday. That's not AI, it doesn't do anything else beyond what I programmed it to do, it doesn't try to survive or better itself.

You don't think AlphaGo or self driving cars are impressive?

Yes and no. I mean the demo is great, but can I actually have one? No? Well then I can only be so impressed.

I know, they're coming soon, but I've been waiting for years and at some point the enthusiasm wanes when it's been right around the corner for several years.

Hey, maybe they're trying to solve a problem that's harder than anyone expected.

Anyways, I'll be impressed when I can have one.

You can't have a nuclear bomb either. Are they unimpressive?

yes, only until I can have recreational nukes can I bask in their power and radiation.

Not at all the same. They're way past demo and have proven effectiveness repeatedly.

Comparing pre-alpha with fielded is no comparison. Nuclear weapons haven't been going on and on about how great they'll eventually be.

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