This is an expert system designed for a specific, technical purpose which does not require the wholesale theft of creators' copyright intellectual property. - ThreadSky

julietemckenna.bsky.social • 80 days ago

This is an expert system designed for a specific, technical purpose which does not require the wholesale theft of creators' copyright intellectual property.

Reposted from The Guardian

AI learns to distinguish between aromas of US and Scottish whiskies

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almostconverge.kozterulethasznalatienge.day•80 days ago

it should also be noted that they (very sensibly) chose one of the simplest possible tasks in the area

pigasuspress.bsky.social•80 days ago

How about an AI-powered lie-detector to monitor all political debates, and (especially!) PMQ time?

ogre.red•80 days ago

Tongue-in-cheek commentary aside ... that actually is a pretty good example of what machine learning does best - making hyperfocused tools for specific purposes.

julietemckenna.bsky.social•79 days ago

Absolutely. These 'expert systems' are genuinely useful - and a world away from the derivative nonsense churned out by 'generative AI'. Which is of course why the LLM snake oil merchants try to pretend they are the same somehow. Time to start pushing back against that deceit, I feel.

nickpheas.bsky.social•80 days ago

And it's not AI in any useful sense. It's become a useless label applied to every aspect of computing.

stinaleicht.bsky.social•80 days ago

There are useful and helpful things that AI can do. Unfortunately the bulk of our energy, water, and company efforts are expended on the wrong things.

alexanderhay.bsky.social•80 days ago

We need to differentiate 'AI', which is becoming a toxic term, and 'advanced algorithms', which is what this system really is.

stinaleicht.bsky.social•80 days ago

i’m more interested in a thoughtful technology sector that's interested in advancing positive, useful, helpful tools.

not replacing workers, sucking up all the energy, & wrecking the environment so a billionaire can be a trillionaire & bob the troll can ‘create’ a sucky remake of mickey mouse.

alexanderhay.bsky.social•80 days ago

It's a race to the bottom, which is neither progress nor sustainable.

adamchristopher.me•80 days ago

Still uses too much energy.

wharris.bsky.social•80 days ago

Where did you find the energy use of this?

I cannot see how analyzing a dataset of 390 molecules is remotely comparable to genAI systems trained on the entirety of the public internet.

If *this* is too much energy use, we're going to have to shut down the Comp Sci departments of every university.

wharris.bsky.social•80 days ago

Nearly every comp sci grad student is doing work at this level of computational complexity. This is many, many, MANY orders of magnitude smaller in scope that any genAI system out there.

And, sure, sniffing whiskey isn't exactly breakthru science but the improvements in molecular analysis might be.

kderbyshire.bsky.social•80 days ago

An obvious application would be detecting labeling fraud of various kinds.

kderbyshire.bsky.social•80 days ago

The energy required for machine learning is pretty directly correlated to the size of the model being used. From a quick read of the underlying paper, I would guess the whisky model fits quite comfortably on a standard office computer. Not the same at all.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42004-024-01373-2

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