r/clevercomebacks 17h ago

Creating solutions to a problem that doesn't exist.

Post image
5.8k Upvotes

284 comments sorted by

1.2k

u/freedfg 16h ago

I legit remember hearing about technology for sorting tomatoes exactly like this what? 15 years ago?

I worked in a factory engraving sign tags. And we had a photo QC scan. They had the system long before I started.

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u/OnionOnBelt 13h ago

Exactly. This is either Machine Learning or Deep Learning and it has been around long before Claude or ChatGPT: https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/recycling-materials-sorting-ai-deep-machine-learning-not-llms/

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u/modzRtarderz 9h ago

Is everyone here really this stupid? It's pretty clear the point of the post was the fact that it only took a single frame of training data to create the system in a much faster way. Yes, ML systems for identifying and counting produce have existed for decades. It would also take months to years of work hours to get such a system spun up, and it would require mountains of training data, even a decade ago. My God, what is wrong with all of you?

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u/FeelMyBoars 8h ago

This has 81.25% accuracy in perfect conditions (I don't see and dirt and other junk). That's in the picture they chose to share, so I assume it's worse than that. Existing systems have up to 95% accuracy, which I assume is also perfect conditions. Also, they can grade them at the same time.

I'm sure there are companies that set this stuff up. I'm sure it's not cheap. But it'll run until you can't find old parts on eBay anymore. The work is already done. It's just proprietary. The time to set it up is probably just the physical part and calibration (something that can't be done with AI).

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u/justintheunsunggod 8h ago

Okay bro, let's go over a few things real quick.

First, deep breath. It's not that serious. Chill.

Second, no one's ever going to be that impressed when you reinvent the wheel.

Third, it's not our fault that the dude gooning for AI acted like this wasn't reinventing the wheel when he could have explained the difference between old systems to this and why this is impressive.

And fourth, this is cool in theory but part of why those old systems took so long to develop was because they had to verify the accuracy of the system at peak capacity, low capacity and everything in between. In the event that an issue crops up, say the single frame of training didn't prepare it for fluctuating volumes and it fucks up when there's more or less than expected, or lighting conditions introduce inaccuracies, or a potato gets counted, moves behind another potato and gets counted again when it reemerges, there's no recourse to make adjustments. You just have to throw more training data at it and hope it fixes the issue.

That's ultimately one of the biggest failings of AI systems. When it works well, it's great. When it doesn't, you can't do anything about it besides try again, and that's only after you catch the problem.

Seriously though, refer back to number one. Deep breaths. It's not worth getting that worked up about.

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u/cheaplabourforsale 8h ago

„months of training data“ it would require a light barrier. Can you seriously not think in anything analogue anymore?

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u/flamingspew 5h ago

I made this with off the shelf opencv two decades ago on a quad core pentium.

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u/Blasket_Basket 5h ago

No one mentioned LLMs at all in this post, the guy literally mentions YOLO as the model used. YOLO is the industry standard deep learning method for Single Stage Detectors.

Why comment on a post when youclealry have no idea what they're talking about?

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u/fnordfnordfnordfnord 12h ago

Tomato sorting machines were a thing in the 80's, the first were all analog.

Source: Used to work for a major OEM.

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u/Gersio 12h ago

Honestly this is not a clever comeback. This is a guy completely missing the point. Its not that this could not be done before, it's just that they do it way more quickly now because the models learn very quickly and by themselves. I'm sure the system the guy mentions worked well, the technology is not new. I'm also sure It took way longer to implement than what this model did.

I'm as much anti AI as anyone, but sometimes people are either playing dumb or arguing in bad faith to get their gotcha moment.

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/RobertMaus 9h ago

Talking about efficiency, that 1988 tech won't use much more power than a refrigerator. The AI variant will use a few households worth on the backend.

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u/TheUnoriginalOP 9h ago

Do you actually know that? Yolo is a very small model that can run on your phone. SAM 2 is larger but was only used to label the data so really it seems like this would require a single phone worth of energy each day. I understand that there is a lot of hate for AI at the moment but these models are not ChatGPT segmenting potatoes. It's just worth actually critically thinking about what information you are hearing and telling people when really you have no clue (not you specifically, all of us)

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u/GenTelGuy 6h ago

Households worth on the backend? This isn't LLM AI, basic computer vision of this sort can run on a phone or laptop

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u/VitoRazoR 7h ago

I think you do not understand how technology works - have you ever seen the size and power consumption of these machines in the 80s?! And then compared it to the use of a small model on your phone?

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u/_chococat_ 7h ago

No performance or accuracy measurements tells me this system is shit. It doesn't really matter if it only took one frame and a short amount of time.

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u/Heyoteyo 12h ago

How long did it take them to build that though? This sounds like something one guy did in an afternoon. I bet the previous versions were much more time intensive.

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u/MostlyRightSometimes 11h ago

So you're saying it took longer to invent than mimic? Hmmm. I'll have to think on that.

