The AI hoax: The genius algorithm
Sometimes a very impressive algorithmic achievement is done and it should be celebrated. GPT-3 is a great example. GPT-3 is amazing engineering and data science and very well deserved it gets a lot of media attention. But for every GPT-3 there are hundreds of thousands of AI solutions, that are based on standard algorithms and not necessarily a genius achievement but a school book approach.
It might sound like I’m having a go at many AI solutions out there but in fact it’s the other way around. Going for a groundbreaking genius solution is for the vast majority of AI-cases not the right way to go. The standard algorithms can in most cases easily be sufficient for the task at hand and everything beyond that effort is usually bad business.
Beware when someone claims a genius or even special algorithm
Given all this I still hear a lot about the “unique”, “genius” or “special” algorithm that some company has developed to solve a problem. I often hear terms like this in the media and the fact that this is so popular makes a lot of sense. When you have a business that you want to market and sell your product at a high price. It also helps to scare competition away when they think that the entry barrier to make a certain product or solution is very high. But that is what the genius algorithm is 99 out of a 100 times. A marketing message.
In reality much of the AI out there is standard algorithms such as CNN’s, Random Forest or even logistics regression that some would claim isn’t even AI. These algorithms can be used by most novice developers by using freely available frameworks such as Tensorflow or Scikit learn.
My primary reason to write this post is the same as for a lot of our posts I’m writing. I want to demystify AI and by killing the narrative about the genius algorithm I hope more people will have the chance to utilize AI.
So when you hear these claims, be critical and don’t let it be the reason not to get started with AI.
The media is at fault
I’m not usually one to call “the fake media”, but in this case of AI I fell that the media has not lived up to it’s responsibility and a a naive way followed the hype and corporate press releases without taking the critical look that is in many ways what separates the news outlets from other information sources.
I often wonder how the danish(Where I live) news stations can have an Egypt correspondent but not an AI or even deep tech correspondent. The events in Egypt might not be as important to the everyday life in my and many other countries than AI is starting to have.
I really hope the media will improve here and not keep AI in a mystified aura.
The future of AI-algorithms
I’m pretty sure the future for AI-algorithms are a given. The big tech companies like OpenAI, Deepmind, Google, Facebook and Apple will be the ones to develop the genius algorithms and very often release them into the wild for everyone to use. It’s already happening and we will only see more of this. So claiming to have a genius algorithm is just not very likely a true claim in the future.
