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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of froth, as in any hot field. However, unlike before, there are many cases where AI actually works now. Some perceptual tasks work better than a human, in fact. We can quibble about the naming and whatnot, but that's not something you can say about the last AI winter. It's sort of like dotcom bust of 00, sure things imploded back then, but there's no sign whatsoever e-commerce will implode at any time in the future because unlike before it actually works this time.

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> Some perceptual tasks work better than a human, in fact. [...] that's not something you can say about the last AI winter

Eh. I'd say that's somewhat apples to oranges.

A) There were some useful and successful expert systems.

B) Things seemed to be going swimmingly, until they hit a fundamental wall.

C) We're working with a few orders of magnitude greater compute than they had access to.

Sure, but we did figure out how to make things more robust and generalizable, at least for perceptual tasks so far. Knowledge representation and probabilistic reasoning are still non-existent, though. Moreover, nobody is even working on any of that, for fear of being compared to Doug Lenat.

So robust and generalizable that adding a pixel here and a pixel there, too small to be even recognized by a human, confuse image recognition system to the point it confuse panda with gibbon?

These adversarial examples are generated in a very artificial way that will not be present in natural images (and if you’re thinking of security issues, the attacker needs access to your model...)

They’re still an interesting topic to explore but hardly evidence that neural nets don’t generalize.

Wouldn't the worry be that generalizing to real world tasks involves enough variation that the same issue could arise naturally?

Representation learning and probabilistic methods are huge sub-areas of modern machine learning, just take a look at the proceedings of ICLR2019.

Representation learning != knowledge representation, probabilistic methods != probabilistic reasoning. I'm talking foundations of AGI, which as far as I'm aware, nobody is seriously working on at the moment.

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