Hacker News Reader

It's pretty unreasonable to expect that if you're aware of what AI winter is, and the fact that we're probably upon the cusp of another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

Once everyone realizes every practical use of their AI technology is more than adequately met by conventional code, and that there's no grand breakthrough into general artificial intelligence coming anytime soon, the hype cycle will end.

View on HN

> Once everyone realizes every practical use of their AI technology is more than adequately met by conventional code

I'm all for skepticism for the current hyperbole, but there's no need to be hyperbolic in the other direction.

There are some applications in which deep learning really does work better than alternatives. The 2018 Gordon bell prize, after all, went to a team that did deep learning on Summit for climate analysis.

There is a nontrivial list of applications that you would have a hard time convincing experts that they would be better off with conventional code.

I think we're set for an AI fall, not winter. There are truly some techniques for which current ML implementations work quite well that cannot be adequately met using conventional code. Speech recognition, machine translation, and image processing are the main examples.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com