back to article Don't fall for the AI hype: Here are the ingredients you need to build an actual useful thing

Artificial intelligence these days is sold as if it were a magic trick. Data is fed into a neural net – or black box – as a stream of jumbled numbers, and voilà! It comes out the other side completely transformed, like a rabbit pulled from a hat. That's possible in a lab, or even on a personal dev machine, with carefully …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The problem is

    Tell all of that to the MSM media and get them to change... Good luck...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The problem is

      Does that change come from an ATM machine?

  2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    You forgot one of the most essential elements. A hip brand name.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Before / After

    Before "AI", Google image search used to give an exact match in the form of a phrase someone might use. Basically a reverse lookup.

    After "AI", Google image search gives only a generic category, and images that are only broadly similar.

    Everything is worse with "AI".

    1. CharlieM

      Re: Before / After

      On the plus side, I can now go to the Google Photos app and search for photos of dogs and see just the photos of dogs. Without me ever having to tag each dog photo. That feels like a step forward to me!

  4. CharlieM

    If you want to skip the hype

    If you want to skip the hype and actually see what AI looks like. Watch this Google Talk.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4alGiomYP4

    It's not supposed to require a PHD apparently, although after watching it I think it certainly helps!

    It's interesting, although clearly little more than the Hello World of Machine Learning. So its pretty clear that most "enterprise" developers are unlikely to be dropping low level ML models into their next project. That's probably why Googles starting to also offer some "AI" as a Service APIs. So you can treat it as a magic black box, and pay Google to do the thinking for you.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The money quote

    "The reality is most startups don’t have enough data for it to be useful."

    And this where the legacy companies have a leg up if they take advantage of the opportunity.

  6. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    A.I. "There's a lot of hype..."

    Yes. Here are some things I've noticed over the years; offered in case they help.

    "A.I. There's a lot of hype..." El Reg (2017).

    "A.I. is hard." This dates back to Minsky I think. Everybody keeps forgetting it every ten years.

    "A.I. is hard, especially outdoors." Mine. Applies to self-driving cars. If you understand what Minsky means by "hard", then you'd be very cautious about standing in front of self-braking Volvos, or Teslas speeding towards you.

    "A.I. outdoors needs senses." Sight, hearing, touch, smell... Self-Driving Cars will need hearing and smell. Plus vibration detectors.

    Google Deep Dream suggests a conceptual approach to visualize exactly what it is that your artificial neural net has *actually* learned. Nobody seems to have noticed this connection.

    Cheers.

  7. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    "There's a lot of hype, and the reality is..the technology is..very raw and difficult to implement "

    Could have been written in the 80's

    Or the 90's

    or the 00's

    And as we come to the end of the 2nd decade of the 21st century.....

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Garbage in

    Garbage out

    1. Dr Stephen Jones

      Re: Garbage in

      Cats out

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Garbage in

      More like meticulous sets of training data in, garbage out.

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