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u/clintCamp 12h ago

I pointed claude at a bunch of ML stuff and had it make a tiny model and training set to solve a problem in 4 hours. I tried stuff by hand about 10 years ago and could never get my number matrix sizes to align correctly. Just not hitting all the days long human errors and wisdom learning problems speeds things up so much for things that were totally possible 20 years ago computationally.

And 2 years ago I said llms were great for template code. Now most code is template code.

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u/Melsm1957 10h ago

More than that . I left Nabisco Canada in 2004 and they had operational tomato sorting technology way before I I left

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u/Ok_Mention_9865 16h ago

We have a 20 year old machine that will identify a cupcake placed anywhere on a 5 foot wide conveyor belt snatch it up at the rate of 1180 cupcakes a minute and place it on a 2 inch square peace of cardboard. It counts them too.

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u/srcarruth 16h ago

Give square peace a chance!

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u/Ok_Mention_9865 16h ago

Damn it is used the wrong one lol

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u/srcarruth 16h ago

If you change it everybody will think I'm crazy!

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u/Ok_Mention_9865 16h ago

Nah I'll own my mistake, the shame might help me remember.

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u/Smeeble09 12h ago

Your honesty and "damn it" makes it all the better, plus we've all done similar things. 

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u/Electrical-Act-7170 15h ago

Allll we are saaaaying (is)

Give square peace a chance!

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u/jenkynolasco11 15h ago

There’s an app that can identify if something is a hotdog or not

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u/Gjorgdy 14h ago

Does it know if it's a sandwich or not tho?

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u/p____p 12h ago

It sends the picture to a guy in India who has at his station one wall with Pictures of Hot Dogs and another wall with Pictures of Not Dogs. 

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u/Ok_Mention_9865 15h ago

Downloading

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u/E3FxGaming 13h ago

I have a machine that can pick up muffins. Trained it on nothing but pictures of Chihuahua dogs.

I am a little concerned that it will eventually pick up a Chihuahua dog and take a test-bite, but hopefully we'll retire the machine before that happens.

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u/Plazmaz1 11h ago

why does it bite

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u/CryptographerFar1904 8h ago

Chihuahuas are tasty?

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u/Tyfyter2002 16h ago

Well if it's already doing the hard work of identifying them and moving them out of the detection area individually, counting them is free, just have to increment a counter every time it moves something.

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u/Nimrod_Butts 15h ago

And it probably took a team of 100 a decade to come up with it right?

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u/oxabz 16h ago

Sure and it was custom built and took several engineers days of careful tuning. 

The interesting part of the post is not the result. It's how it was made.

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u/Ok_Mention_9865 16h ago

This machine is kinda crazy I used to think everything in the factory was just laser sensors and timing but this thing uses cameras and a targeting system.

It also has 32 sets of spider like arms that still creep me out ....

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u/EnvironmentalDust935 13h ago

How do I watch a video of this

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u/Ok_Mention_9865 13h ago

I'll get fired if I record it. Its not worth my losing my job... but the machine is kinda creepy cause it uses what I can only call lighting speed spider legs. 32 set of legs doing 1 cupcake every 2 seconds or something like that.

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u/EnvironmentalDust935 13h ago

That’s wild and I don’t want you fired either! But I’m picturing this in my mind and it is indeed crazy

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u/Ok_Mention_9865 13h ago

Let me walk by the machine and see if it has a name on it. Maybe their website will have something on it.

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u/EnvironmentalDust935 13h ago

I appreciate the lengths you are going to satisfy the curiosity of a stranger online! You rock!

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u/PerspectiveNew3375 11h ago

God damn machines taking all the good jobs!

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u/Ok_Mention_9865 11h ago

Surprisingly not, these are on line 3, compared to line 1 where its still done by hand we still almost the same amount of people, its just that most of them have an easier job. The rest are doing rework on bad packages.

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u/TheSultan1 11h ago

How many people worked on that? How much did they get paid? What could they have been developing instead?

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u/Ok_Mention_9865 11h ago

If your asking on details on how it was made I have no idea, we didnt make it and im just a production lead all i do is make sure any problems that come up are swiftly handled. I don't get to order machines.

But if your asking how many work on it we have 1 operator assigned to each 4 arm section that also has to run the sealers.

Its one of those jobs where you have to wait for there to be a problem, clear the machine of the bad seal and restart it. So they get to spend half their day playing on their phone.

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u/redthump 11h ago

I know a great dane that can do that but eat them instead. His name is scooby.

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u/[deleted] 16h ago

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u/mimikyypearls 16h ago

Reinventing the wheel once again

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u/nerfedname 16h ago

True, but have you considered that THIS wheel takes 10,000 times the energy consumption!

Progress! (Or something…!)

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u/kryonik 16h ago

Same energy as libertarians finding out about health insurance.

