Daniel Rocha <[email protected]> wrote:
> There isn't,though, any meaningful advance in AI for decades. What happens > is the massive feed of data for very repetitive tasks in a very narrow > field of expertise. > Your information is out of date. It is true there was little progress for many decades, and for a while in the 1990s and early 2000s, progress was mainly from massive databases. That is how Google made progress in machine translation, for example. However, in the last 5 or 10 years, there have been breakthroughs in neural network technology. It has been improved with multi-level networks, where one network produces output for another, which passes output to another, and so on. This has resulted in things like AI programs that recognize a photo of a cat taken from just about any angle, and programs that can even synthesize a generalized image of a cat. These programs work much better than previous ones. Previous ones would look at something like a meaningless pattern of stripes or dots and indicate that was a picture of a giraffe (or some other off the wall choice). Neural networks go way back in AI research, but in previous implementations they were only one layer deep. For a long time, the neural network approach was more or less abandoned. Until someone thought of the multi-level improvement. The results of the new approach are dramatic. They include things like the program that beat the world's best Go player, and a dramatic improvement in the quality of Google translate. Do a search for: google translate improved with neural networks . . . and you will find many articles about this. Such as: "The Great AI Awakening:" https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html The article quotes a translation of this sentence in Spanish by Borges: Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído. The old Google translate system rendered this: One is not what is for what he writes, but for what he has read. The new one: You are not what you write, but what you have read. That's astounding. - Jed
