A chess computer isn't magic because you know that it is basically searching the game tree very fast with some heuristics. Neural networks are not like that. You know that it's a network of activation functions, but how that solves so many AI tasks is still more or less a mystery. So maybe the AI effect will be less strong with deep learning.
I disagree that neural networks are necessarily mysterious. In most cases they can be straightforwardly understood as brute-force function approximation (approximation here meaning mostly interpolation, in some cases capable of a limited degree of extrapolation). You take many samples of a function (either because you have a huge data set, or because you can actually sample with a simulator), and incrementally modify a large network to slowly converge it towards an accurate approximation of the function. The advent of very large data sets and GPU training made this possible, but the tech is pretty well understood, at least at the level of a 5-mile-high view.
Of course, but compared to how chess algorithms work it remains far more mysterious how exactly that produces an english description of a grid of pixel values.
Probably only because every CS undergrad or self-trained person sees at least a few search algorithms. So although they probably couldn't write a performant chess-playing program, they get the general idea.
I expect in 20 years undergraduate curricula evolve to cover NNs, and then those courses will have their salient bits adopted into mass market expository books/blog posts/code examples/etc. At that point someone like you will be saying something like you said about whatever the new hotness is.
> A chess computer isn't magic because you know that it is basically searching the game tree very fast with some heuristics
Yep, we know, the consecrated expression for this point is "they just used clever tricks".
But at some point these clever tricks add up to something akin to imagination or intuition. Do you think humans are not made of "clever tricks" too? Could it be possible that we humans have the magic fairy dust of real intelligence sprinkled in our brains and machines are lesser than us?
