this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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If you want something more complex than an alarm clock, this does kinda work for anything. Emphasis on "kinda."
Neural networks are universal approximators. People get hung-up on the approximation part, like that cancels out the potential in... universal. You can make a model that does any damn thing. Only recently has that seriously meant you and can - backpropagation works, and it works on video-game hardware.
"AI is whatever hasn't been done yet" has been the punchline for decades. For any advancement in the field, people only notice once you tell them it's related to AI, and then they just call it "AI," and later complain that it's not like on Star Trek.
And yet it moves. Each advancement makes new things possible, and old things better. Being right most of the time is good, actually. 100% would be better than 99%, but the 100% version does not exist, so 99% is better than never.
Telling the grifters where to shove it should not condemn the cool shit they're lying about.
I’m not sure we’re disagreeing very much, really.
My main point WRT “kinda” is that there are a tonne of applications that 99% isn’t good enough for.
For example, one use that all the big players in the phone world seem to be pushing ATM is That of sorting your emails for you. If you rely on that and it classifies an important email as unimportant so you miss it, then that’s actually a useless feature. Either you have to check all your emails manually yourself, in which case it’s quicker to just do that in the first place and the AI offers no value, or you rely on it and end up missing something that it es important you didn’t miss.
And it doesn’t matter if it gets it wrong one time in a hundred, that one time is enough to completely negate all potential positives of the feature.
As you say, 100% isn’t really possible.
I think where it’s useful is for things like analysing medical data and helping coders who know what they’re doing with their work. In terms of search it’s also good at “what’s the name of that thing that’s kinda like this?”-type queries. Kind of the opposite of traditional search engines where you’re trying to find out information about a specific thing, where i think non-Google engines are still better.
Your example of catastrophic failure is... e-mail? Spam filters are wrong all the time, and they're still fantastic. Glancing in the folder for rare exceptions is cognitively easier than categorizing every single thing one-by-one.
If there's one false negative, you don't go "Holy shit, it's the actual prince of Nigeria!"
But sure, let's apply flawed models somewhere safe, like analyzing medical data. What?
Obviously fucking not.
Even in car safety, a literal life-and-death context, a camera that beeps when you're about to screw up can catch plenty of times where you might guess wrong. Yeah - if you straight-up do not look, and blindly trust the beepy camera, bad things will happen. That's why you have the camera and look.
If a single fuckup renders the whole thing worthless, I have terrible news about human programmers.