VIA Joins In The AI Race, Linux/Android Support For Their New Developer Kit

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VIA Joins In The AI Race, Linux/Android Support For Their New Developer Kit

It's been a while since last seeing any interesting products out of VIA with having been focusing on digital signage solutions and fabricating some basic ARM boards. The company has been exploring deep learning and AI and today announced the VIA Edge AI Developer Kit...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VIA-Edge-AI-Developer-Kit

[GunpowaderGuy]

Khronos needs to consider prioritizing replacing open cl with vulkan

[schmidtbag]

Khronos needs to consider prioritizing replacing open cl with vulkan

Why? To my understanding, most of the benefits of Vulkan (in particular, the reduced PCIe bandwidth) is largely irrelevant when it comes to OpenCL tasks. Also from what I heard, Vulkan is not a drop-in replacement to OpenCL, because there are some things they do differently from each other (mostly related to shaders).
Where Vulkan makes for a more sensible use-case is either repeated short bursts of data to be calculated, or, if anything graphical is involved. But from what I've noticed, most OpenCL tasks can run for several minutes to hours at a time, and are headless.

[cybertraveler]

At this point I'm wondering if these devs working on AI are trolling the general public. Look at the logo they chose to use. They shape some lines in the shape of a brain and show a humanoid robotic arm pointing or pressing something. This all plays into this fantasy idea that AI development is about producing sentient beings which interact with humanity as equals. If you look into the narrow AI research and work actually being performed, it's pretty much all just about cleverly designed algorithms that self-optimize based on large tagged, data sets or by repeating simulations 1000s of times and making minor tweaks to their parameters each time to get better scores. The general public generally don't understand what it is they are doing. All they've got are mental images of sentient robots taking over

One thing the general population do have right is that this AI tech will indeed take over many of their jobs. It's not because of a nefarious, AI orchestrated, nefarious, mass human-slavery plan though. It's simply because people have foolishly demanded and supported legally imposed high minimum wages and a huge amount of burdensome, legislative requirements of their employers. Their employers are quite wisely looking for a cheaper alternative to dealing with these really risky, awkward and expensive humans. If they can pay one narrow AI developer to tune and maintain an algorithm and some computers to perform a job that previously 10 people did, then they are probably going to reduce costs and more importantly reduce the huge business risk of dealing with humans.

[numacross]

At this point I'm wondering if these devs working on AI are trolling the general public.

Imagine there's 2 teams bidding for funding. Team A is solving a real, useful, but ultimately boring problem and is not good at marketing while team B does this:

"We're currently working on a AI blockchain edge serverless coffee machine!"

"That sounds innovative! Here's your millions of dollars."

[WolfpackN64]

At this point I'm wondering if these devs working on AI are trolling the general public. Look at the logo they chose to use. They shape some lines in the shape of a brain and show a humanoid robotic arm pointing or pressing something. This all plays into this fantasy idea that AI development is about producing sentient beings which interact with humanity as equals. If you look into the narrow AI research and work actually being performed, it's pretty much all just about cleverly designed algorithms that self-optimize based on large tagged, data sets or by repeating simulations 1000s of times and making minor tweaks to their parameters each time to get better scores. The general public generally don't understand what it is they are doing. All they've got are mental images of sentient robots taking over

One thing the general population do have right is that this AI tech will indeed take over many of their jobs. It's not because of a nefarious, AI orchestrated, nefarious, mass human-slavery plan though. It's simply because people have foolishly demanded and supported legally imposed high minimum wages and a huge amount of burdensome, legislative requirements of their employers. Their employers are quite wisely looking for a cheaper alternative to dealing with these really risky, awkward and expensive humans. If they can pay one narrow AI developer to tune and maintain an algorithm and some computers to perform a job that previously 10 people did, then they are probably going to reduce costs and more importantly reduce the huge business risk of dealing with humans.

"Foolishly high minimum wages"... that those employers are more then capable of paying.

[cybertraveler]

Imagine there's 2 teams bidding for funding. Team A is solving a real, useful, but ultimately boring problem and is not good at marketing while team B does this:

"We're currently working on a AI blockchain edge serverless coffee machine!"

"That sounds innovative! Here's your millions of dollars."

Pfff, your AI, blockchain edge serverless coffee machine doesn't even do VR and AR. Not to mention it isn't a self-driving coffee machine. Also: with that lack of a "SMART" prefix in its name I can only assume it's stupid.

[numacross]

Pfff, your AI, blockchain edge serverless coffee machine doesn't even do VR and AR. Not to mention it isn't a self-driving coffee machine. Also: with that lack of a "SMART" prefix in its name I can only assume it's stupid.

