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Comment by wintorez | Hacker News Reader

I'm no expert in the field of AI or Machine Learning, so I have a question for the experts here? Has there been any theoretical breakthrough in the AI in the recent years? I knew we had neural networks and different types of classifiers, etc. for more than a few of decades now, so apart from better marketing, has there been a significant breakthrough that explains this sudden surge in the interest in AI?

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There have been a number of breakthroughs in specific fields recently. In fact it seems like there is a paper every week that pushes the state of the art forward in some branch of AI/ML. I think the big one that triggered the current excitement was the success of convolutional networks in image recognition tasks. You can read about that one (in 2012) here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530561/the-revolutionary-...

EDIT: This paper refers to the algorithm as SuperVision which was the team name, but it is more commonly called AlexNet. Here is another article discussing it:

https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-changed-the-direction-o...

Thank you. The very answer I was looking for.

Before 2005 experts estimated that AIs that could beat humans at Go would take many years still. In October AlphaGo came out and in March 2016 beat everyone. In 2017 AlphaGo Zero came out, which was only trained on self-play. It beats all previous versions.

But it is not so much these big breakthroughs that cause current optimism, as much as the large amounts of continuous improvements and refinements.

Recent breakthroughs in ML from a commercial perspective are achieving super-human performance in some computer vision tasks and end-to-end methods beating traditional ones in machine translation and speech recognition.

However, these breakthroughs have not much to do with a general notion of intelligence as they are very limited to a specific task. In the media, the term AI is used very inflationary these days.

> has there been a significant breakthrough that explains this sudden surge in the interest in AI?

Yes. Some tasks like language translation, face recognition etc. have reached human level performance. Why has this happened? Large data and increase in computing power (Thanks gamers and GPUs!).

Is this translation service available online? I tried different services recently while travelling, none of them were better than basic knowledge of the language and a dictionary. Full sentences sometimes work well but anything else is problematic (e.g. restaurant menus).

deepl.com is pretty good. This translation of your question into German is flawless: "Ist dieser Übersetzungsservice online verfügbar? Ich habe in letzter Zeit auf Reisen verschiedene Dienste ausprobiert, keiner von ihnen war besser als Grundkenntnisse der Sprache und ein Wörterbuch. Ganze Sätze funktionieren manchmal gut, aber alles andere ist problematisch (z.B. Restaurantmenüs)."

Some deep net answers below.

However - MCMC for scalable bayesian reasoning. - Answer Sets for reasoning in FOL. - Big data sets for training lots of classifiers. Including deep networks. A big breakthrough has been crowdsourcing the labelling.

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