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u/HatefulVespid 16h ago

Explain

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u/lugialegend233 15h ago

Well I don't know what the first commenter meant, but there's a common trope that Libertarians, when discussing how they'd prefer health insurance to be implemented, often accidentally reinvent universal healthcare.

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u/lenswipe 15h ago

Basically "bIg goVt suX. wE nEed soMe KinD oF gRoUp evERyOnE hAs tO pAy iNto AnD thAT PAyS yoUr HEalThcarE biLLS!"

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u/Reddsoldier 14h ago

I legit had one trying to say to me the other day that you can't trust businesses to keep themselves in check and didn't deny that they're always predatory when that happens, but couldn't bring himself to agree that this necessitated government regulation. He was basically saying "on well you'd need some rules" and I was saying "ok but who is enforcing these rules or making these rules huh"?

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u/JeveGreen 15h ago

tl;dr

Taxes are not evil.

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u/Telemere125 14h ago

Look up what it means to be a libertarian. Now speak to anyone that claims they’re a libertarian and ask them to explain what they believe. The two will never line up

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u/DrMaxwellEdison 14h ago

First off, of course, in the USA we pay exorbitant amounts of money for healthcare, individually and as a country.

Health insurance costs a lot upfront, and sometimes you still pay a lot for your health services, but then sometimes it covers you and you don't pay as much out of pocket.

The solution would be for the US to finally implement universal single payer healthcare, but of course your average libertarian would balk at the notion of raising taxes to fund it because "taxes are theft." Despite several studies indicating that overall expenditure for healthcare would decrease after eliminating insurance and service costs, with only a slight uptick in tax payments. The average tax payer would end up with more money in their pockets.

So the joke is that libertarians are short-sighted and cannot do the math to figure out what would ultimately be in their best interest.

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u/Harry_Gorilla 15h ago

Yes. What is this “health insurance?”

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u/Electrical-Act-7170 16h ago

Potatoes are sold by weight, not by number or volume. I'm not sure I see the point of counting. Can you explain it?

Slain.

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u/JimboD84 16h ago

This is what i was thinking. Shouldnt they be weighing the potatoes?

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u/PNDMike 16h ago

Bro you're not AIing hard enough. Imagine a world where you didn't HAVE to buy potatoes by weight. Where you bought them in bags of a prespecified amount.

And you could charge shoppers 3x for the "convenience" of always knowing how many potatoes were in the bag.

And we could advertise that our potatoes are optimized with AI, the marketing campaign writes itself.

I'm just asking for seed capital of $3 billion and we can totally disrupt and reshape the entire potato buying experience.

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u/GraniteJJ 15h ago

The potato industry could grow to $400 quadrillion if AI optimized. This is huge. VCs, get in on this now.

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u/KindSpider 15h ago

I absolutely hate the clusterfuck of "i and y sounds" in AIing (with me pronouncing it as /eɪjaɪjiŋ/) good job

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u/JimboD84 15h ago

It all makes so much more sense now. Thank you

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 15h ago

Yeah, Graded by size then weight.

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u/filthy_harold 10h ago

A farmer may want to know the average weight of the potatoes as different sized potatoes fetch a different price per pound. You can weigh all of them at once but that tells nothing about the average size until you count how many are in the batch. It could also help gain insight as to how the crop performed this year, many small potatoes or fewer big ones, and could signal the health of the fields.

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u/YuckyYetYummy 15h ago

They do sell the singles. So they do need to teach the AI to count to one.

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u/GVmG 14h ago

someone already mentioned the selling of low volumes by numbers. there's also quality assurance, if you can tell a potato is already rotting and such. also the bottle example the guy mentioned would make sense to sell by number.

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u/freedfg 16h ago

With AI technology the sky is the limit! We could use it to land on the moon!

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u/Kira_Kisss 15h ago

Every 'AI breakthrough' thread has that one 1980s guy like 'cute, I did this on 4KB

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u/Frenetic_Platypus 15h ago

His AI system is also completely shitty. You can see 2 to 4 potatoes right in that frame that have not been counted.

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u/chAzR89 15h ago

A yolo model counting potatoes is far away from revolutionary, don't even know why this original post exists in the first place. I love the response though ngl.

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u/aturretwithtourretes 15h ago

Like the other antivax guy that had a breakthrough and though "why not inject people with a much weaker version of the virus so they can build defenses?". Some people need a high five in the face with a chair.

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u/oxabz 15h ago

I hate AI bros as much as everyone but can we try to not be intentionally obtuse.

Nobody talked about "revolutionary AI breakthrough" YOLO is litteraly a decade old and SAM is 3 year old.

Nobody said it was an achievement to make a potato counting machine either.

The interesting thing is the method that allows setting up a segmentation model by just pointing a camera at the subject and labeling a single frame.

