Not only is this not obsolete, it’s close to biographical as it closely references the first and second Artificial Intelligence Winters. The first being in the 60s. We’ve been working on these for a long time, so 5 years is short. It took until GPGPU to kick into full gear and some clever insights to get Deep Learning up and running (somewhat attributed to work published in 2011) to start reliably on this problem, and even that is an oversimplification of the timeline and the scope.
Others have mentioned oddities like the difficulty of subject matter (picture contains a bird vs picture of a bird) but there are a lot harder problems that are trivial to humans and counterintuitively incredibly hard for computers.
Even with AI models that can identify that there are birds in the picture. Having it decide with accuracy that the picture is of a bird is still a hard problem.
I remember this one. It seems as spot on now as it was then, IMO. It’s not trying to say that object detection is magic or impossible, since it was totally possible then as well. It just requires a dedicated team + time + money to pay them, which is what this comic was trying to express. It is true there are more off-the-shelf software available for newer programmers now than there was before, so dev time is shorter, but that’s more just degrees of comfort / budget as opposed to anything fundamentally different.
It could have been the other way around if global positioning systems were either not developed or used only by the military. In that case, detecting scenery of a park could be easier than trying to figure out the position on the map.
Or it could just be that maps data are not shared. You’ll need to hire boats and hire people to go and draw the map.
That’s true, even if the specific example doesn’t hold, the core concept does. If I needed to implement a bird detector today, I’d make an API call to AWS Rekognition or an equivalent service. It would take me a day or two to learn the API and then maybe 4 hours to actually implement. But if you asked me to implement a bird species detector, I’m pretty sure there is no off the shelf API capable of that, and I would indeed need months or years.
Off the shelf… no… though I’ve been rather impressed at the accuracy of the iPhone. There’s this little i in a circle that has a star in the corner which will do a “let me try to match this”. I believe its only a matter of time before this becomes more accessible.
I haven’t used a computer to id birds before, so I’ll take your word for it. That being said I know that programs I’ve tried are entirely incapable of identifying mushrooms (or even getting in the correct family sometimes). This may just be an issue of lack data, bc a lot of what I do to id is fairly simple and formulaic. On the other hand I use a lot of context clues which may not be readily apparent ig
Why do you think it’s obsolete? I suppose nowadays we can use AI generative models to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible, but it still can be hard.
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