[pdimitar]

> This may not result in new widgets next CES but may be game changing to society in a decade.

And I am tired of hearing that ever since the 90s.

Clearly, deep fakes changed society. Made people more paranoid and less believing of what they see. Is that a positive change though?

Meanwhile, you still have to manually load dishes in the dishwasher, and robot vacuum cleaners stumble and block on the easiest of obstacles.

Call me a cynic but AI work needs to get out of its comfy well-funded bro-club corner and start to seriously try and solve real-actual-physical-world problems. It's all well and good that scientist X can model a text paragraph with this or that NN but when will he solve a car driving itself?

And don't get me wrong. I know science can take a long time to make a breakthrough. It's not adhering to the same laws as everyday work -- I am aware and I am clamouring for science. But I don't feel the AI area is even heading in any direction at all. Could be wrong though.

[bonoboTP]

There is a lot of work going on in many directions. Believe me, whenever the general public notices some "obvious" shortcomings or holes or missing research, there is usually already years of effort in the making and heaps of papers exploring it. It's just that there is a huge delay to media and popular consciousness.

If you just read the "AI" comment sections on HN it may seem everybody is just training a cat/dog classifier in Keras on ImageNet and nothing new is going on. In reality there's tons of work in one-shot/few-shot learning, unsupervised, self-supervised methods, combining modalities, quantifying uncertainty, robustness to attacks, etc.

Yes, robotics is still not at the stage where you could get a human-like dexterous dishwashing/T-shirt folding machine. But people are working on it as well.

However, not all companies need it. The "comfy well-funded bro-club corner" (why so much envy in the phrasing?) probably does not need physical robots, they just do data analysis, like if you need to process videos uploaded to Youtube, or you program an intelligent tool for photo or video editing software, that's also important and has nothing to do with robotic arms.

I think it's the fault of the media that "AI" appears as this single conceptual blur, when it's actually tons of different applications. It is capable of a lot more than 1-2 decades ago. But it's not AGI, and not everyone needs to work on human-like/conversational AGI in a humanoid body.

Image analysis, machine translation, speech recognition, all these work today at least to some extent and just a short time ago they just did not work at all outside extremely carefully crafted cases in prototypes that fell apart immediately when the researcher wasn't there to keep it from collapsing (I mean this metaphorically: the predictions were extremely bad outside the scenario and dataset it was crafted for).

[brutus1213]

Hey .. I saw your comment just now (yeah .. I know 11 days!). I think you are spot on (about several points), and some really interesting insights. I'm bookmarking this comment.

[pdimitar]

All of that is completely fair and I am not debating your well-made points.

My issue are a few things in particular:

- Recent evidence that most AI papers are approved by underground rings of peer reviews -- either on the principle of "you approve my paper, I'll approve yours" or because the authors know each other from university. That story was even posted here on HN several months ago.

- Any progress that the outside public sees is really small.

- Any non-small progress is never noticed by the general public. It's captured by a corporation because some deluded board member who never worked an hour in their life imagines that the company's small AI breakthrough will definitely hand them the keys to ruling the entire planet, I suppose. One example coming to mind: translation software. Why doin't we have that yet?! There are literal decades of research and some of the FAANG corporations bragged on their blogs, several times, that they almost solved it (Microsoft I think). All of the public-facing translation software packages are rather mediocre. Also, why don't we have publicly accessible and shareable NNs trained with millions of self-driving travels? Etc.

---

> I think it's the fault of the media that "AI" appears as this single conceptual blur

Many here on HN -- me included -- have the confidence to think they are not influenced by mainstream media on such topics. I personally got hyped for computers at 11-12 y/o partly due to the charmingly goofy but ambitious 90s sci-fi movies but now, almost 30 years later, I am not seeing that progress you speak about.

> The "comfy well-funded bro-club corner" (why so much envy in the phrasing?)

You deciphered it perfectly. It's envy, not going to deny the obvious. I am not making half-bad money at all but I have heard some insane numbers -- like $30k+ a month for being an AI researcher! -- and I in the meantime have to prove to my team leader that I am not completely useless even though I was recruited on the clear condition that most of what the company is working with is new to me and I'll need months to catch up. And I get times less salary. I admit I am envious of people who get to (a) do exploratory work and (b) be very handsomely rewarded for it.

I think even with that there's a good feedback that AI workers can extract from my rant: you guys are extremely privileged. Even more than a lot of programmers / sysadmins (who are already quite privileged compared to many other people).

> It is capable of a lot more than 1-2 decades ago.

There's no ill intent behind the next phrase: I am honestly not seeing it anywhere. As a very pragmatic (and aging) programmer I'll believe it when my dishwasher can reach for the dishes and cutlery in the sink and load them by itself. I'll believe it when I can leave a robot at home while taking a walk with my wife and return to a spick-and-span-clean apartment.

Which brings me to...

> If you just read the "AI" comment sections on HN it may seem everybody is just training a cat/dog classifier in Keras on ImageNet and nothing new is going on.

I am not denying that I do the same and I am likely judging this through not getting enough information. But my general intention isn't to be extremely well informed on what's happening in the area; it is more about asking the question "okay, fine, but WHEN will what you are working on be ACTUALLY useful, even a little bit, out there?".

I can see how many don't like having that question asked to them and so I guess people like me and an average AI researcher would never have a productive discussion. Damn shame. :(

[tuatoru]

I agree with you, but work is being done.

The problem is that AI isn't AGI. So a robot that can pick strawberries (exists, is in commercial use) cannot also pick apples (also a robot in commercial use). The apple robot needed its own R&D cycle. Grapes are different again, and olives, and lemons, and cherries, and almonds... And that's just horticulture.

In a highly diversified economy, it is going to take multiple decades and person-millenia of effort for the AI we have to show much impact.

[pdimitar]

Fair and understandable -- if you don't have Skynet then at least try and make the best with what you have. Cool.

It's just that in my eyes nobody is seriously trying to change the shape of the area. But I already admitted in a sibling (and much longer) comment that I am not well informed in the area -- and to be fair I don't aim to be.

I am just kind of getting disappointed that no real and tangible results are visible in society. What will the apple- or cherry-picking robots achieve save for leaving people without education jobless? Again? And they already struggle to find work anyway.

I am aware that most of us are slaves to the wage. But it's still saddening that nobody seems to take a stand and try and work on (a) something with a bigger and better social impact and (b) not laser-focused on short-term profit.