The definitive weekly newsletter on A.I. and Deep Learning, published by Waikit Lau and Arthur Chan. Our background spans MIT, CMU, Bessemer Venture Partners, Nuance, BBN, etc. Every week, we curate and analyze the most relevant and impactful developments in A.I.
We also run Facebook’s most active A.I. group with 191,000+ members and host a weekly “office hour” on YouTube.
Editorial
Thoughts From Your Humble Curators
This week we bring you the interview of Prof. Vladmir Vapnik, creator of SVM, by Prof. Lex Friedman, the lecturer of the MIT SDC and AGI class. We also analyze the recent statement by Dr. Ilya Sutskever which he stated short-term AGI is possible.
This newsletter is published by Waikit Lau and Arthur Chan. We also run Facebook’s most active A.I. group with 181,000+ members and host an occasional “office hour” on YouTube. To help defray our publishing costs, you may donate via link. Or you can donate by sending Eth to this address: 0xEB44F762c58Da2200957b5cc2C04473F609eAA65.
Join our community for real-time discussions here: Expertify
News
Echo is Gaining Ground…..
We learned last week Amazon is now hiring 10000 workers for it Amazon Echo. That was doubled from 5000 from previous years. We also learned that all this investment starts to pay off, e.g. Microsoft is now selling Echo online and offline. At least for now, we all know that Amazon is the winner in the battle of speech assistants.
Google Health Absorbs DeepMind’s Health Business
The new Google Health group now absorbs DeepMind’s health business. It makes you wonder few things:
- Is Google Health part of Verily, an Alphabet subsidiary, or are they also separate?
- What left for DeepMind’s business other than ……. game playing now?
- What does that mean to the future of DeepMind?
One thing for sure, Google is taking a tighter grip on DeepMind now, potentially because of the bad publicity caused by DeepMind-RoyalFree event. (See Issue 20) And Verily, from what we saw, seems to be more cautious about patient privacy.
Blog Posts
AI For Everyone
deeplearning.ai just announce a new class which cater to non-technical people. So if you are thinking of preparing material for not technical staff for your company, this could be a good resource. Coming in 2019.
Short-Term AGI is a Serious Possibility, said Open AI Founder Ilya Sutskever
If you start AI only the last few years, one thing you might heard of is the possibility of AGI. You must feel remote for these ideas because they are so different from ideas such as supervised learning or reinforcement learning.
We feel the same way, AI practitioners these days are quite a different group from AGI advocates. So when Open AI Founder, Ilya Sutskever, said short-term AGI is a real possibility, you should probably take notice.
So why do people believe AGI is possible in the first place? Setting aside that some people just blindly believe in AGI. Most AGI advocates actually based their belief upon projection from technological progress. Moore’s Law is one of the most well-quoted. Here, Sutskever’s arguments are mostly based on the recent progress of deep learning. One of his arguments is that deep learning has “repeatedly and rapidly broken through ‘insurmountable’ barriers.” and he enumerated several important progress in deep learning such as Imagenet, GAN and AlphaGo.
Would his prediction comes true though? You asked. And of course, just that we can achieve something impossible few years ago, it doesn’t always mean we can do that. So say, speaking in deep learning: can we come up with a network architecture which integrate multiple senses together? Or if we can think of one, do we have enough computational power to train them?
Perhaps it begs a relevant question: how do you judge a certain prediction on AI? In our view, since they are predictions, you cannot quite verify if they are true now. Perhaps a better way to judge them is to look at the feasibility of their underlying theory. Most controversy about AI prediction such as the emergence of the more popular “Singularity” on how we can predict progress on other technologies.
We don’t pretend we have the answer. We suggest you to think independently and come up with your view.
“Math is language that uses God” – Vladimir Vapnik
Here is an interesting interview of Prof. Vladimir Vapnik by MIT Prof. Lex Friedman. Just on the two minutes segments we have several thoughts and you may listen to the whole pod cast here.
The first is what Vapnik really means. It seems to us, when Vapnik said “Math is a language that uses God”. The “God” has a sense of “deterministic”, i.e. close to the meaning when Einstein said to Niels Bohr: “God doesn’t play dice”. So this saying was more like “Math is a language which is deterministic”. And later when he wondered how reality can be described by simple language of Math. It gives us a sense that he believe that reality can be described by Math.
Perhaps the more important question is “Should reality in machine learning be described by Math?” If we see reality as data we can observed and measured, then we should be more reserved if we should blindly pursue a simple equation as descriptions. For example, when we are talking about using regression to describe a set of data, what we are looking for is the best description according to some criteria. e.g. say when we are choose the optimal number of mixtures in a Gaussian mixture model(GMM), we can use likelihood difference, or BIC etc to decide. We wonder other than actual performance metrics, we can have anything to decide upon these criteria.
All-in-all, this is a very interesting interview. We also asked Prof. Friedman on how Prof. Vapnik thinks about the rise of deep learning. Prof. Friedman promise to post another clip on AIDL again. So stay tuned.
Other Interesting News
- Uber AI Residency 2019
- Should AI makes important decisions for humans? -Pew Research
- Resnet training in 3.7 mins, but also check out fast.ai 18 mins setup?
- Baby vs Grandma – Another trolly problem which stirs AIDL members.
- Autonomous Weapon. What’s the Facts?
About Us
About Us
This newsletter is published by Waikit Lau and Arthur Chan. We also run Facebook’s most active A.I. group with 183,000+ members and host an occasional “office hour” on YouTube. To help defray our publishing costs, you may donate via link. Or you can donate by sending Eth to this address: 0xEB44F762c58Da2200957b5cc2C04473F609eAA65.
Join our community for real-time discussions here: Expertify