With all the recent hype around AI, I feel that a lot of people don't understand how it works and how it is useful. AI is useful at solving certain types of problems that are really difficult using traditional programming, like finding patterns that aren't obvious to us.

For example, object recognition is about finding patterns in images. Our brains are great at this, but writing a computer program capable of taking pixels and figuring out if the pattern is there is very hard.

Even if AI is sometimes going to misclassify objects, it can still be useful. For example, in a factory you can use AI to find defects in the production line. Even if you don't get it perfect, going from 100 defects per 1M products to 10 per million is a huge difference and saves the factory a lot of money.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 46 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Agree, but the joke to me is business folks thinking AI is a miracle and they can just shove it everywhere to print money. Where us devs know what you mean, and would like to add it in where it makes sense. Business thinks it's ready to replace us.

[–] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 points 9 months ago

The key to "AI" is having a human there to take algorithms and apply them to the right problems.

This is what most people don't understand because many of the demos are quite impressive and narrowly tailored to prevent the fact from being obvious unless you know what you're looking for.

[–] LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago

Most useful application so far seems to have been to predict protein folding. Have to check up on that, it should allow to cure all sorts of bad things.