Automated mail sorting has been using AI to read post codes from envelopes for deacades, only back then - pre hype - it was just called Neural Networks.
That tech is almost 3 decades old.
Comment on So Far, AI Is a Money Pit That Isn't Paying Off
elbarto777@lemmy.world 11 months agoAI powered? Like what?
Aceticon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
elbarto777@lemmy.world 11 months ago
But was it using neural networks or was it using OCR algorithms?
Aceticon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
At the time I learned this at Uni (back in the early 90s) it was already NNs, not algorithms.
(This was maybe a decade before OCR became wideapread)
In fact a coursework project I did there was recognition of handwritten numbers with a neural network. The thing was amazingly good (our implementation actually had a bug and the thing still managed to be almost 90% correct on a test data set, so it somehow mostly worked its way around the bug) and it was a small NN with no need for massive training sets (which is the main difference with Large Language Models versus the more run-off-the-mill neural networks), this at a time when algorithmic number and character recognition were considered a very difficult problem.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
DudeDudenson@lemmings.world 11 months ago
I love people who talk about AI that don’t know the difference between an LLM and a bunch of if statements
TWeaK@lemm.ee 11 months ago
The key fact here is that it’s not “AI” as conventionally thought of in all the scifi media we’ve consumed over our lifetimes, but AI in the form of a product that tech companies of the day are marketing. It’s really just a complicated algorithm based off an expansive dataset, rather than something that “thinks”. It can’t come up with new solutions, only re-use previous ones; it wouldn’t be able to take one solution for one thing and apply that to a different problem. It still needs people to steer it in the right direction, and to verify its results are even accurate. However AI is now probably better than people at identifying previous problems and remembering the solution.
So, while you could say that lots of things are “powered by AI”, you can just as easily say that we don’t have any real form of AI just yet.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Oh but those pattern recognition examples are about machine learning, right? Which I guess it’s a form of AI.
TWeaK@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Perhaps, but at best it’s still a very basic form of AI, and maybe shouldn’t even be called AI. Before things like ChatGPT, the term “AI” meant a full blown intelligence that could pass a Turing test, and a Turing test is meant to prove actual artificial thought akin to the level of human thought - something beyond following mere pre-programmed instructions. Machine learning doesn’t really learn anything, it’s just an algorithm that repeatedly measures and then iterates to achieve an ideal set of values for desired variables. It’s very clever, but it doesn’t really think.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I have to disagree with you in the machine learning definition. Sure, the machine doesn’t think in those circumstances, but it’s definitely learning, if we go by what you describe what they do.
Learning is a broad concept, sure. But say, if a kid is learning to draw apples, then is successful to draw apples without help in the future, we could way that the kid achieved “that ideal set of values.”
Lmaydev@programming.dev 11 months ago
fusionchat.ai/…/10-everyday-ai-applications-you-d…
Some good examples here.
Most social media uses it. Video and music streaming services. SatNav. Translations. Banks. Hospitals. The list goes on.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Got it. Thanks.