From a research perspective, this is a win, and I dont want to downplay it.
Its interesting to consider this is the context of deepmind and other "commercial" AI research shops though, and how it stack up against the promises made about AI. One way to look at the headline is that researchers finally found something AI can do, and it turned out to be in some obscure area of number theory. Again, this is cool from a research perspective, connecting to disparate subjects to get a result. But if this is the kind of thing we're finding that AI is good at, what does it say about the commercial hype around it?
It's totally impressive! I'm excited for the future of DeepMind and to see what other kinds of things we can build from neural networks. I'm just saying that we have to be careful with what kind of intelligence we ascribe to an algorithm like this. An AI is not going to take over the world by impressing us with its game-playing skills.
While I agree with other commenters and also with the article, that this is not like „boom, DeepMind magically speeds up everything and you have to look in more detail at numerical stability etc depending on your use case, there is still something big in here: in the past algorithms were an almost exclusive product of long and deep thinking of experts. Now we saw that AI can be used for algorithm discovery. This can actually have quite big impact.
All tiny improvements can add up, some improvement in sorting, some in matrix multiplication, some in lookups, you get the point. All that can accumulate to business advantages.
As someone not familiar with AI - I'm wondering if this is really as simple and revolutionary as the article states? MIT is kind of known for highly optimistic press releases that maybe oversell sometimes, which makes it hard to know what's actually a real breakthrough sometimes
The way it is understanding and interpreting the queries I find amazing. Seems like a big step in AI (to the public at least).
The results are equally interesting, i hope it can live up to the hype.
what a weird moment to take a stab at AI, right now when all the projects are starting to bear fruit and we can see advances that remind me of moore's law in the 90s.
these projects have direct commercial applications right now.
It's an exciting time for sure. To the layman this feels like the first real progress we've had towards AI since the 70s. It seems like the field kind of wandered off into the realms of pure mathematics for a few decades with little tangible progress, but now we're getting stories every few weeks about how computers can recognize objects in pictures or compose new music or whatever.
Can everyone please share their thoughts on how significant of a breakthrough this is, how do you see this being applied in the world of AI, and what are some use cases in the consumer realm?
The most interesting thing about this is that it shows significant progress towards goal-oriented AI. The fact this system is effectively learning what "win" means in the context of a game is something of a breakthrough.
Lots of leading AI researchers actually are taking it seriously, including of course OpenAI, and recently Geoffrey Hinton who basically invented deep learning.
Its interesting to consider this is the context of deepmind and other "commercial" AI research shops though, and how it stack up against the promises made about AI. One way to look at the headline is that researchers finally found something AI can do, and it turned out to be in some obscure area of number theory. Again, this is cool from a research perspective, connecting to disparate subjects to get a result. But if this is the kind of thing we're finding that AI is good at, what does it say about the commercial hype around it?
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