Those are reserved for further rounds of funding of course

[cybertraveler]

"Foolishly high minimum wages"... that those employers are more then capable of paying.

1. I didn't say that. You misquoted me.

2. If you learn about or even think about how rational people act in a market place, you wouldn't say that. If I need someone to pack bags in my grocery story and I can find someone that will do it for 3 credits per hour, why would I choose to hire the guy who will only work for 5 credits per hour (with all other things equal)? It works the other way round to: if I am a highly skilled narrow AI engineer and there is someone offering me 50 credits per hour, why would I work for the employer offering me only 30 credits per hour (with all other things equal).

The way you increase your wage is by increasing your value to other people. One way you can do this is by learning a skill which is in high demand. The way you get higher quality employees is by raising the wage you offer so that higher quality candidates (who work harder, with less errors and more skill) are interested in applying to work for you.

You can learn about how markets work for free at https://mises.org/

Alternatively you could demand minimum wage laws and other violently enforced legislation and then watch as:
1. automated systems take over jobs
2. businesses seek employment in other countries where minimum wage laws are lower and there is less employment legislation.

If you demand laws and employment-related legislation you are literally demanding that governments threaten peaceful individuals with violence if they don't act how you want them to and you are literally ensuring that the people in the country you live are going to be less able to compete with automated systems and foreign workers.

Also: please note that nothing I've said can be seen as support for large corporations who monopolise markets and thus gain the ability to partially dictate outcomes. These corporations gain these near-monopolies via government intervention in markets too. Specifically they gain this power by:
- regulatory capture
- getting legislation passed that favours their business
- getting lots of legislation passed in their market so it becomes prohibitively risky and expensive for small businesses to legally operate in that market
- laws which explicitly grant monopolies (eg patent law and to a lesser extent, copyright law)
- cronyism: business people make friends with government people and get government contracts which are paid for without your consent using money that the state stole from you. You can't boycott these companies, because your money will be used to pay for them whether you agree with them or not.

[starshipeleven]

At this point I'm wondering if these devs working on AI are trolling the general public. Look at the logo they chose to use.

That's the only way to convey the concept to unwashed masses.

Everything else is so totally alien that it is pointless to even make up an image for it.

One thing the general population do have right is that this AI tech will indeed take over many of their jobs. It's not because of a nefarious, AI orchestrated, nefarious, mass human-slavery plan though. It's simply because people have foolishly demanded and supported legally imposed high minimum wages and a huge amount of burdensome, legislative requirements of their employers.

This is bullshit they are telling you to convince you to accept shittier conditions NOW while they wait for machines to actually be able to replace you anyway sometime in the future.

Machines in many fields are (and in many more will be) genuinely better than human laborers at any wage, and their prices will decrease as time goes on and the underlying technology is more and more commoditized and mass-produced.

Minimum wage is irrelevant, you will get fucked by machines regardless. The point is that the time for most fields that aren't already automated isn't short or even mid-term, but of course "someone" would greatly prefer you think the time is now and accept shitty wages.

If they can pay one narrow AI developer to tune and maintain an algorithm and some computers to perform a job that previously 10 people did, then they are probably going to reduce costs and more importantly reduce the huge business risk of dealing with humans.

You're describing current industrial automation, or normal software development, AI does not work like that. For anything meaningful a company has to invest a ton of cash for a relatively long amount of time to create and train an AI software to do some specific task and then they will provide a paid service to third parties.

Making AIs for small-scale issues is still (and will probably remain) prohibitively expensive.

Alternatively you could demand minimum wage laws and other violently enforced legislation and then watch as:
1. automated systems take over jobs
2. businesses seek employment in other countries where minimum wage laws are lower and there is less employment legislation.

This is overall irrelevant again as the cost of living worldwide has not stabilized nor is going to stabilize in any reasonable timescale. You can remove all minimum wage laws and taxes and shit, and still be orders of magnitude less competitive than a random shithole place where the cost of living is a fraction of the cost of living in a first world country.

The only thing you get is that you shittify the environment around you, throw large amounts of people in what is basically indentured servitude for their whole goddamn life, and for what? Because robots are scary? Fuck that, it's propaganda for ONE purpose (guess what).

The game here is doing the reverse, to get the rest of the world to increase their standards so they come and match ours. And setting a standard yourself is required for that.

Automation is still a problem, and keeping wages within acceptable (living) standards won't solve it, but bending over backwards to the ones that want to pay you shit isn't a solution either, so why doing it anyway?