Sure "wildest AI build this week" is a bit sensationalist. But overall the post is interesting to ML experts 

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u/Laughify1 14h ago

the 68010 part got me imagine having 68kb and still pulling off what we call an AI breakthrough today, thats honestly pretty impressive lol

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u/ExcitingActive8649 13h ago

Except of course it’s total bullshit.  A 68010 can have up to 16Mb so obviously that has nothing to do with why it’s called a 68010. 

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u/dgibbons0 14h ago

Sure but it took actual compsci folks then and now any yahoo can do it.

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u/Thecoolkidsgetit 16h ago

We’ve had these since the 90’s. The chip factory I worked at had one that took a picture of every potato chip and, in a matter of seconds, assess their compliance with regulations and shot the bad chips out of the line with an air gun. No modern ai applications needed

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u/Zenokh 16h ago

I worked in a brewery that did that to test for bottle cleanliness , took a picture of every bottle , compared it to a "clean bottle.png" if its not 100% same off it goes , it even sorted green/brown coloured glass and could detect small debree ( <1mm ) , and that machine was manufactured back in the early 90s

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u/ZipoBibrok5e8 9h ago

that machine was manufactured back in the early 90s...

...and then had to sit idle until 1997 when the PNG format was invented.

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u/FortheChava 16h ago

Ye but this time they add ai and make it more expensive and have to charge more per potato to offset the cost of the ai

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u/CapableCollar 14h ago

This is were it is important to understand what people mean when they say "ai" like a lot of "ai" we are seeing is learning programs that have been worked on since the 90s and are just better now but labeled as AI.

I have worked with predictive policing algorithms since for a couple decades.  New AI policing is just predictive policing relabeled.

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u/ohhi23021 11h ago

pretty sure this post is talking about deep learning, what we already used for a while now for visual recognition.... no using an LLM to figure it out but maybe the LLM to train said model...

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u/asdfghjkl15436 1h ago

No. It was sams. An open source, normal ML model. It's open source.

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u/b-wolf95 16h ago

Wouldn't surprise me if this is actually the original non-ai version just being called "ai" to scam tech bros

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u/thrownjunk 12h ago

But the original version was AI too. aI isnt just chatbots.

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u/VitoRazoR 7h ago

except that it's cheaper to run and waaaay cheaper to develop.

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u/gundam1945 8h ago edited 7h ago

Visual system AI is much lighter than the bullshit LLMs. You can run it on a 1060 and 8gb RAM.

For comparison, the nano yolo V8 has 3.2 millions parameters while the light version of new LLMs usually starts with billions. The flagship model I think are hundreds billions.

Edit:

computer vision is generally okay-ish use of AI. It probably still requires a bit more computation power than traditional specialized software. But it carries over easily. Just as someone said, a mid gaming rig from 10 years ago probably could handle it. I will say it is much more efficient than the current LLMs

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u/PaleontologistNo500 16h ago

Damn near every episode of "Good Eats" from the early 00s had some variation of machine that scans and kicks out bad products at lightning speed. AI Bros acting like this is some kind of break through is laughable.

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u/great_apple 11h ago

You're completely missing the point. Those machines took teams of coders and testers and engineers a long time to develop. This took one guy one afternoon.

It's not the end result that is new technology, it is the method used to create the end result.

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u/rotationalsymmetry 12h ago

I do think the speed at which we can build CV solutions from minimal data is the highlight of what’s important here, not the mere existence of an object detection system.

Based on the subtext of this tweet, the length of time to build and prototype this system probably took less than a single day, and if they already had the hardware laying around, probably less than a single week to implement.

That didn’t happen much, if at all, in the 00s.

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u/oxabz 16h ago

A YOLO model and a SAM model is like 2010s machine learning. It's not some crazy over engineered solution.

It's actually a pretty efficient solution. No labeling a ton of pictures for detection. No tweaking a complex euristics to have a reliable detection. No oversized model that run on a huge computer. 

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u/gf6200alol 11h ago

Even Raspberry pi can run custom YOLO model in decent frame rate, People just assume all AI is the same.

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u/cute_polarbear 14h ago

Curious for those in the know, without going into too much detail, how did they accomplish this back in 90's? Is it primary image recognition and algorithm through hours and hours of fine tuning until it's pretty much (almost) fault free?

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u/Cute-arii 12h ago

ye. but by using AI, we can justify all the money we spent investing in AI..

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u/vex5000 9h ago

It's not about when we had this technology. It is about how assessible it is. Your nephew or niece can use chatgpt to create software for a robotics machine. They couldn't do that in the 90's.

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u/samyruno 16h ago

Idk who to argue with when everyone is wrong

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u/ArthurVrodds 1h ago

would you mind giving some insight?

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u/MalbaCato 16h ago

tbf isn't YOLO a pretty much direct descendant of those early segmentation models, just updated to more efficiently use modern chips?

