Even with all the amazing examples of progress in artificial intelligence, such as self-driving cars and the victories of AlphaGo, the technology is still very narrow in its accomplishments and far from autonomous. Indeed, says Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, today’s machine-learning systems are “AI savants.”
Etzioni, speaking today at MIT Technology Review’s annual EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco, explained that self-driving cars and speech recognition are based on machine learning. And even today, he said, 99 percent of machine learning is based on human work.
Etzioni pointed out that machine learning needs large amounts of data, all of which needs to be labeled: this is a dog; this is a cat. And then people need to supply the appropriate algorithms. All this relies on manual labor.
AI is “not something mystical. It’s not something magical,” he said. “It will take a lot of work to go beyond current capabilities.”
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