On: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

[__loam]

People will spout off about how machine learning is based on the brain while having no idea how the brain works.

[gary_0 → __loam]

It is based on the brain, but only in the loosest possible terms; ML is a cargo cult of biology. It's kind of surprising that it works at all.

[Borg3 → gary_0]

It works because well, its actually pretty primitive at its core. Whole learning process is actually pretty brutal. Doing millions of interations w/ random (and semi-random) adjustments.

[Terr_ → Borg3]

I think I've fallen into the "it's just a very fancy kind of lossy compression" camp.

[eli_gottlieb → gary_0]

Honestly once you understand maximum-likelihood estimation, empirical risk minimization, automatic differentiation, and stochastic gradient descent, it's not that much of a surprise it works.