Walked into the AI exhibit at the science museum in Chicago and actually saw how they train computer vision models

I was just killing time between trains and wandered past this demo where they had a camera pointed at a table of objects. Every time you put something new down the screen showed what the AI was "seeing" - like edge detection, depth mapping, object classification. It was wild to watch it struggle with a shiny metal bowl then nail it after a few tries. They even had a little score showing confidence percentage. Has anyone else seen one of these interactive AI setups at a museum or exhibit? Do they all work pretty similar or is this one special?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_viola9d agoTop Commenter

People get real excited about these demos but half the time the thing is just running a pre-recorded video loop pretending to be live. I saw one at a tech fair last year where the "AI" was totally faking it and the guy running the booth couldn't even explain basic neural network stuff when I asked. Not saying yours was fake, but museums love making things look more impressive than they actually are. That confidence score thing is probably just a random number generator to keep tourists entertained.

spencer_gonzalez19d ago

I actually read that the Science Museum of Minnesota has a similar computer vision demo but theirs focuses on how self driving cars see the road. They use a little RC car that drives around a track with traffic cones and the AI has to figure out what's a cone versus a person versus a piece of trash. The shiny bowl struggle you saw makes total sense though because I heard those models get confused by reflective surfaces since the light messes up their depth perception. It's pretty cool how they show the confidence score too because you can see the exact moment the AI goes from "pretty sure" to "absolutely positive" about what it's looking at.

the_alex9d ago

Exactly the moment the AI goes from "pretty sure" to "absolutely positive," so basically like me trying to decide if I left the stove on.