Friday, December 31, 2021

Machine Learning is Not AI

We need to stop referring to today's machine learning as AI. It is marketing techno spin no more and no less. There is nothing intelligent about it. We are nowhere near general or even narrow artificial intelligence.

Deep Learning has Come Far

Machine learning, largely driven by deep learning has fueled an amazing explosion of solutions from image recognition to game play to language parsing and analysis, however none of this approximates human intelligence. Much like engineered systems there needs to be deeper structures and abstractions to model the world with and not just more parameters, layers and experimenting with activation functions. 

More is Not the Answer

Just adding more neurons, more deep layers and experimenting with activation functions and hyper-parameters or understanding bias vs variance is not going to get us to anything like intelligence. These concepts are all useful for better machine learning and preparing data for achieving the best predictions possible given the data available, but it is not AI. As an engineer I find it amusing to sit there and fiddle with a LSTM to get it to predict temporal events given a set of historical events and independent variables. You definitely get statistical insights into the problem you are modeling (if your data is in good shape that is), but again this is not intelligence.

GPT-X and transformers are an example of how not to do intelligence with billions and parameters and massive power consumption. There have been some cool results and solutions that have come out of all this, but it is a brainless black box pattern recognition and association - nothing wrong with that - but don't call it AI. Without incorporating higher order abstractions including causality and relationships, I don't see how today's ML and DL can be called AI.

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