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The US government has placed software designed to train neural networks to analyse satellite images under new export controls in a bid to prevent foreign adversaries using said code.
The decision, made by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), is effective today. Vendors shipping software subject to the controls – in that the applications help machine learning systems annotate satellite images in a particular way – will have to apply for a license to sell their products to customers outside of the US and Canada.
"Items warrant control for export because the items may provide a significant military or intelligence advantage to the United States or because foreign policy reasons justify control," the BIS said.
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US to Restrict Export of AI Technology for Image Analysis
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I'm gliding over a NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP near ATLANTA, Georgia!!
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Tuesday January 07 2020, @08:50PM (8 children)
Well, AI is different in degree. It's even more complex. Just try to print an AI program in PERL on a t-shirt. But it would still fit in a book.
And you're also right that it's often developed outside the country. I think Japan and China are two of the top players. China may be ahead on image recognition. (OTOH, I'm no expert in the field, and that's just my, relatively uninformed, view.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 07 2020, @09:05PM (5 children)
A classifier node is basically one for loop. A neural net is just a bunch of those linked together, a 10 line script to provide feedback to weights, and a giant pile of training data.
A generative adversarial network is just two of those.
Absolutely shirtable.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 08 2020, @06:59PM (4 children)
You are underestimating the complexity of the process. And I don't know by how much, merely that it's significantly.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:06PM (3 children)
There's huge fucking hardware requirements when you start talking about the 50 layers used in ResNet-50 operating in reasonable time, but the overall code structure is remarkably compact.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:35PM (2 children)
There's certainly a lot of generalized structural similarity, but there are also a large number of specialized functions. Most of the code will use identical modules, but some will require specialized modules, and those will need to be integrated into the rest of the code.
Perhaps I'm overestimating the abilities of the current AIs, but a real AI will need to focus the object recognition on what it's looking for. Skim over most of the image without processing deeply, but when it sees something that looks plausible, evaluate it more closely. Then, if the image is partially obscured, or rotated in an uncommon way, it will need to pass that up to a higher level which will evaluate it again in a larger context.
Even simple object recognition isn't that simple, and when you're looking something in particular the processing gets extra complex (though better at producing the right answer). Part of recognition is deciding whether something that you've possibly seen is reasonable to see in that context. (This is why the students see the demonstrator being stabbed with a knife rather than a banana. So it can lead to errors.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:44PM (1 child)
Well, now you're starting to get unfair. Those t-shirt encryption perl scripts aren't dumping all of TLS with its socket management, streams, error resiliency, key validation, certificate lookup, and the host of complex infrastructure around encryption. They're shifting some bits and doing some math. Of course there's application specific contextualization that needs to happen.
The actual neural net guts are real damn simple, at least in terms of "where the magic happens".
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 08 2020, @11:14PM
Well, if you restrict it to actual visual image processing, and don't consider object recognition as significant, then yeah, you could do it, but you everyone else already has that capability, and has had it for decades.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday January 07 2020, @09:27PM
Don't underestimated the T-sizes some Americans need and the terseness of PERL. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 07 2020, @09:32PM
No, but... just try to teach AI / machine learning techniques in a free online setting like Coursera.
Agreed, the US is a major player in image recognition, but by no means are we playing in a league of our own.
Funny anecdote: I worked for a video security who were developing their own automatic image recognition algorithms and the guys who were doing the actual work were in the US on H1B visas from Russia, Israel, Turkey and I think Senegal...
🌻🌻 [google.com]