You may remember your first wide-eyed year at a new school, surrounded by senior students who dismissed you as “clueless” or “naive”. And like all of us, you simply lacked enough experience with the world.
The joys and perils of being naive
Many authors and celebrities have romanticized the virtues of naivete and the fresh, unbiased view of the world that comes with it. But naivete, generally speaking, is a dangerous trait out there in the wild. One could easily be taken advantage of, perhaps bamboozled, or worse, a joke could fly right over your head.
A lack of worldliness can leave you vulnerable. Education by firehose
Most machine learning systems start out more naive than you might think. But they overcome a lack of experience in one of two ways:
- Big Data Systems: Throw millions of data points at the problem, constantly training the algorithms and models, and hope it’s enough.
- Brute Force Systems: Manually tune results by leaning on humans to classify and point out exceptions.
Luminoso, on the other hand, doesn’t require these manual steps to stand on solid ground. Instead, it starts with 28 million facts about how the world works, needs only a few hundred documents to begin, and is ready to go in minutes with 13 languages in its arsenal. And the best part, is that Luminoso is automatic, meaning it learns unsupervised and adapts on the fly to new terminology.
Common Sense trumps naivete
There’s a growing movement in Machine Language and Artificial Intelligence; a belief that piling on more data can only get you so far. Notably, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen announced a $125M investment in AI2 (common sense AI) stating that “If we want AI to approach human abilities and have the broadest possible impact in research, medicine, and business, we need to fundamentally advance AI’s common sense abilities.”
Luminoso agrees with this approach. Through their involvement in initiatives like the Open Mind Common Sense project, our co-founders have previously written and presented about the incredible importance of ridding AI of naivete. Common sense has been an accepted AI term for over a decade, but with the recent attention it’s getting, the machine learning world is starting to pay attention to the importance of a little experience.
Maybe soon, our AIs won’t be teased by its human senior students for being so darn naive.
