
Ask HN: Is AI really a thing? - lbriner
Call me cynical but I see AI as the next hyped technology even though I am unaware that anything has changed in the last few years and that it seems to be nothing other than pattern matching or machine learning, which is software that is told how to react to inputs, just like normal software.<p>Am I wrong?
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mindcrime
_Am I wrong?_

If you insist that the only thing that merits the label "AI" is what the rest
of us all "AGI", then yes. AI can do some pretty amazing things, but as the
old saying goes "once it works, it isn't considered AI anymore". A lot of the
stuff we have today would have been like black magic not very long ago. But we
still don't have "human like AI" so you get pundits and critics saying "AI
isn't real, AI is just pattern matching", etc.

 _unaware that anything has changed in the last few years_

A computer program just beat a arguably the best human Go player in the world
at Go. You don't see any significance in that?

 _which is software that is told how to react to inputs, just like normal
software._

Great, so write me a program, without using any machine learning, that can
recognize the MNIST images with an error rate of 0.21%. If you finish before
you die of boredom, or the heat death of the universe, I'll be stunned.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Depends, is he allowed to have the same budget/resources?

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jimsmart
Most software is just reacting to inputs, yes, and AI algorithms are no
different there. But one should recognise the inherent reductionism in any
such statements claiming that that's all AI is.

Even if/when we do have AGI, it will still, arguably, just be software (plus
hardware) that is reacting to inputs — such a definition helps nobody in this
instance.

What about these things:

\- Speech recognition \- Facial detection/recognition \- Fingerprint
recognition \- Personal agents (Siri/Alexa/etc) \- Self-driving cars \-
Recommendation engines \- Route planning \- Spam detection

All of these things have either improved significantly thanks to AI, or would
not exist without AI (that is: many of these algorithms are in fact
categorised as being AI). Of course, as others also point out: once it's been
solved, most folk don't categorise it as AI any longer, it's merely "just
another algorithm".

Furthermore, some manufacturers are now including dedicated hardware-
acceleration for some of these algorithms, in mobile devices (e.g. Apple's A11
and A12).

Granted, yes, many recent advances are "nothing other than pattern matching or
machine learning" but that's a very wide brush you are weilding. One day even
AGI may be classed as "nothing other than machine learning".

No, we don't yet have AGI. But yes: AI is really a thing, and it's here now,
hype or not.

[TBH, I'm uncertain if you're trolling or not, but hey]

~~~
jimsmart
I see HN doesn't do lists very well / at all? Hmm.

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eindiran
The technologies that currently exist are examples of ANI ("artificial narrow
intelligence" or weak AI[1]). The way you are using the term AI is in line
with what is known as AGI ("artificial general intelligence" or strong AI[2]).
Strong AI doesn't currently exist and, as far as we can tell, is still a fair
way away. Some people believe that strong AI isn't even possible.

So to answer your question directly, AI is a thing, but currently it is only
the subset of AI called ANI. AGI is still over the horizon.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_AI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_AI)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence)

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yongjik
Sounds similar to a classical "curse of the AI": when AI does anything well,
it stops being AI.

Before AlphaGo: "Hah! Go requires strategy and deep thinking. A computer will
never match the insight of masters!"

A few days(!) after AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol at the first game: "Ha! Of course
it's just a game of counting everything really fast. Of course computers are
good at it, this game is totally unfair!"

Watching the media and people flipping their stances in a matter of days was
quite comical.

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gronne
No - and not really controversial to say so. But one can argue that the
explosive growth in computerpower has made it more useful.

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NicoJuicy
Let's first see when autonomous vehicles come.

I understand what you mean, considering the vast amount of resources that A.I.
requires.

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Piskvorrr
Skynet - probably not. Harder-to-debug, yet useful algorithms - that's already
here. Then there's stuff in-between, and that is uncertain...I mean, I am
typing this on a tiny supercomputer, possibly on the other side of the planet
from you; I didn't even imagine _this_ three decades ago.

TL;DR: wherever the future takes us, it will not be like we imagine it now.

