On limits of deep learning and where to go next with AI.
Every now and then in the discussions of AI/AGI and what not comes the central figure of that entire intellectual movement - Ray Kurzweil. And with him inevitably comes a form of an exponential chart like the one below: Basically the curve depicts Moore's law (which is not disputable), with a few additional labels suggesting that a particular computing performance is somehow equivalent to a…
If you have taken a statistics class it may have included stuff like basic measure theory. Lebesgue measures and integrals and their relations to other means of integration. If your course was math heavy (like mine was) it may have included Carathéodory's extension theorem and even basics of operator theory on Hilbert spaces , Fourier transforms etc. Most of this mathematical tooling would be…
As I child I've been raised as a catholic and I vividly remember what it was like to believe in God and all the divine entities. It does bring certain amount of comfort to our lives, removes loneliness, gives a broader sense to existence. At some point however I started questioning the things I was told and eventually became more of a deist and at this point pretty much an atheist. I don't claim…
Back in a very distant past, perhaps over 2 billion years ago, a wonderful thing happened: a strand of nucleic acid found itself encapsulated in a little protein bubble, along with a few other ingredients sufficient for it to replicate. This in fact may have happened millions of times before, each time dying out after a few generations. But one such bubble that appeared that day in the primordial…
Statisticians like to insist that correlation should not be confused with causation. Most of us intuitively understand this actually not a very subtle difference. We know that correlation is in many ways weaker than causal relationship. A causal relationship invokes some mechanics, some process by which one process influences another. A mere correlation simply means that two processes just…
For some reason, people love to be scared. People also love to spook other people, that gives them the sense of advantage, power. And in the hyper-stimulated era of social media and numerous dopamine shots per hour this dynamics takes on a completely new scale. It turns into a psychotic rumbling between complete and unquestionable excitement only to turn in minutes to fear mongering utter…
I was raised in a rational family, with strong belief in science. When I got my masters degree a was pretty much convinced that we generally know everything about the world and that science is more or less a complete endeavor. By the time I got my PhD however, my confidence dropped quite significantly. Now almost 13 years after my PhD defense, my view is that science is actually a rather fragile…
In the modern era of computers and data science, there is a ton of things discussed that are of "statistical" nature. Data science essentially is glorified statistics with a computer, AI is deeply statistical at its very core, we use statistical analysis for pretty much everything from economy to biology. But what actually is it? What exactly does it mean that something is statistical? The short…
It's time for another post in the Tesla FSD series, which is a part of a general self driving car debacle discussed in this blog since 2016 [ 1, 2 , 3, 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. In summary, the thesis of this blog is that AI hasn't reached the necessary understanding of physical reality to become truly autonomous and hence the contemporary AI contraptions cannot be trusted with important decisions such as…
There is a never ending discussion, which very concisely can be summarized in this tweet below: And frankly any time I see similar exchanges (and I see a lot of them) I get mildly irritated. Let me get to the essence. Computer analogy Computers have been undoubtably the shaping invention of the recent century and hence they have became a strong theme in our culture. Since the theory on which…
The pandemic has largely overwhelmed the news cycle over the past year and hence influencing and largely deflating the AI hype train. There were a few developments though which I'd consider significant. Some of them very well predicted by articles in this blog, and some surprising. Let's jump right in. Million Robotaxis in wonderland Since it is 2021 after all, the most immediate AI flop is…
2020 is a very strange year and a dumpster fire in many respects. Everything is still holding together but it feels like the news we get are just progressively more absurd. Similarly is the case with AI where a slow motion train wreck is progressing eliminating more and more hyped up companies and researchers. There are still areas where money is pouring into the field, but it feels like it's a…
Intro Since many of my posts were mostly critical and arguably somewhat cynical [ 1 ], [ 2 ], [ 3 ], at least over the last 2-3 years, I decided to switch gears a little and let my audience know I'm actually a very constructive, busy building stuff most of the time, while my ranting on the blog is mostly a side project to vent, since above everything I'm allergic to naive hype and nonsense.…
I've started contemplating this post in mid February 2020 while driving back from Phoenix to San Diego, a few miles after passing Yuma, while staring into the sunset over San Diego mountains on the horizon hundred miles ahead. Since then the world had changed. And by the time you'll read this post a week from now (early April 2020) world will have changed again. And by the summer of 2020 it will…
California DMV disengagements reports are out for 2019 , and it is time to plot some data. As usual, these number are not really measuring reliably the safety of AV's and there are plenty ways to game them, or overreport. Please refer to my last years post for a deeper discussion (and 2017 post here, 2018 post here ) on why these numbers are essentially flawed. Nevertheless these are the only…