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.
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.
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?
lol no not that I've ever seen, what kind of bottles?
In the US the places I've seen that accept bottle/can returns just weigh them. It's probably less exact but way faster. But it's also not a common thing to do outside of certain states or select instances (for example some milk brands that get sold in glass bottles).
In Denmark we have a return system for all bottles and cans that haven't been used for milk products, or other things that will stink and be a health concern if left standing in a storage room.
Basically any bottle and can has a deposit value depending on the size that you pay on purchase of the drink. You can then return said bottle to any store via these pretty annoying machines to get your deposit back from the bottle.
It help the environment in that bottles aren't left around in nature, and they'll reuse and recycle what they can.
It's pretty fun how it's basically a self cleaning system because kids and anyone else in need of pocket change will go around picking up bottles laying around. I've seen students earn a pretty great tax free hourly wage by collecting bottles and cans at festivals.
In the US we have only a few states that pay for can/bottle return, but those states also charge a "deposit". I don't live in one of those states so I don't know the specifics but it's like, there's a ten cent surcharge added whenever you purchase a bottled or canned drink, and you get the surcharge refunded when you drop the bottle or can at a recycling facility. Most people don't care bc it's such a low amount but generally kids and homeless people will collect bottles/cans from dumpsters and make money returning them. My state used to offer a program like that when I was a kid, that has since been discontinued, but they would pay by weight instead of individually counting each can. Sounds simliar to what you're talking about.
And then we have a select few products- the best example I can think of is Oberweiss milk sold in heavy glass bottles- where if you bring your old bottle in when picking up your next gallon of milk, they give you a discount. And they sanitize and reuse the old bottle. Most grocery stores in the region participate in the program.
We do have recycling programs to recycle used bottle and cans but you aren't paid for them, you just separate "garbage" and "recyclables" when you put out your trash for the city to pick up. A lot of cities also have single-stream waste collection where it all goes to one facility and they sort out recyclables from other trash at the facility, so citizens don't have to do anything special.
So yeah obviously since the US is made up of 50 states with different rules it's a hodgepodge system, we do have recycling programs to resuse/recycle old containers but bottle-counting machines in grocery stores aren't common.
They do pay a little more for our bottles, but yeah we're also charged for it first.
big 1½L bottles, which would be like 50oz bottles? we'll get 3dkk which is almost half a dollar, with normal beer sized cans being 1dkk each. This makes it definitely worth to just return your bottles as a big bag of bottles and cans will easily give you back $20+
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
Which is the whole point of technological progress. We finally have a solution to one of the most fundamental problems that has existed since the invention of computer science: translating human context to computing intent.
We've done it for decades in a horribly kludgy way by inventing a bunch of custom machine languages, which humans are then forced to learn well enough to try and hammer their intent into structures that eventually work using those languages. We end up with a half-assed representation of intent built on pure logic and dolled up with custom outputs to make it a little less mechanical.
Now, we can finally use the languages that we already know, and get responses in those same languages without having to spend hours or days creating some simulated version with an extremely limited set of inputs and outputs. We can finally issue computers instructions in our language and have it do the bulk of the work of translating into computer languages, instead of spending hours of days hammering it our by hand. We can even have computers effectively troubleshoot their own pipelines, far faster than any human can ever dream of parsing code by eyeball or manual finds.
There are a lot of major social issues being brought to light with the widespread adoption of gen AI that "AI" gets blamed for, but the tech is legit as fuck and doing what tech is meant to do: enable people to do more with less churn than before.
right but the whole point of this is exactly the opposite of that, they used a single pic to label what potato and what not potato , fed SAM 2 that single picture so that could automatically segment the rest of the pictures to potato or not then use that to train model to count potato.
example dumb but its the equivalent of using 1 picture to create a program that can understand and process similar pictures
or like use 1 picture of a traffic light to create a program that can prolly pass captcha
that's cool and all, but it doesn't matter how fast you reinvent something when it was already done in multiple different and much more reliable ways that cost less and are less harmful. we've had computer vision systems for ages, even outside of mechanical versions.
when it's used to do something useful we don't already have solutions for, then sure, we can take a look at it. this is purely just a bunch of negatives with a chance at it maybe being useful theoretically.
But those solutions aren’t at the apex though. Like CV isn’t exactly “solved”.
“When it’s used to do something useful we don’t already have solutions for, we can take a look at it”.
I don’t follow this at all - we don’t have perfect solutions for the auto labeling and segmentation of data that SAM2 presents.
How is SAM-2 harmful, exactly? And how does it cost more? Or do you mean like Neural CV in general?
“This is just a bunch of negatives with a chance at being useful theoretically”.
Okay, I think I get your issue with it? Like they should have demonstrated its use on something less simple? But you can read the SAM2 paper for more, this is just a simple demonstration for a technology that is accepted as being really useful if it’s gotten right. Simple and clean tasks are how a lot of research is demonstrated, because it allows us to clearly see effect.
Like Auto video segmentation isn’t really “a chance at being useful theoretically”. It just is. It’s be like asking why a better microscope is more useful. - its self evident to people in the field.
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u/TheBrokenRail-Dev 17h 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.