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Introducing OpenAI

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Re: Introducing OpenAI

#101

Post by bdcs »

argonaut wrote: post #79

I find it a bit disappointing that despite originally stating that YC Research would target underfunded/underserved areas of research, they've decided to fund and dive into one of the most-hyped, well-funded areas of research: deep learning, an area of research where companies are hiring like crazy and even universities are hiring faculty like crazy. I'm reasonably sure all the research scientists had multiple job of…

I agree with you that AI is a well-funded area of research, although if you take the view that traditional forms of research, eg private or academic, come with crippling problems -- short-term horizons, corrupting influence of profits, publish or parish, time wasted in meetings/grant-writing -- then you can see the potential of having a more long-term, focused, and centralized space for inventing AI.

>> YC Research decided to join the same arms race that companies like Toyota are joining.

Or perhaps YC Research providing a sandbox next to a warzone.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#102

Post by _delirium »

johann28 wrote: post #71
hacker_9 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creation of what is essentially an ethics committee for a technology that doesn't even exist yet? With people such as Elon Musk on board who have publicly said 'AI is our biggest existential threat' ? Additionally the second paragraph: We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely. This infers they think AI wil…

Sutskever, Schulman, Karpathy and Kingma are experts in machine learning. And yes, AI will definitely be used for all sorts of purposes including hostile means. Just like anything else, really. Financial manipulation, spying, intelligent military devices, cracking infrastructure security, etc. These are realistic concerns, we shouldn't fall for the Skynet red herring. We can have problems with ethical AI use, even if…

I hope I'm wrong, but given the composition of the donors I'd be surprised if they really put much scrutiny on near-term corporate/government misuse of AI, apart perhaps from military robots. There are definitely interesting ethics questions already arising today around how large tech companies, law enforcement, etc. are starting to use AI, whether it's Palantir, the FBI, Google, or Facebook, so no argument that it's a timely subject at least in some of its forms. It'll be interesting to see if they get into that. I'd guess they probably want to avoid the parts that overlap too much with data-privacy concerns, partly because a number of their sponsors are not exactly interested in data privacy, and partly because the ethical debate then becomes more complex (it's not purely an "ethics of AI" debate, but has multiple axes).

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#103

Post by Kutta »

vox_mollis wrote: post #65

Where does this leave MIRI? Is Eliezer going to close up shop, collaborate with OpenAI, or compete?

Almost certainly, the AI safety pie getting bigger will translate to more resources for MIRI too.

That said, although a lot of money and publicity was thrown around regarding AI safety in the last year, so far I haven't seen any research outside MIRI that's tangible and substantial. Hopefully big money AI won't languish as a PR existence, and of course they shouldn't reinvent MIRI's wheels either.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#104

Post by _sentient »

leereeves wrote: post #87
_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.

It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly. The high-stakes wager isn't success vs failure in creating strong AI, it's what happens if you do succeed.

The framing here is: "What are the implications of doing nothing if you are right (about the inevitability of a malicious strong AI, in this case), compared to the implications about being wrong and still doing nothing?"

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#105

Post by chimeracoder »

ipsum2 wrote: post #91
rjvir wrote: post #4

> Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research are donating to support OpenAI. In total, these funders have committed $1 billion Funny how they just slipped that in at the end

Note that this is "committed $1 billion", not funded. "although we expect to only spend a tiny fraction of this in the next few years."

> Note that this is "committed $1 billion", not funded.

That same caveat could apply to any fund raised by a venture fund - usually funds are committed, and the actual capital call comes later (when the funds are ready to be spent).

It's an important caveat in some circumstances (e.g. it hinges on the liquidity of the funders, which may be relevant in an economic downturn), but in this one, I'm not sure it really makes a difference for this announcement.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#106

Post by glup »

cdnsteve wrote: post #81

AI is a pretty huge field, what area are they going to focus on specifically?

I'll wager RNNs in NLP given Ilya's background. Probably moving towards increasingly rich models of natural language semantics and pragmatics.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#107

Post by hacker_9 »

iopq wrote: post #92
hacker_9 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The brain has not only solved the vision problem (reconstructing depth from still images, recognising the objects in the scene, and filling in the occluded parts), it has also solved the motion problem of coordinated the movement of our ~300 muscles (given constraints, how do I move from A to B, or pickup the cup, or do a handstand), as well as solved the memory problem (basically infinite memory, with some sor…

If you have to forget, your memory is not infinite. My computer's HD is infinite, but you have to remove programs that you don't use.

Well technically yes, but I could counter argue that we have 'living memories' that we can not only replay at any time (any of them, without any buffering or delay), but also change and combine with other memories to create new memories. Additionally if someone tells you something the brain can search all your memories in what seems to be a microsecond and pull up the relevant ones (file search on steroids, that can even search every single frame in all your recorded movies).

Much more useful than static data on a hard drive.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#108

Post by increment_i »

johann28 wrote: post #52
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…

There is no natural cutoff. If they become too creepy and make us emotionally attached, we'll change them so they don't freak us out in that way.

There is a bit of consensus about this exact issue in terms of the 'Uncanny Valley' hypothesis[0] and I'd tend to agree. We would have to dehumanize any sufficiently advanced or "self aware" AI agents if we mean to have them serve human interest solely and unconditionally. Incidentally, humans seem to be historically well versed in doing so.

[O]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#109

Post by cobaltblue »

mikepalmer wrote: post #99
karmacondon wrote: post #88

This is a key takeaway: "...we are going to ask YC companies to make whatever data they are comfortable making available to OpenAI. And Elon is also going to figure out what data Tesla and Space X can share." Money is great, openness is great, big name researchers are also a huge plus. But data data data, that could turn out to be very valuable. I don't know if Sam meant that YC companies would be encouraged to contr…

'The "evil" AI and safety stuff is just science fiction, but whatever.' umm... you can offer proof that we have nothing to worry about? Does the proof go like: Just as all people are inherently good, therefore all AIs will be inherently good? Or is it more like: since we can now safely contain all evil people, therefore we will be able to safely contain evil AIs? Sounds to me like there is some risk, no?

I thought of responding to that bit too, changed my mind, but your response made me reconsider again. The response is simple, just a quote from Yudkowsky: "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." When all one knows about potential future AIs comes from sci-fi, and the only sci-fi one reads or watches is weak sci-fi with very human good/evil AIs, one's frame of reference in the discussion about whether concerns are warranted or not is way too narrow to be worth any further consideration.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#110

Post by scott_karana »

sethbannon wrote: post #95
kumarski wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitrogen research. Haber Bosch is a primary example. Nitrogen both creates and destroys. Look harder. ;)

How does nitrogen research have the capability of solving all the world's problems?

How does AI solve all problems, either? I can think of plenty of problems with our bodies that AI might never fix. Cost-benefit and all.
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