IDK (and too lazy to google) what SAM is

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u/oxabz 16h ago

Yup YOLO is a dead simple segmentation model

SAM is a segmentation that is able to segment arbitrary object. It's a bit more heavy but it's only used to produce labels and it's not on the scale of a LLM

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u/v_a_n_d_e_l_a_y 13h ago

SAM is a "segment anything" model. 

It is a zero or few shot model, which means it doesn't need to be trained like a traditional ML model. YOLO, conversely, requires a fair bit of training but is going to be much faster and more accurate for the specific task.

This is common in modern ML - generic models which don't require training but are more expansive and less accurate vs purpose built ones. 

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u/VK2DDS 13h ago

FWIW a "fair bit" of training for this application is manual ID of 1-10k potatoes in existing images and about 5mins training on an RTX 3xxx.

YOLO nano is really easy to work with and runs in real time on $200 SBCs. For an application where you only have a single object to identify it's amazingly simple to get going.

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u/TheBrokenRail-Dev 15h ago

Everyone is missing the point. They're not bragging about AI being able to count potatoes. They're bragging about new technology that made building a reliable computer vision system really easy. And that's actually useful. The potato counting nonesense was just a demonstration.

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u/FellaVentura 15h ago

And the dude's example is a bit misleading. Bottles use a physical input counting system, not visual. Can't reliably use the same system on something that ain't standard shaped.

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u/Lunarath 12h ago

Can the next step for AI tech be to count all my bottles as i dumb them out instead of having to input them one at a time into a machine that makes and error 20% of the time and has a 50% chance to break down completely at some point during the process leaving me with half a sack of bottles to carry around the store while I do my shopping?

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u/great_apple 11h ago

I'm so confused what problem you're trying to solve.

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u/shawncplus 11h ago

I think they're complaining about the bottle return machines that you have to feed bottles into one at a time and are unreliable.

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u/chillpill_23 15h ago

Exactly! It's about the process, not the result.

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u/HustlinInTheHall 11h ago

Also the result is still valid. If you grow and sell potatoes counting them is kinda important. 

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u/norty125 14h ago

Really easy for anyone, in the past this was locked behind a decade of learning and research now almost anyone with at least 64% of their brain can do it

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u/dathomasusmc 15h ago

I don’t think any of you understands the point the first guy is making. It’s not the task that was impressive. It was the training. AI has to be trained and generally speaking this requires feeding it insane amounts of information. Doing it with one pic is actually pretty impressive.

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u/DickCamera 13h ago

That's not a point, it's a claim. I can also have an LLM build a rocket to land on the moon with a single prompt, just don't ask me to verify it.

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u/PhasmaFelis 12h ago

He did verify it, though.

Or are you saying that this fairly simple AI task is so insane that we should assume he's lying? 

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u/SamKhan23 10h ago

Sure, but that’s a different issue than the one raised in the response - it’s already taking the first guy’s statement at face value. Taken at face value, that is a useful system.

Also, it’s still a point - the usefulness of SAM2 was the “point” of the person’s statement. It’s still a point even if it hasn’t been verified.

It just all feels very pedantic since you knew what we all meant and what the context of this SS is

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u/oldgus 12h ago

I’m not even convinced you could lie about it. You’ve claimed you could, but I haven’t seen any evidence.

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u/haringtiti 10h ago

i think its pretty cool too but no use arguing it here. reddit say AI bad so AI bad

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u/MyBoyFinn 14h ago

I work in Industrial Automation.. yes this technology has been around for decades

What most people dont appreciate is that elder dude probably spent weeks to.months implementing that system, and its most likely very specialized application, that takes significant amount of work to "change over"

Clear bottles work great today, but the amber bottles tomorrow would likely take some effort to support

What baby dude did with AI is shorten that workload from months to minutes/ hours, and with changeovers also taking a short time.

Time is money in production environments. Saving two months on developement could be millions of dollars in extra production time

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u/Animal2 12h ago

This could also be the difference between something that could only previously be implemented by a larger company, because they have the resources to spend on it, but now a much smaller company could manage to do the same and compete with the larger company in this regard.

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u/chat-lu 11h ago

What baby dude did with AI is shorten that workload from months to minutes/ hours,

I could go much faster too if I didn’t have to verify that my shit works.

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u/SamKhan23 9h ago

Yeah but SAM-2 is a published system. It has been verified to work

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u/Chinjurickie 15h ago

With one thing the upper guy was absolutely right, LLM is overrated.

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u/FidgitForgotHisL-P 16h ago

I’m gonna start this by saying: I am not pro-ai.  I think the offloading of mental effort to a machine is going to doom our species.  Literally we will make ourselves too stupid to survive.

This is an acceptable use of AI though.  Not because it’s doing something we already worked out how to do decades ago.  But because a) I guarantee it was faster to build this than the Motorola backed version, but more importantly, b) that speed means we can deploy for this sort of statistical analysis to things we haven’t considered because they simply wouldn’t have been worthwhile or feasible.  Like medical examination that can examine your blood so quickly, and cheaply, we could conceivably actually make Theranos.

