

Ask HN: Is AI a growing field? - dmix

I have become interested in artificial intelligence lately and I'm trying to gauge the field, but I haven't found many publications about the current state of it.<p>Are more people becoming interested in AI? Is there greater demand for it in businesses then say 10 years ago?
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frisco
If by AI you mean machine learning, yes. If you mean "human-like-interactive-
thing," yes but not in a way that means we're substantially closer than we
were 15 years ago.

AI in the ML sense is quickly becoming critical to business and is opening up
lots of possibilities that we could only dream of 5 years ago. At its heart,
Google is basically an ML company for one big example. Facebook is moving in
that direction as well. There are lots of startups solving old problems with
AI, too, such as Knewton (tutoring), and for some self-promotion, my company
(Quantios).

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jacoblyles
Computer vision seems to be in high demand, too. The army wants its robots to
know what they're shooting at.

~~~
tomsaffell
Yes, they do. Reminds me of the AI algorithm designed to tell US tanks from
Soviet ones. They accidentally trained it on one type of film for US tanks,
and another type for Soviet tanks, each with different color tones, and ended
up with a system that could spot different color tones...

[http://books.google.com/books?id=JNhRSAMFn6YC&pg=PA271&#...</a>

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endtime
That's one of the problems with neural nets...there's usually no easy way for
a human to understand what the actual decision process is (in sharp contrast
to, say, decision trees).

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trapper
Yes there is. There are a few methods of converting a trained nn to a decision
tree. It's actually a better way of training decision trees for some problems.

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vaksel
I'd say no. My dad worked in AI 20-30 years ago(worked on some AI project for
Russian military, something to do with nukes), and he looks for jobs in the
field, now and then. And from what he say about, it seems like the AI field is
pretty much frozen right now.

There are almost no jobs available, and the few available are usually the be
assistant to some professor who is trying to do something that was already
done 20 years ago.

~~~
bOR_
Had the same impression. The most interesting advances I saw when visiting
Alife XI last year was in cognitive robotics. Using MRI scan information from
thinking persons to unravel the global structure of the brain, and then
implementing that in computers.

The global workspace theory definitly seemed interesting.

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njoubert
I'm currently going around visiting potential Ph.D. programs as an admit for
next year, and at all the top schools (CMU, Stanford, Berkeley) the amount of
people studying AI and machine learning is staggering. The field is definitely
academically very active.

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ktharavaad
There are a LOT of publications on AI if you look at all the conference papers
and journal papers floating around on the net. The field of AI itself is
divided up into lots of sub fields such as logic theory, machine learning,
language processing, search/optimization.

Examples of "AI research at work" are the face detection in google
picasa/iphoto ( machine learning + vision ). You email spam filter ( text
classification ).

As AI research matures and as computers get faster, its safe to say that there
is definitely a greater demand for AI but its hard to come up with "obvious"
applications of AI algorithms like the ones I listed above.

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HSO
as peter norvig said at a recent conference, it depends on how you define AI.

to gauge the field, why not start with his textbook
(<http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/>). right next to this link, i just saw this one
here for more resources on the web (<http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ai.html>).

btw, i wouldn't really think too much about what other people are interested
in or not if you are at your stage. if you are drawn to the field, do it. tech
is too unpredictable to make this kind of career calculus.

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jey
Depends on what you mean by AI. It's not a single area of study.

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blogimus
Somewhere I heard a saying that goes something like "AI is machine
intelligence we don't quite understand. Once you've figured it out, it is no
longer AI, it is an algorithm."

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endtime
I don't find that especially convincing - there is no machine intelligence we
don't understand, since we have created all of it.

I would say that AI includes a few classes of algorithms related to solving
certain types of problems (detection, planning, concept abstraction), or
perhaps related to certain techniques for solving problems (heuristic search,
ML, vision, etc.).

~~~
blogimus
If your only talking about machine intelligence that we've already created,
then of course we already understand that. I was talking about the _concept_
of machine intelligence and problems that we would like to solve and are
trying to solve with machine intelligence, but haven't solved yet. Once we
solve a machine intelligence problem, we tend to call it an algorithm or a
technique rather than machine intelligence.

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jpirkola
Try searching AGI or "strong AI", which is a new movement trying to achieve
general AI rather than application specific. I have got a good article on
that: <http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=689>

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Eliezer
Don't go into THAT field unless you have guts of STEEL.

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zitterbewegung
Either that or believe in the singularity.

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Anon84
The singularity is probably inevitable. I doubt it we'll see it in our
lifetimes, though.

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endtime
Why? If you buy into exponentially increasing progress, then most of the
graphs seem to indicate that it will happen within a lifespan from now,
especially if you consider the medical advances that will come in the
intervening time.

