We can get a computer to tag the birds, answer questions about them, and generate new pictures of them.

  • @DannyMac
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    951 year ago

    Did you miss the part that said “I’ll need a research team and 5 years?” The XKCD character did it! SUCCESS!

  • @Zeth0s
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    1 year ago

    More than 5 years then. The comic was right, with the difference that it took more than 1 single team of researchers to solve it

  • @[email protected]
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    671 year ago

    I have a book on learning Pytorch, this XKCD is in the first chapter and implementing this is the first code practice. It’s amazing how things progress.

  • El Barto
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    631 year ago

    Not obsolete? More like prophetic.

  • transigence
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    381 year ago

    Computer vision was just popping off five years after that, so I would say that it is prescient.

  • obosob
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    371 year ago

    Even with AI models that can identify that there are birds in the picture. Having it decide with accuracy that the picture is of a bird is still a hard problem.

  • GamesRevolution
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    331 year ago

    It’s actually even more correct because it underestimated the time needed by 5 years

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    I remember this one. It seems as spot on now as it was then, IMO. It’s not trying to say that object detection is magic or impossible, since it was totally possible then as well. It just requires a dedicated team + time + money to pay them, which is what this comic was trying to express. It is true there are more off-the-shelf software available for newer programmers now than there was before, so dev time is shorter, but that’s more just degrees of comfort / budget as opposed to anything fundamentally different.

    • @[email protected]
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      61 year ago

      It could have been the other way around if global positioning systems were either not developed or used only by the military. In that case, detecting scenery of a park could be easier than trying to figure out the position on the map.

      Or it could just be that maps data are not shared. You’ll need to hire boats and hire people to go and draw the map.

    • @satrunalia44
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      51 year ago

      That’s true, even if the specific example doesn’t hold, the core concept does. If I needed to implement a bird detector today, I’d make an API call to AWS Rekognition or an equivalent service. It would take me a day or two to learn the API and then maybe 4 hours to actually implement. But if you asked me to implement a bird species detector, I’m pretty sure there is no off the shelf API capable of that, and I would indeed need months or years.

        • @hinterlufer
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          31 year ago

          Google Lens is also a thing for general usage, and there are plenty options for more specific tasks such as Merlin for birds.

  • @[email protected]
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    281 year ago

    I used to put this in my object detection presentations 5 years ago and it never failed to draw chuckles from the audience.

    Shit has been going really really fast.

  • @uskok
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    241 year ago

    Why do you think it’s obsolete? I suppose nowadays we can use AI generative models to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible, but it still can be hard.