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Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

I almost wonder if this was a ploy by the American companies. AI is being injected into all apps and even pushed as major feature, but, at least in my circle of friends, nobody cares or wants that. Most people use Whatsapp, with no AI. Google is trying Allo, to no success, and Facebook is pushing M, also to no success. I think AI is brilliant and could be the future, but from my experience, people generally don't want it in the ways it's being pushed. I definitely see the 'AI' and 'ML' markets, somewhat tied together, switching gears soon.

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Facebook's M has had limited success, but on the other hand, News Feed, the core of Facebook's business, is build entirely around AI. And Google, of course, has had plenty of success with AI outside of Allo.

I wouldn't say "nobody cares or wants" AI, just that companies are still trying to figure out where it's best used.

You're right...kinda. AI is used in many places. Where it's advertised as a feature? Failure. Where it's used in the backend? People don't seem to have much of a choice. I stand by my statement.

Back in 90s, some Japanese manufacturers (e.g. Panasonic) tried to sell AI-based home appliances such as rice cookers or washing machines. The buzzword then was "Fuzzy Logic" instead of NN. Don't know how successful they were, but it seemed like a classic case of selling features instead of stories. Ordinary people don't buy stuff because of its features.

I think fuzzy logic controllers are very common in appliances. Samsung even has a neuro fuzzy logic washing machine that uses optical sensors to see how clean the water is. I think consumers need a fancy sounding technology on their appliances even if they don't know what it means exactly.

I don't know if they still do, but I know the Japanese used Fuzzy Logic for a while to schedule their trains.

The distinction between fuzzy logic and the Bayesian interpretation of probability has always been unclear to me.

Fuzzy logic are very successful in auto focusing cameras.

Reminds me of the (imo, erroneous) dichotomy between "strong" and "weak" AI back in the day. Strong AI is what captures the imagination of the crowds, but weak AI is what actually brings the money despite not being as sexy. Of course many things that we take for granted now would have been considered strong AI 40 years ago; the definition is constantly shifting.

I forget where I heard it, but someone once pointed out that AI, before the recent DL boom, refers to things that we don't know how to do. As soon as we know how to solve a problem, it gets a much more apt name.

I'm constantly amused, when I see articles like this, that I've yet to see any application of AI as impressive as Akinator, and it's been around for a full decade.

In consumer products, perhaps not. Business systems? Oh, you betcha.

Note: I'm interpreting AI as "also the very useful subset of AI called Machine Learning" here. ML is already in so many things, but I think it truly has yet to take off. But I very much believe that it will be ubiquitous. It's probably worth it for programmers to learn some of the basic algorithms, general approaches, and what they're good for.

I agree. That's kind of my point. AI now seems tied to data mining consumers. Consumers don't want this. It is much better served behind the scenes, or in business settings. The majority of people just don't want a creepy assistant.

I'm sure people know and like self-driving Teslas Alexa is quite popular, Snapchat filters (&clones) likewise Google search and many other popular products (YouTube video captioning) are also driven by AI I agree with you though - we are not yet there for chatbots!

I will take better AI for predictive text entry on touch screen keyboards any day of the week. I use Android's built-in keyboard with swipe typing and it does fix some things but it could go much further.

I think most "AI" efforts right now are in an uncanny valley of usefulness. They're "intelligent" enough to be troublesome and difficult to program with, but not "intelligent" as in AI-complete. We get used to the speech recognition working until suddenly it doesn't, and then we just wish we could type and click our way through.

Messaging is perhaps a bad place for AI as people use it specifically to chat to real human intelligences and don't want weird AI butting in. I'm sure there are lots of other areas where it is useful like the robots avoiding obstacles mentioned in the article.

There's so many ways it is being used, and many of it are seen as useful by consumers, I think. For example, better autocorrect/prediction of the next word you're going to type, smarter text selection, ...

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