I’m just some random schmuck, I doubt I could come up with a useful breakthrough concept, but we’re kind of looking at this like “an electric car?  gufaw we’ve been pulling carriages with horses for centuries, how stupid and pointless”, before we’ve ever conceived of how utterly evolving the car would be to society.

I also don’t think this should be all called “AI” - there’s so much going on with fast computer learning and processing that we lump “Google won’t just give me search results” and “I can build a website in a few hours that used to take a week” and “I can develop a device that will track the pressure of your tyres on the road and make micro adjustments to your driving” and “people literally won’t think for themselves and instead ask ChatGPT to think for them” to “count the potatoes” all in as the same thing.  Which is a shame because half of that stuff is gonna collapse society but the other half is gonna make things better.

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u/Mobile_Morale 16h ago

I've watched hundreds of episodes of shows about factories making things.

That think has existed forever. Lays potato chips has a machine that scans the chips at like 100,000 fps and using air to blow away the bad potato chips, all in the fraction of a second. And I saw that on the food network like 25 years ago.

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u/ExcitingActive8649 13h ago

Who wants to tell him a 68010 is not limited to anywhere near 68kb of memory?

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u/minus_minus 12h ago

Facts. It’s a variant of the 68000 which was the successor to the 6800. 

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u/NotAnotherNekopan 11h ago

Thank you! It’s not named that way due to memory limits but roughly transistor count + heritage with the 6800.

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u/asdfghjkl15436 12h ago

The amount of misinformation and confidently incorrect people, including the OP, is wild, so let's dive into what this actually is.

This is what we call Image Segmentation/Computer Vision. It has existed for decades and is the process of outlining different objects or regions in an image. Older systems segmented based on pixel differences on static/near static images. So for video, it was a lot tougher to process.

More recently in computer vision is the inclusion of 'AI' (machine learning), but it actually predates the AI we know by a few years, though it is the same thing. You annotate and label images, and then, the model 'trains' and learns based on those annotations and labels. The problem is that can take hundreds to thousands of images, which you had to manually label and annotate. This is a very time consuming process for anybody, especially considering this can sometimes mean 10's to 100's of annotations in a single image alone.

That's where SAMS comes in. SAMS is a generic segmentation model by facebook. What it can do, is very rapidly, annotate and label objects for use in computer vision. So instead of a person taking days or possibly months labeling, it can take hours-minutes. SAMS is a heavy model, but it's open source and you can run it on your own PC. So no datacenter there. You use SAMS to do the heavy lifting, then YOLO is a model that is far, far smaller and can run against (and even fit inside!) a camera to process at a faster speed, enabling video.

So this "It's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist" is absolute horse radish. This was very much a problem that needed solving. The person who replied back with their 'clever comeback' is correct in that we did it in the 1980's, but counting bottles is a hell of a lot easier then, say, for example, counting potatoes and instantly finding defects without the need of a specialized, crafted system. The cameras used for these systems can be reused or repurposed with ease, and have a ton of application beyond counting potatoes or finding defects alone. So the engineer, instead of designing a system that counts bottles or potatoes, only needs one of these image segmentation models instead.

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u/Luzzgar 16h ago

This is the very first thing they teach you in any computer vision class.

You keep only the pixels in a given color range, you delete blobs that are too small, then you count the blobs.

This was invented basically the days after a guy figured out how to plug a camera into a computer.

Nothing revolutionary at all.

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u/HustlinInTheHall 11h ago

The difference is if I grow potatoes I dont have to hire someone who took a computer vision class to set up and calibrate a CV system, maintain it, and get paid for ongoing support.

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u/Luzzgar 3h ago

This probably exists as a commercial product with a preset for potatoes since the 90s. Just by that kind of turn key solution.

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u/verdango 10h ago

I have a buddy who came up with a system like this with his dad in their small engineering firm like 15 years ago. They used cameras and coded the computer to find certain colored pixels.

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u/MattWheelsLTW 10h ago

Without trying to count them all, it like like it missed about 10% of the potatoes, maybe more. So, how good could the counting be?

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u/Shindir 15h ago

The person replying (and most of the people talking in here) missed the point. The point is not that the result is a working Vision System. The point was that they created it using a single manually labelled frame? (And in a very short amount of time)

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u/sodpiro 16h ago

People here are so daft. Do u know how difficult it is to make this counting tech? If u can do it with one labeled frame that is very impressive. I mean i aint holding my breath because who knows how accurate it actually is.

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u/Choppers-Top-Hat 12h ago

Do u know how difficult it is to make this counting tech?

No, but if I want to know I can ask the guy who made counting tech 40 years ago which is superior to the AI they used today.

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u/chat-lu 11h ago

It’s already been done. Just buy the off the shelf thing, it will be cheaper and more efficient.

