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Introducing OpenAI

openai.com

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Re: Introducing OpenAI

#41

Post by dang »

negrit wrote: post #18
azzafazza wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to have missed a story here. A quick Google search turned up a letter on Quora, https://www.quora.com/Is-working-in-Infosys-as-bad-as-this-l... , is that what you are refering too?

YC is lobbying to change the H-1B system in order the let startups get more H-1Bs. Infosys is blatantly abusing and cheating the H-1B system so bad that startups are getting penalized when sponsoring H-1B visas. And now YC is getting in bed with infosys...

The relationships of large organizations can be surprisingly complex; consider Apple and Samsung. YC isn't large, of course, but Infosys is. The information content of the OpenAI funding announcement for immigration questions is probably zero. (No special knowledge behind this comment, just a general observation.)

Edit: Please don't break the HN guidelines by complaining about downvoting. Downvotes to your comment upthread are not because of any "Infosys brigade"; they're most likely because it combined oversimplification with negativity and because it points discussion toward a pre-existing controversy that is off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#42

Post by johann28 »

hacker_9 wrote: post #3

This is about 100 years too early. Seriously why do people think neural networks are the answer to AI? They are proven to be stupid outside of their training data. We have such a long way to go. This fear-mongering is pointless.

It's not necessarily the answer to AI, but it works remarkably well. Is it Skynet or the Terminator yet? No.

There are different ideas for what constitutes AI. Expert systems and knowledge-based reasoners? Pattern-recognizer black boxes? Chatbots? AGI?

Over the years the concept of AI shifted. Until recent years "AI" was mostly used for things like A* search, creating algorithms that play turn-based table games for example (see the Russell-Norvig book), symbolic manipulation, ontologies etc., a few years ago it began to also refer to machine learning like neural networks again.

Neural networks are good at what they are designed for. Whether they will lead to the path to human-like artificial intelligence is a speculative question. But symbolic manipulation alone won't be able to handle the messiness of sensory data for sure. I think neural nets are much better suited for open-ended development than hand engineered pipelines that were state of the art until recently (like extracting corner points, describing them with something like SIFT, clustering the descriptors and using an SVM over bag-of-words histograms). Hand engineering seems too restrictive.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#44

Post by cwp »

peter303 wrote: post #22
sethbannon wrote: post #11

I can't think of another field of research that's simultaneously brought the potential to solve all the world's problems and the potential to end life as we know it. Very appreciative to see so many great minds working on ensuring AI heralds in more of the former, and none of the latter.

They said this 60 years when AI began.

Except for that bit at the end.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#45

Post by _sentient »

logical42 wrote: post #36
_sentient wrote: post #5

$1B in committed funding. Just, wow. Side note: I wonder if the Strong AI argument can benefit from something akin to Pascal's Wager, in that the upside of being right is ~infinite with only a finite downside in the opposing case.

Finite downside? What about Skynet?

You have the poles reversed.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#46

Post by murbard2 »

sethbannon wrote: post #11

I can't think of another field of research that's simultaneously brought the potential to solve all the world's problems and the potential to end life as we know it. Very appreciative to see so many great minds working on ensuring AI heralds in more of the former, and none of the latter.

Molecular nanotechnology

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#47

Post by keerthiko »

dopamean wrote: post #16

In all seriousness... does "just, wow" communicate something different from "wow?"

Hmm. I believe "Just, wow" means that there is nothing more to explain about the event in question worth expressing amazement about, as it is extremely self-evident.

Sometimes also used to express being at a loss for additional words.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#48

Post by hacker_9 »

jonknee wrote: post #32
hacker_9 wrote: post #3

This is about 100 years too early. Seriously why do people think neural networks are the answer to AI? They are proven to be stupid outside of their training data. We have such a long way to go. This fear-mongering is pointless.

Humans are really stupid without training too.

Not true. Humans can adapt to many environments by pulling in training from other related environments and applying it to the new data. Some call this generalised learning, but I think it points more to our ability to shape everything we know to any given problem - something 'beyond' just generalising.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#49

Post by toomuchtodo »

dools wrote: post #40
baconner wrote: post #38

"We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills..." I realize that today machine learning really is purely a tool, but the idea that ai will and should always be that doesn't sit quite right with me. Ml tech absent of consciousnesses remains a tool and an incredibly useful one, but in the long term you have to ask the question - at what point does an ai transition from a tool to a slave. Seems some ti…

We've been pretty happy to enslave animals in semi-symbiotic relationships for thousands of years. It's about the same as that.

Its going to work until it doesn't. You don't feel too bad about ants you step on, do you? Even if you're not purposely walking on them.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#50

Post by JoshTriplett »

baconner wrote: post #38

"We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills..." I realize that today machine learning really is purely a tool, but the idea that ai will and should always be that doesn't sit quite right with me. Ml tech absent of consciousnesses remains a tool and an incredibly useful one, but in the long term you have to ask the question - at what point does an ai transition from a tool to a slave. Seems some ti…

The idea is not that we should build and (try to) suppress a sentient AI; that would be a bad idea for numerous reasons. However, we don't necessarily need to build a sentient AI in the first place; we can build a process that has reasoning capabilities far above human without actually having agency of its own.
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