~~~
khafra
All real-world exponential curves I can think of eventually reverse
precipitously, or at least plateau.

~~~
dmix
This is mentioned in Kurzweil's Singularity book. With Moores Law, he expects
transistors to peak at 2020 and molecular computing to take over after that
and continue the growth.

He believes innovation and paradigm shifts supplement the plateauing of
S-curves.

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dfox
Main problem with AI is that nobody really knows what it means. When something
starts to be remotely useful, it is not called AI anymore :)

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amichail
For me, AI's goals are very cool but most of its approaches not so much. In
fact, I find most AI talks rather boring.

The only parts I really like have to do with human computation (e.g., ESP
Game) and stealing ideas from nature (e.g., genetic programming, ant colony
optimization, etc.):

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143>

[http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Biology-Peter-J-
Bentley/dp/074...](http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Biology-Peter-J-
Bentley/dp/0743204476)

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queensnake
My total out-of-butt reasoning: with low-level AI-ish things becoming
commonplace (computing power getting cheaper, and devices becoming more
ubiquitous; ever cheaper, more sophisticated robots, O'Reilly books on
Collective Intelligence) and more data around, there'll be more demand for
harder, truer-AI stuff. And if somehow there isn't, it still helps to have an
understanding of the lower-level, easier stuff.

And, there's a lecture on Google video (don't have the link) of a guy going on
about how there are lots of expert systems out there run by companies that
don't advertise themselves.

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paulgb
> And, there's a lecture on Google video (don't have the link) of a guy going
> on about how there are lots of expert systems out there run by companies
> that don't advertise themselves.

It it this, by any chance? <http://is.gd/otrN>

I haven't seen that one myself (watching it now), but I've seen others where
Larry Smith talks about exactly what you mentioned. Unfortunately nobody
thought to mic him and his style of moving around makes him hard to hear on a
camcorder mic.

~~~
dmix
That was a great video. I made this post with an interest primarily in the
expert systems part of AI and this video solidified by interest.

I now know what I'm going to do after the internet. :)

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ivankirigin
I think robotics is in a lull, and will be for a few years. This of those out
there (pleo, roomba, packbot, kiva, anybots), and you'll find they are all
"dumb". Interesting physical intelligence like BigDog isn't really a product.

It will be a few years before any intelligent robots come out. 6-10 years is a
good time frame to start a robotics business.

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brianobush
I do AI for work, however, it is not my only task. Most of my work is
development work, data wrangling and debugging. Pure AI jobs probably exist,
but I like the diversity and hoping to do more research is a lost cause in
most software applications since so much time is required doing development.

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jasonb05
I work in AI as well after completing a phd in computational intelligence (a
relatively recent flavor of AI). from my limited exposure, working in AI
involves consulting/software engineering with different tools, in my case
intelligent agents.

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zandorg
I took a degree in AI, and now I'm firmly convinced that AI == search. If you
make something searchable in a simple, new way, that's AI. If it's grandiose
but doesn't work, that's not useful.

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jibiki
Two exceptions:

1\. Many computer vision algorithms (Canny...) are more clever than search.

2\. Fourier analysis is not search.

But maybe that's too low-level to be "real" AI.

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zandorg
About (1), I wrote some software that finds text in an image, by searching for
items and filtering with rules.

Maybe in my post, I was being too general.

I studied neural networks at University too, and maybe I don't use them
because I find them hard to apply to a search task.

But all the AI module's theory (outside of neural nets) was about searching
trees, etc.

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natmaster
Shameless plug for my University: <http://z.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-
lab/publications_recent.php>

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jlees
Shameless plug for mine, although the publications page is pretty terrible:
<http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/publications/>

Every time I have a conversation with someone in the department I get excited
about some new direction of AI research. (I work in natural language
processing myself.) AI certainly isn't dying, but from my own experiences
straddling business and academia, I'd say it takes far too long for Cool
Stuff(TM) to make it into the real world.

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sscheper
By AI, do you mean Asians and Indians?

In the Silicon Valley, yes.

