SILICON OVERLORD LEARNS TO ASSOCIATE DOORBELL WITH PIZZA GUY WITHOUT HELICOPTER PARENTS HOVERING OVER IT
In what experts are calling “literally just how f@#king babies learn,” MIT researchers have created an AI system that can match sounds with corresponding visuals without a human standing over it and saying “Yes, good job! That’s a door slamming! Who’s a smart little algorithm? YOU ARE!”
WHAT’S NEXT, TEACHING IT TO USE THE TOILET BY ITSELF?
The breakthrough system, affectionately named CAV-MAE Sync because scientists apparently hate normal words, can now automatically understand that when someone plays a cello in a video, that’s where the cello music is coming from. Revolutionary stuff that literally every newborn figures out by month three.
“We are building AI systems that can process the world like humans do,” explained researcher Andrew Rouditchenko, apparently unaware that humans learned this skill around the same time they figured out that their hands belonged to them.
THE REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPT OF “THINGS MAKING NOISE WHEN THEY HAPPEN”
The system uses what scientists call a “contrastive objective” and a “reconstruction objective,” which is just fancy talk for “figuring out when sh!t goes together” and “remembering it later.”
“By doing that, the model learns a finer-grained correspondence,” said Edson Araujo, who could have just said “it knows a door slam when it sees one” but had a dissertation to justify.
EXPERTS WEIGH IN WITH COMPLETELY MADE-UP QUOTES
“This technology is absolutely groundbreaking,” said Dr. Obvious Observation, professor of Stating The Bloody Obvious at Duh University. “Next thing you know, AI will discover that rain makes things wet and fire is hot. We’re truly living in magical times.”
Professor Impress M. Egrants added, “We’ve spent approximately $4.7 million teaching a computer what my 2-year-old nephew learned for free while drooling on himself.”
WIGGLE ROOM: NOT JUST FOR TODDLERS ANYMORE
Researchers added what they call “wiggle room” to the model, which sounds suspiciously like they just let the damn thing figure stuff out on its own rather than micromanaging every computational neuron.
“Essentially, we add a bit more wiggle room to the model,” Araujo explained, using technical language that absolutely required a PhD to comprehend.
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS THAT WILL DEFINITELY CHANGE YOUR LIFE, PROBABLY
Scientists claim this breakthrough could someday help with journalism and film production, because apparently identifying that a door slam sound happens when a door slams is a skill worth millions in Hollywood.
In the longer term, this work could help robots understand that when your car makes that grinding noise, it’s because something is f@#ked up under the hood and not because your vehicle is trying to communicate in Morse code.
FUTURE PLANS: TEACHING AI THE MIND-BLOWING CONCEPT THAT TEXT EXISTS
Future plans include teaching the system to recognize text, which is something your great-grandmother could do without a supercomputer and several German research grants.
“Sometimes, very simple ideas or little patterns you see in the data have big value,” Araujo concluded, essentially admitting they spent years discovering what every infant on Earth figures out before learning to walk.
The research was funded by people who apparently have money to burn while the rest of us struggle to pay for streaming services that ironically use AI to recommend shows we don’t want to watch.
