AI developments aren't all real

Davis Blalock, a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told Science magazine that some of the gains may not exist at all. Blalock and his mates compared dozens of approaches to improving neural networks--software architectures that loosely mimic the brain and found that it wasn't obvious what the state of the art even was. The researchers evaluated 81 pruning algorithms, programs that make neural networks more efficient by trimming unneeded connections. All claimed superiority in slightly different ways. But they were rarely compared properly--and when the researchers tried to evaluate them side by side, there was no clear evidence of performance improvements over a 10 year period.