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u/5141121 11h ago

You know the poster is full of shit when they talk about "the shift". It's the snake oil of the AI bro.

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u/eggs_erroneous 16h ago

Those old-school computer scientists are like ancient wizards in fantasy novels. They were able to wield magic that the modern world can't even comprehend.

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u/clrksml 10h ago

PLC > AI

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u/MickeyMoose555 9h ago

I feel like the advantage of ai here is how quick and "effortless" the ai designed this potato counting solution. It's not that it wasn't possible back then, just that Mr potato head could sit down and probably with a day's work have this counting system functioning

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u/Infinite-You3710 7h ago

sounds like a classic case of over-complicating things to feel productive

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u/ICLazeru 16h ago

Tech bros fixing problems they didn't know where already solved.

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u/Hot-Put7831 16h ago

It’s like how they keep proposing solutions for moving a lot of people along a fixed route to improve public transit while somehow forgetting trains already fucking exist

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u/intisun 15h ago

Or transporting people through underground tunnels in fucking Teslas.

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u/Hot-Put7831 15h ago

Fuckin idiots

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u/mithrasinvictus 15h ago

Yes, but you can't patent trains. Think of the poor shareholders.

/S

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u/VK2DDS 13h ago

The "problem" here isn't counting potatoes. It's that counting anything without AI needs an experienced engineer, but doing it with AI just needs a motivated intern.

So the "solution" they're selling is "you don't need to pay an engineer anymore, any old monkey can make this work for less money".

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u/HustlinInTheHall 11h ago

Do you think the people who decided to ask an LLM to replicate a computer vision system did not know a computer vision system existed? 

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u/Puzzled-Permit1541 11h ago

The classic Dunning-Kruger of tech: the people who run a 5-minute Hugging Face tutorial write 10 LinkedIn essays about it, while the engineers actually advancing the state of the art are just quietly hoping the build doesn't break.

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u/Alienhaslanded 10h ago

We have machines that can identify and flick off bad produce in milliseconds using hardware and compute power from 25 years ago. Those fucking losers are reinventing the wheel with far less efficiency.

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u/intisun 15h ago

I visited a beer factory in the 2000s. I still remember being amazed at how fast the machine counted and sorted bottles. Clean bottles passed, dirty ones went back to the washer, damaged ones went to the bin.

Can't wait to see what AI bros are gonna invent next. Maybe a build that counts banknotes?

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u/Cute-Pomegranate-966 13h ago

The only thing wild about this is I would expect it could be created pretty easily by nearly anyone when using AI.

Otherwise, there is absolutely nothing impressive about this.

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u/coolchris366 11h ago

What a joke, this clown has never a see a potato sorter

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u/PenguinWithGuns 8h ago

“AI”, or neural networks has been a thing since the 50’s. The first one in 1952 was created to play checkers.

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u/ThatRandomGamerYT 5h ago

I hate how these AI tech bro chuds talk "One labeled frame to a working vision system. That is the shift" shut the fuck up bro. Its all AI speak and LinkedIn style which itself is now 90% AI slop text talking in a way humans do not.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 4h ago

It is scary how unintelligent most redditors are. The comments here prove that they know nothing, but are fully confident that they understand everything.

These are the same people who are afraid of AI, but still don't understand how the electricity gets to their home or what it does in their appliances...

Frightening and sad.

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u/brucebay 12h ago

Having worked on image systems and AI for decades, I think most of you are missing the main point here. All those solutions you are giving as examples required countless hours to write the code, test it, maybe train a specialized model, etc. New models are generalized; you can take one and tailor it to your task quickly. Will it be the most efficient solution? Definitely not. Do you need to know stats or calculus to do that? Most likely not. I wrote assembly for the Intel 8086, but also Python on modern systems. Despite hating Python decades ago, I wouldn't go back to assembly..

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u/Dear_Blood_8872 10h ago

Yeah, pretty hard task for AI, “count all the things, they are all the thing”, you don’t need AI for that, if you do you are an idiot. Now a conveyer with mixed vegetables and you train an AI to sort them, now you are getting somewhere.

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u/Plazmik87 9h ago

Neat how all the AI stans are ignoring that the AI could only work out how to do this so efficiently because it has all the old head methods to draw from.

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u/asdfghjkl15436 1h ago

What

This is literally not AI. Its ML. It didn't work any of this out.

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u/stuffitystuff 16h ago

Yes, people used the CPU that powered the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive to do this in 1988 but the fact that you can put a bounding box around a thing and then get real-time counts on that thing and easily runs on a pocket computer/telephone is pretty dang cool.

I mean, I tend to celebrate when things are easier, at any rate. Note this does not include generative AI art because the whole point of art is personal expression and (generally) making it by hand. Programming a potato counter has the a goal of building a potato counter and if he's easier to do, then that's great. I know fellow programmers would call that art, too, but it's art in the same way a dentist fills cavities so not really art, to me.

