Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by i_like_apis 1250 days ago
First off, your tone is bad.

ML is currently capable of the tiger case you mention. It’s generally called “few-shot” or “one-shot” learning. In the context of an image generation model, having never seen a tiger before, if you show it a few pictures of a tiger, it could immediately draw you thousands of tigers in any variation or scenario you can think of, which is way more than a child can do.

As for the need to train on millions of images for the base model, I believe you are trying to say something about “sample efficiency”, and how ML differs from the brain in this regard outside of the few/one-shot contexts (which ML is absolutely capable of). I would argue that sample efficiency of the brain is actually also quite low, much lower than people assume. It’s irrelevant to an argument that ML is not superior, because ML is clearly is capable of learning richer, more effective representations in a shorter wall time than we can, whether it is sample efficient or not. And in the sample efficient few/one-shot contexts (learning what a tiger looks like from one picture), it also outperforms humans in speed accuracy and creativity. It’s not even close.

As for classification errors, ML is capable of some errors we are not, actually by virtue of being superior at learning representations we are not even close to being capable of learning. But those are edge cases, and they are fixed by various means. In the main cases, ML outperforms humans in speed, accuracy and class complexity, all exponentially.

You said something about graph approximation but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m talking about learning and you’re complaining that machine learning is not “logical reasoning”. Whether ML is currently capable of logical reasoning is another discussion. Certain models do demonstrate some types of it today.

“Graph approximation” is a type of learning task. ML is a billion times better than humans at it so it also doesn’t help you argue that ML isn’t superior (in that regard).