[darawk]

> This latest craze of "AI" research seems to be fueled by a sudden glut of computational power (GPUs) that wasn't available previously. I think that most technical people would agree that the mid 2020s is extremely ambitious. I'd also argue that we're actually more likely to experience another AI winter.

I think that is extremely unlikely. "AI" (read: machine learning) is actually being used for business purposes now, it's delivering enormous value to nearly every business on the planet. We're now in a long phase of descending the gradient of the current batch of broad techniques. This is likely a decently long gradient, with lots of marginal improvements to be made for a long time. And whereas with research projects, people don't care much about marginal improvements, they really do for business use-cases. For those reasons, I think AI/ML is basically here to stay just as much as basic biological research, or physics, or whatever is, if not more.

[logifail]

>> "AI" (read: machine learning) [is] delivering enormous value to nearly every business on the planet

That statement appears to contain two fairly bold claims - could you share sources?

[overlords]

Not OP, but of course even 0.1% improvements are worth millions to search engines, social network feeds, financial forecasters, and self driving car companies. Also worth thousands or millions to manufacturing processes, and to small businesses, which might be using ecommerce optimization systems through providers.

[adrianN]

Every big website uses some kind of machine learning to prevent fraud. Banks do the same. Data mining is used everywhere to improve customer experience. Data mining is used in industrial applications for preventative maintenance.