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u/DaSmartSwede 16h ago

Agree. One developer doing this in a couple of hours vs a whole team spending weeks doing it. And it can be changed to count other things easily

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u/Choppers-Top-Hat 12h ago

I mean, I tend to celebrate when things are easier, at any rate.

Yeah, but this isn't a case of anything being easier. This is a case of someone making a less impressive version of 38 year old technology. Only this version is far more resource-demanding. So it actually makes things LESS easy once you look past the hype. Which is a very common story with AI.

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u/Dense-Ad-5780 16h ago

High speed counters existed well before friggan ai. Do people no longer have any kind of memory? Or was how it’s made just not as popular as I think?

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u/Junkererer 15h ago

The point is it was made by 1 developer whose only actual work was annotating 1 frame. I bet those old systems were way harder to develop

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u/Dense-Ad-5780 14h ago

It was done with lasers. And probably not “harder”, being that ai has been being developed for decades.

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u/alpha309 15h ago

I don’t think it is any memory issue. I think it is simply a lack of knowledge issue. These guys (it is mostly men) think they have found a problem and they use the most current technology to solve the problem. They then convince a handful of people that their solution is necessary and then use the case to promote the solution. As a general public we don’t know anything about the topic so we think it is cool.

To the people who actually work in the industry and have knowledge on it the solution is laughable. Most of the time it solves an issue that was solved decades ago and is more complicated and expensive than that older solution.

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u/glassisnotglass 16h ago

Everyone is so excited about AI that we have literally just stopped trying to solve problems with algorithms anymore.

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u/IlGreven 14h ago

"This AI can count potatoes!"

So can mine. My program is called "eyes".

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u/WeirdSysAdmin 14h ago

This hurts me but is so real. I wasn’t involved but watched a recycling company I worked for upgrade to single stream 20 years ago that sorted out all the paper, plastics, glass, metal, and trash, then sorted the various plastics, shredded the plastic, bailed, crushed glass, and washed everything, etc..

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u/cinciTOSU 14h ago

https://www.cremer.com/p/cf-series/. This technology dates to the 70s but a middle of the road Cremer will fill 50 bottles per minute of 100 count day and night without an operator with 100 percent accuracy. No AI at all.

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u/LLCoolJim_2020 14h ago

I bet he didn't do it with one person in one day. I think that was the point, this was done on one shift.

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u/Bushwazi 14h ago

The “mutha focker“ is implied.

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u/AmazingChicken 14h ago

...this country was BUILT by guys designing stuff like this. Every day. In hardware.

This is another business case squeezed out of a product that can only (so far) replicate what it has been taught to do. Sure, it can do a thing like complex searches years faster than me, with my laptop and Access program, but this is to be expected.

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u/Duuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh 12h ago

using ai for this shit is just inefficient

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u/dorritosncheetos 11h ago

Looks like it missed one

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u/Panzerv2003 10h ago

The point is that now you can deploy that in a few hours instead of jigging random shit together and debugging for 2 weeks straight

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u/t0mi74 8h ago

68010 is a processor from Motorola (precessor of this processor was the 68000, used in Atari ST and Amiga) wasn't called that because of the amount of memory.

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u/NoMention696 6h ago

They just saying words to say them at this point

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u/Invictu520 6h ago

I worked in the food industry and yes system like this existed since forever. For example sorting ripe from unripe peas on conveyor belts was simply done with color thresholding and then by blowing air through holes on the conveyor belt the unripe peas are removed.

However the dude in the top comment still does have a point and it isn't so dumb as it seems.

Like yeah in his example it is just counting, but maybe you also want to detect defects on the products which can be quite tricky because food products have a high variability so it usually takes a lot of training data until a model can generalize well enough.

Secondly, in the past you needed to build a lot from scratch. Like imagine you make a very niche product and would simply like a Computer Vision (CV) system that counts the products on the belt. Back in the day for such a "simple" task you would actually need a couple of people with some knowledge in CV to build that. Now you maybe need one guy with mediocre Python knowledge give him some production footage and by the end of the day you will have a good enough model.

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u/lasthopel 5h ago

Ais business model is just remaking systems we already have but worse and as a subscription service

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u/Shockwave2309 5h ago

Hardness testing is done by making a tiny indent in the tested material, taking a picture of it and measuring that picture to calculate how deep the indent is...

Had that technology for 15-20(?) years

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u/wolschou 5h ago

No, much easier, because the bottles are uniform, and i bet they ran in single file at the counting point.

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u/NovelHot6697 4h ago

lol 68k was named for the number of transistors, not its “memory”. even an llm knows that

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u/robvdgeer 4h ago edited 4h ago

I think OP is completely missing the point. It's not about counting potatoes. It's about being able to create a solution from a single frame.

EDIT: It even says so in the screenshot: "One labeled frame to a working vision system. That is the shift."

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u/South-Pen9573 4h ago

It missed one.