And while AI certainly holds massive potential for solving these and many more challenges of an increasingly connected world, in a recent interview with Wired, Jerome Pesenti, PhD, Facebook’s vice president of AI discussed its clear and present limitations and warned against overhyping the technology.
“Deep learning and current AI, if you are really honest, has a lot of limitations. We are very, very far from human intelligence, and there are some criticisms that are valid: It can propagate human biases, it’s not easy to explain; it doesn’t have common sense, it’s more on the level of pattern matching than robust semantic understanding,” he said.
Dr. Pesenti, who previously held leadership roles on IBM’s Watson team and at BenevolentAI, also discussed the difficulties of scaling AI.
“The rate of progress is not sustainable,” he said. “If you look at top experiments, each year the cost is going up tenfold. Right now, an experiment might be in seven figures, but it’s not going to go to nine or 10 figures, it’s not possible, nobody can afford that.”
He continued, “It means that at some point we’re going to hit the wall. In many ways we already have. Not every area has reached the limit of scaling, but in most places, we’re getting to a point where we really need to think in terms of optimization, in terms of cost benefit, and we really need to look at how we get most out of the compute we have. This is the world we are going into.”
That optimization includes taking a more realistic approach to AI: “We need to explain that it’s useful, but don’t overhype it. It doesn’t serve us to claim it can do things it cannot. And I don’t need to overhype it to justify the existence of my team,” Dr. Pesenti said.
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