Comment on So Far, AI Is a Money Pit That Isn't Paying Off
Aceticon@lemmy.world 11 months agoAutomated 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.
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