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Would you pay to keep this woman in your house? [message #97364] Fri, 19 January 2024 10:03 Go to next message
Rusty is currently offline  Rusty
Messages: 1195
Registered: May 2018
Location: Kansas City Missouri
Illuminati (3rd Degree)
Me. Capital H no. The general public should be questionably skeptical also. ALEXA hasn't been the profit generating platform as hoped for. So Amazon's thinking of making her a privilege to have around by charging for the service. Good luck with that.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/alexa-is-in-trouble-paid-for-alexa-gives-inaccurate-answers-in-early-demos/
Re: Would you pay to keep this woman in your house? [message #97365 is a reply to message #97364] Fri, 19 January 2024 12:07 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Wayne Parham is currently offline  Wayne Parham
Messages: 18792
Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)

LOL! Laughing

Yes, we're all used to these chatbots being free, and also the voice assistants like Alexa. So nobody is going to want to pay for them.

And even more an issue - in my opinion - is the accuracy problem with neural networks. Assistants like Alexa tend to be narrow AI applications that have pretty tight "guardrails." They only can respond to a fairly narrow set of specific things that they've been trained on. This makes them act a little more like rules-based systems, which don't stray off their knowledgebases.

General-purpose AI is exposed to a lot more training data, so it can respond to a lot more topics. But that also means it can make a lot more inferences that don't track with reality. So general-purpose AI has a problem with accuracy.

But if you think about it, accuracy is even more of a problem with human neural networks, especially politicians. Very Happy

Jokes aside, the whole mechanism of neural networks prevents them from acting in the ways we normally associate as "computer behavior," which is rules-based and deterministic. There is no guarantee of accuracy from any neural network. It is literally a statistical inference engine, and it gains its "understanding" from training data that is inaccurate and incomplete.

Hopefully its training data is mostly accurate, but even if its perfect, it isn't complete. Nothing ever can be. The whole underpinnings of machine intelligence tell us that, right from the start, when guys like Alan Turing and John von Neumann studied Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem and started making thinking machines using that understanding.

There are always holes in our understanding, and in those holes, inference fills in the blank spots. Sometimes its with useful stuff, but as often as not, it's nonsense. A good machine then studies what it puts in those holes, and attempts to test it to see if its useful or not. If useful, that's good knowledge. If not, its nonsense that should be discarded.

But our machine learning systems haven't quite gotten there yet. We're moving our systems in that direction, but they're not there yet. Neither are the meat-suit artificial intelligences that walk this planet. Smile
Re: Would you pay to keep this woman in your house? [message #97366 is a reply to message #97365] Fri, 19 January 2024 12:46 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Rusty is currently offline  Rusty
Messages: 1195
Registered: May 2018
Location: Kansas City Missouri
Illuminati (3rd Degree)
Good for you Wayne that you're keeping your social connections open after the hole put in your heart recently. You're very resilient and healthy for it. Some would succumb to the dark side of dealing with tragedy. My commendations to you.
Yeah, the meat puppets wearing suits are what the Alexa enterprise is all about. Not pushing the envelope of human understanding and enlightenment.
Re: Would you pay to keep this woman in your house? [message #97368 is a reply to message #97366] Fri, 19 January 2024 12:57 Go to previous message
Wayne Parham is currently offline  Wayne Parham
Messages: 18792
Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)

Thanks for your kind words.

Staying busy is a coping mechanism for me. If I'm not busy with people "in the real world," then I get busy thinkin' thoughts and those definitely take me to dark places. Sometimes sad, sometimes mad. I guess that's probably normal grieving and I'm sure I'll be on this emotional roller-coaster for quite some time.
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