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I greatly enjoy AI startup press release bingo.

  - .ai domain name
  - No mention of how they use or define AI
  - "AI + Humans"
  - Banner picture from science fiction film (Prometheus)

(Disclaimer: I used to work at an AI startup and am generally interested in how companies market themselves)

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"The most valuable businesses of the coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete."

"When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks, but even a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can’t beat a child at others, you can tell that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other – they’re categorically different."

"Palantir takes a hybrid approach: the computer would flag the most suspicious transactions on a well designed user interface, and human operators would make the final judgement as to their legitimacy."

- Peter Thiel, "Zero to One", Chapter 12

Thiel is going long on these AI+human startups.

This quote, and the kind of thinking that engenders it (and is engendered by it), bother me.

Yeah, a cheap laptop can do arithmetic faster than 'the smartest mathematicians'. And the smartest mathematicians can do arithmetic faster than many children. Does that make mathematicians and children 'categorically different things' as well? In some trivial sense, sure, but it doesn't preclude any kind of connection between the two, or require some deep new ontological commitments to model.

I'm all for the current practical approach of using 'AI technology' as a human supplemental. But I'd rather not frame it as (what I perceive) as some kind of mystic, dualistic argument. At least not until we know more about both.

I also don't really think Peter Thiel is worthy of being the keystone of any kind of argumentum ab auctoritate in this particular field.

We can train children to become mathematicians.

Yes, that's precisely my point.

I've read the rest of what you have to say on this, and it is precisely the kind of mysticism that bothers me. There are no means of disproving it, it reduces to dogma in the end, but it's philosophically disingenuous to assert that because computers and people feel like different things in some cases, they must be, and then to argue backwards from there; it's question-begging in the original sense.

I mean it's clearly obvious that today, "AI" on computers != human. Unsupervised learning is making leaps & bounds. Even supervised learning isn't able to solve all problems better than humans even if it can do so on a staggeringly large amount of problems.

I don't think anyone is positing that that's true forever and all time. It seems reasonable to bet on AI at some point becoming sophisticated enough to outperform AI+human. I think it'll happen shortly after the point where AI can identify a new problem (or class of problems) by itself that it hasn't been taught about & then build new tools to help itself tackle that problem. After that it's the singularity because that process repeats ad infinitum. The only value-add of humans after that is if our creativity is somehow better/different than & can explore problems in ways the AI can't (& even that feels like a very short-lived advantage unless there's some crucial physical/mathematical impossibility standing in the way).

Seems pretty plausible with a max entropy + Bayesian hypothesis selection. And it has empirical implications:

https://www.am-nat.org/site/halting-oracles-as-intelligent-a...

If I'm right, then all AI only companies will be beaten by a AI+human company, so we can make market predictions and propose research directions based on the hypothesis. Doesn't seem entirely without technical/financial merit. I make a note of the economic implications at the bottom of the following proof:

https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/

Why do you say it a form of mysticism?

Further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723

They also have a VP BlockChain in their team [0], despite no apparent use of blockchain tech anywhere, you can't make this shit up

[0]: https://www.engineer.ai/about-us

You're absolutely correct in that we don't currently use blockchain tech anywhere in our stack yet! It's something we're currently exploring as a way to augment our business in order to deal with complex problems like identity management, royalty payouts, and escrowed payments. Additionally, today we can only work with developers in devshops; in the future we want to expand into the freelancer market. Dealing with freelancers at scale is a complicated proposition, as it's been super hit and miss with a well structured workflow to manage them. We're hoping we can solve that problem with a mix of automation and blockchain.

- Disclaimer, I am the aforementioned VP Blockchain at Engineer.ai

Juicero is on their list of customers, too. (Same page.)

I now realize that we clearly we need to fix that page - those logos mentioned are some of the companies that our senior team have come from (hence why it's in the "Our Team" section)! Apologies if it was misleading, I'm getting that updated right away!

- Disclaimer, I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

I'm now seriously considering adding that Prometheus photo to our press kit ;)

Jokes aside, my colleague @sachmans has posted a comment above that should hopefully answer your question on how we use AI. As for how we define AI, as an engineer myself, I'm a little annoyed by how it's become an umbrella term for everything from basic statistical models to ANNs. Unfortunately that is the reality of it - and so we've consciously decided to use it as an umbrella term for the various applications of ML/NLP/NNs that we use internally.

- Disclaimer, I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

Yup, we should term this "the .ai bubble".

Wouldn't this technically be like the 4th ai bubble? I remember reading these bubbles have been happening since the 60s.

edit: Okay, I'm slightly wrong. I looked it up due to curiosity. This would qualify as the 3rd major ai bubble, but there have been a few minor ones. Also known as "ai winters": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

AI winter referring to the lack of funding in ai projects instead of collapse in companies.

The bad side of me wouldn't mind another AI winter. Today I heard on the radio what was essentially data aggregated and related with SQL joins referred to as "AI". I've never heard another term become as meaningless as AI. Even blockchain is better defined.

Insert old man voice "If I had things my way, making hype about anything would be punishable by death."

Not going to lie. If someone ran for president on just that platform alone, where it's illegal to make any overblown promise/hype on tech, the contenders really need to come up with some good arguments for me not to vote for the hype killer.

I'm just afraid what's going to be the next hype train. The blockchain hype train was just plain dumb. It's a super niche piece of tech with really limited uses. Still cool for that. But will never revolutionize the world. This AI bandwagon is getting out of hand. People think all AI tech is perfect 100% of the time, all the time. It's more, works 93% of the time, 23% of the time.

The next hype tech... scares me what it could be.

This is how I feel as well. Hype takes on a life of it’s own as it becomes fashionable to repeat other people’s talking points about a technology you know nothing about, have never used and have never critically considered.

But that’s sort of humans in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Do you also think it deals with "belief" of something new and fantastic. I might be reaching on this... and this idea is like a grand total of 2 minutes old in my head.

But take crop circles. Over and god damn over, they're proven to be some bored asshole that went out with a board, some rope, and free time to make shit in a field. But every time a new one pops up, "Oh my god... is it aliens!?!?!"

Every time in tech. Overblown claims are made and shown to be false or limited in scope. By "smart people" towards "smart people". But we still get "No! This will change the world!". "It might change the way we take dumps on the shitter, but not the world." "IT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!".

Or "Making the world a better place through statistically blockchain distributed interconnected AI designed silicon chips... 2.0"

I mean... it's all a religion. Looking at it in another light. Heavy prayer and belief in things you probably shouldn't. Makes tech people more religious than those that are "religious".

I might be reaching and ranting at this point.

I strongly suspect something conceptually similar to SQL joins is going on in a human brain.

Quite hilarious yet quite frustrating for us at how we are marketing ourselves and having to explain all the nonsense going on out there is not really AI?!

I guess that's why US media is hyping how China is surpassing the US in AI.

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