Number of nines of reliability is a discussed topic in distributed systems and servers. Could be a good comparison, it’s typically in the range of five nines
Getting anything involving an AI to even 99% accuracy level (2 nines), let alone to 4- or 5-nines, is extremely hard. Also, AI tends to be very sensitive to distribution shifts of types that happen frequently, so if we somehow got something involving AI to say 3-nines, I strongly suspect that it wouldn’t stay that way for long without a lot of ongoing work.
To be fair, search engines are another extremely unreliable technology which we have nevertheless managed to make useful.
Also, humans driving cars and achieving crash rates O(1in100,000miles) (with multiple curves/other hazards per mile), and self-driving cars managing to get into the same region of reliability, both show that it is possible to get neural net systems up to at least around 6-nines reliability with enough work. But it’s certainly not easy, and these are situations where the price of failure is a few injuries or lives, not billions.
the question is what we want many nines on. I think many constraints we might want to guarantee we can get way better than that. the question is what we want to get constraints on
Number of nines of reliability is a discussed topic in distributed systems and servers. Could be a good comparison, it’s typically in the range of five nines
Getting anything involving an AI to even 99% accuracy level (2 nines), let alone to 4- or 5-nines, is extremely hard. Also, AI tends to be very sensitive to distribution shifts of types that happen frequently, so if we somehow got something involving AI to say 3-nines, I strongly suspect that it wouldn’t stay that way for long without a lot of ongoing work.
To be fair, search engines are another extremely unreliable technology which we have nevertheless managed to make useful.
Also, humans driving cars and achieving crash rates O(1 in 100,000 miles) (with multiple curves/other hazards per mile), and self-driving cars managing to get into the same region of reliability, both show that it is possible to get neural net systems up to at least around 6-nines reliability with enough work. But it’s certainly not easy, and these are situations where the price of failure is a few injuries or lives, not billions.
the question is what we want many nines on. I think many constraints we might want to guarantee we can get way better than that. the question is what we want to get constraints on