yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible” and directly notes we’ve spent 50 years trying. it’s just a really interesting perspective that it was a recent truism that this stuff is virtually impossible, and we’ve solved it and a huge number of other very difficult problems in less than a decade.
I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable. I feel like you missed the point on purpose in order to have a hot take.
yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible”
We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.
I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.
The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.
yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible” and directly notes we’ve spent 50 years trying. it’s just a really interesting perspective that it was a recent truism that this stuff is virtually impossible, and we’ve solved it and a huge number of other very difficult problems in less than a decade.
I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable. I feel like you missed the point on purpose in order to have a hot take.
We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.
The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.
In short: post title is dumb.