Wiretrip

Not just Altman, but also Amodei, Pichai and Nadella. These guys are desperate now.

Yes but the main thrust of his criticism is the fragility of the whole 'AI' stack, where every part of the stack is unprofitable, unstable and inter-reliant - if any one of those parts goes tits up - everybody else goes with them.

Also, a lot of AI 'users' arrive, search for an actual use case, find none, and then move on.

Actually I think it's 52% <ducks> :-)

You've got to remember that the average IQ is 100. There are a lot of people in the UK below this, just look at Brexit and who we elected, sigh....

I would love to see an article about how people pronounce some of the strange names and acronyms we have ended up with. Quick survey? 'etc', 'gif', 'uefi', 'wget', 'cifs' ?

Yes it was real. My fav phrase to describe the work was 'KY2K Jelly - helps you insert 4 digits where only 2 would go before' :-)

PDF is, without a doubt, one of the worst file formats ever produced and should really be destroyed with fire... That said, as long as you think of PDF as an image format it's less soul destroying to deal with.

Totally agree. I worked on a project that had to try and extract tables from PDFs. It is much harder that it would first appear.

Agreed. I discounted that becuase of the cost but I guess there's the community edition!

Actually a very good alternative would be Java and JavaFX, maybe using Eclipse as the IDE.

Positive reasons: 1) It runs out of the box without and Internet ocnnection. 2) The IDE is extremely good. 3) It teaches OOP and memory management (something often forgotten by today's programmers). 4) It is capable of giving very low level access to the host machine (like C). 5) You can even use (and teach) tricky things like pointers.

I am a professional programmer and I still use Delphi. It's great!

Agreed. I still use Delphi (7) to write Windows apps (and Lazarus to port them to Linux MacOS). Not everything is web based.

They may be slightly safer for the occupants of the car, but the height factor kills 30% more pedestrians and in actual fact accident fatalities are up as a result of SUVs as they incite risk-taking behaviour and roll over in accidents much more readliy. Additionally, they only have to accede to truck safety regulations with are less stringent than those for cars. I can point you to loads of papers and articles on this. They purely are a marketing ploy as they are more profitable vehicles for the manufacturers. BTW those MPG ratings are shit by today's standards; most cars do 45MPG+.

Yes of course. But nobody would ever argue that a van is a better vehicle than a normal sized car for moving people around (unless you have a massive family). SUVs are a profitable marketing trend for car companies and nothing more. We are literally burning the planet and people's insecurities are being exploited to persuade them into oversized and (thus poorly performing) vehicles.

Yes true, but I was really referring more to SUVs. Worldwide there is a real problem with this trend, and it is nearly all marketing. Certainly the average school run in the UK does not benefit form the extensive use of SUVs.

It looks like something my son would have designed when he was 5.

The problem is, they're just bad vehicles. They don't handle well, they guzzle fuel and they kill more pedestrians. There is no point in them unless you're a farmer.

A classic example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY&feature=youtu.be...

Ha! Superb! That neatly describes the state of politics in the USA and the UK at the moment....

Just to add that Musk was not a Paypal founder either. In fact they absorbed his company and promptly fired him for making stupid decisions.

"These guys are working on something No one has EVER done in the history of mankind" - erm people were making electric cars before ICE ones!

Let's face it, it would have been called 'The Dildo', not 'The Tulip'.

GDPR is a good question as I'm not sure they can 'waive' the GDPR rights. There is an ongoing court case in the EU at present.

OK, under most circumstances that is a fair point, and I personally hate astroturfers, but in this case I feel the comment was equally valid as an answer to two threads that were physically separate - and could have ended up in vastly different places. If there is a way to link to an existing comment then let me know and I'll use that method in future :-)

There are tonnes of other approaches to machine learning that don't involve backprop! There are also other approaches to neural netwroks that don't use backprop (have a look at Numenta's stuff for example). I suggest you watch Pat Winston's brilliant MIT AI lectures to see how huge the range of techniques is.

Quantum will be the next 'AI', like blockchain was the last one. :-)

In the text generation tool outlined above (and indeed many of the convnet-based visual networks), the hidden layers are there precisely to extract 'meaning'. The lower layers (closer to the source input) deal with syntax and feed upwards to hidden layers that extract semantic features, which in turn feed upwards to more layers, each with a bigger overview of the semantic features and thus ultimately the context. That's the idea anyway.

For a real emperor's new clothes moment, look at SpinVox!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinVox

Exactly, we are in a very early phase. However, the hype wave is driving a dangerous level of premature deployment of half-baked parlour tricks or the over reliance on simple algorithms where there are real consequences. i.e. prison sentences and insurance eligibility and yes, autonomous vehicles.