AI Hype and the Opportunists

I recently watched this talk by Zachary Lipton. The talk is two years old but still relevant, important, and informative.

Machine Learning: The Opportunity and the Opportunists - MIT Technology Review

Here are a few things that stuck out for me on this matter -

• Excitement + Ignorance = Misinformation

• AI/ML is currently in the same phase that the dot com boom was in the 90s. Back then, anyone who could get a website registered was considered a software expert. And now anyone can become
  – a self-appointed AI authority or influencer with limited or no technical expertise.
  – or can get into positions of authority by throwing money at the problem.
• Some researchers try to anthropomorphize their technology to sensationalize things — such as calling answer prediction models, text comprehension. ( I think it is okay to attempt to catch the attention of your readers with fancy words/phrases, but the readers have to be wary and discerning while reading the text)
• The number of people who can train neural networks has blown up, but the number of people who can reason about it, unfortunately, has not. By reasoning about neutral networks, I mean thinking about things like when might this network break or what the results might mean in a qualitative sense. ( which is why concepts like causality are probably necessary).

Do listen to the whole talk; it is pretty short and might be worth the time.