
Facebook is trying to build AI algorithms that can help build AI algorithms - frostmatthew
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/facebook-trying-create-ai-can-create-ai/
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justsaysmthng
I don't understand what this word (AI) means anymore.

Everyone seems to be doing it, except me. It has something to do with "machine
learning" and "big data" and it's done using neural nets, which have been
around since 1940s.

Somehow I feel like you can use the term AI to any algorithm that takes some
input data, does some processing and produces output data. After all, that's
what it is.

 __

Because this term is so ambiguous, I will try and translate it into more
boring terms:

AI which builds AI means algorithms which produce other algorithms ?

In other words, a program which can write other programs, right ?

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tremon
I think the term AI has been reduced to "anything you can make a computer do,
without writing the explicit instructions for it". So what would have been
described as a Bayesian process (or Bayesian algorithm) ten years ago, is now
called AI. Every tool produced with some genetic programming can now be
classified as AI, even if the resulting program is completely static after
deployment.

It's just hype. Just like every dynamic javascript component got rebranded as
Ajax ten years ago.

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wlievens
Funny thing is that this trend is the exact opposite of what has been the case
in the past decades: things stopped being called AI as soon as they became
broadly useful!

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tremon
In my view, that's because scientists and programmers alike took AI seriously.
No one was willing to claim "AI" as it was a holy grail, considered as-yet
unattainable. What has changed since then is not really our capability, but
our willingness to dilute the term for marketing gain.

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davidwihl
A lot of these idea came out of Harvard HIPS lab under Ryan Adams. Their work
is open source at [https://github.com/HIPS](https://github.com/HIPS),
specifically Spearmint and Autograd. His company, Whetlab, was mentioned in
article as acquired by Twitter. Facebook is taking the idea further as are all
the major ML players.

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notduncansmith
It's called Flow. Not to be confused with Flow[0].

[0] [https://github.com/facebook/flow](https://github.com/facebook/flow)

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reverius42
Facebook is now (apparently) a large enough corporation that it has multiple,
unrelated, public-facing projects with the same name.

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polskibus
Is this just a huge Monte Carlo simulation machine for generating loads of
input setups, run AI many times to see which setup was "best"?

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blazespin
Is flow just another handy library for constructing DNN graphs? (like
tensorflow) or is it actually a program that is creating DNN graphs
intelligently?

I suppose the latter makes a lot of sense, actually. Some of the tweaking and
retesting I do to my tf models seems like it could be automated.

It seems like the real challenge of AI isn't so much constructing the models
but feeding it training data.

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meeper16
Facebook started out as a non-algorithmic company, AOL – geocities –
friendster – myspace – Facebook – who's next? They have a lot of catch up to
do compared to Google, which started as a core algorithmic company in a branch
of AI called Search.

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w_t_payne
I'm trying to do something a bit similar here:
[https://github.com/wtpayne/hiai](https://github.com/wtpayne/hiai)

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morgante
And this is how we all lose our jobs...

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guessmyname
AI-algorithms-ception

