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Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

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Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#111

Post by hartator »

treehau5 wrote: post #91
itg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good, there's enough fear mongering about it when we don't even know where to start when it comes to building an AGI.

It's not fear mongering. Some of the ideas I hear from people on this forum, from academia, and the likes are just downright terrifying, and we don't even know what future AI will be capable of. We have to decide as a society, and decide really soon how far we are willing to take AI research. We built the nuclear bomb, but we decided when to stop. We didn't build more advanced bombs that could level entire providence…

Aren't fusion bombs 1000x more powerful than the original Little Boy (Name of the hiroshima bomb)?

Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#112

Post by hartator »

rojobuffalo wrote: post #105
hueving wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who's benefiting from urging caution about potential bad outcomes for AGI? Every single person working in a position on the cusp of automation. The same thing happens with any new technology that threatens massive industries. (automobiles, airplanes, electricity, heating oil, etc)

AGI and heating oil? There's a troubling gap in reasoning there. Narrow AI and automation replacing jobs has its own set of problems. But a machine intelligence explosion is a completely different thing, and a legitimate existential risk. It's really important to understand the difference and the specific arguments.

Still, you can't find anytime in history where we ended up saying "thanks we were careful" related to new technoloies. It's usually the reverse, governments delaying change for not smart reasons.

Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#113

Post by ladzoppelin »

Who gives a sh!t that Apple was not at the meeting. I think the main takeaway is that 4-5 companies might control one of the most powerful technologies/ideas of the last 5 years. Its already hard enough competing with these companies how is this good for everybody else?

Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#114

Post by ilaksh »

pron wrote: post #19

Calling simple statistical clustering algorithms that are tweaked by lots of trial-and-error heuristics "AI" feels like calling those slow two-wheeled electric self-balancing skateboards "hoverboards". Sometimes marketing can be too dramatic.

Deep learning is not a simple statistical clustering algorithm.

Trial and error is a main way that people learn and it works.

Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#115

Post by Razengan »

xenobioticants wrote: post #84
j1vms wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether right or wrong, I think it's good to keep in mind that Apple has, by far the highest quarterly profit and total asset value, compared to any of these companies - it really is a giant among giants. Alphabet certainly has an excellent future outlook (reflected in the markets), but its current financial state still pales in comparison to Apple. Taking this into account, I figure Apple thinks twice and thrice bef…

'it really is a giant among giants.' You're confused. That would be Alphabet, not Apple. To put it in perspective for you, Google has: ~90% of the search market ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-... ) ~90% of the smartphone market ( https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/gartner-androids-smartphon... ) ~50% of the online advertisement market ( http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Google-Still-Domin…

> However, Alphabet its influence and reach is far, far beyond that of Apple. Its just not as flashy & visible.

You just gave some very "flashy & visible" examples of Alphabet's influence while citing only a "big pile of cash" as Apple's flashy & visible trait.

Apple have always been the most secretive and they almost NEVER announce something before they're ready to advertise it.

Did anybody see the New Mac Pro redesign coming? What about the fact that they were developing a whole new language for 4 years before anybody suspected it, Swift? Now it's one of their biggest things ever (one of fastest growing languages on GitHub by some metrics.)

Hell, even the PowerPC to Intel jump could be considered a surprise, even though they had been working on it for 5 years. [1]

Now, just recently they revealed a bunch of stuff powered by offline machine learning in iOS 10 and the macOS Photos — all without sending your info to Apple — and frankly I'm more impressed by this and the differential privacy thing than with Google's efforts towards centralized AI.

If one were to make any guesses, I'd say Apple is in a unique position to build an AI network distributed across all their devices, without leaking privacy to Apple or anyone. This is very attractive to me as a user, even if I have "nothing to hide." There are over a billion iPhones and iPads and Macs combined, with beefier processors on average compared to the majority of Androids. Android's fragmentation may also make it harder for Google to pull off the same, even if they were to make a commitment to user privacy.

I think the winds of the world are changing direction; people are becoming increasingly aware about privacy concerns, and these issues keep making the headlines. EVEN if Apple is just using it as PR ammo, Google and Facebooks are objectively the worst offenders in this area and they don't look so nice and shiny a People's Champion in a privacy-focused future. It may take just one good open-sourced and distributed search engine, or a newer and more hip social platform (Snapchat looks like a good contender there), to unravel all their prospects.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY_ABCZJcpc

Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#116

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #99
xenobioticants wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'it really is a giant among giants.' You're confused. That would be Alphabet, not Apple. To put it in perspective for you, Google has: ~90% of the search market ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-... ) ~90% of the smartphone market ( https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/gartner-androids-smartphon... ) ~50% of the online advertisement market ( http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Google-Still-Domin…

>* I can think you can see the point I'm making: yes, Apple has a big pile of cash, a fat amount of profit and high stock value. However, Alphabet its influence and reach is far, far beyond that of Apple. Its just not as flashy & visible.* Yeah, Alphabet is bigger in every way that counts except those two inconsequential things for companies: revenue and profit.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#117

Post by ladzoppelin »

ladzoppelin wrote: post #113

Who gives a sh!t that Apple was not at the meeting. I think the main takeaway is that 4-5 companies might control one of the most powerful technologies/ideas of the last 5 years. Its already hard enough competing with these companies how is this good for everybody else?

edit: "The group plans to make discussions and minutes from meetings publicly available." I guess that is cool. But what about the competitive advantage these companies have right now? Does anybody monitor that stuff? I am not talking robots and singularity crap but rather companies that have means and the ability to make every decision with ML and the data to create an insurmountable competitive advantage.

Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#118

Post by wstrange »

coldtea wrote: post #99
xenobioticants wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'it really is a giant among giants.' You're confused. That would be Alphabet, not Apple. To put it in perspective for you, Google has: ~90% of the search market ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-... ) ~90% of the smartphone market ( https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/gartner-androids-smartphon... ) ~50% of the online advertisement market ( http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Google-Still-Domin…

>* I can think you can see the point I'm making: yes, Apple has a big pile of cash, a fat amount of profit and high stock value. However, Alphabet its influence and reach is far, far beyond that of Apple. Its just not as flashy & visible.* Yeah, Alphabet is bigger in every way that counts except those two inconsequential things for companies: revenue and profit.

The iPhone exploited a rift in the space-time fabric.

The right features at the right time, everybody had to have one and the margins are totally insane.

That can't last. The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins.

It seems unlikely they will have another product that generates as much cash as the iPhone.

They will still be a very profitable company, but perhaps not the cash printing machine that we have seen over the last 5 years.

Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#119

Post by mgoodness »

cybernytrix wrote: post #101
princeb wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> best of breed product company focused on a great user experience somehow i put them in the same category as LG, Samsung and Sony, albeit 100x better at what they do.

Apple has its own OS, compilers, IDE, 2+ languages, various frameworks etc. This is more than what Google, more importantly used a lot by people. But yeah it just a hardware company.

Android, ChromeOS, Go, Dart

Re: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

#120

Post by AJ007 »

gavman wrote: post #49

>>"As of today’s launch, companies like Apple, Twitter, Intel and Baidu are missing from the group. Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals — many of which are part of this new group." It seems Apple's lack of engagement in the community [1] is really starting to hurt it. Did…

I see a list of companies which are ethically compromised. Apple has publicly taken the opposite side of the fence on this one. I'm not sure they want to be associated with Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft using AI to strip apart user's private behavior and reassemble it as advertising data. Would we trust a cooperative of tobacco companies funding scientific research and ethics surrounding the use and promotion of cigarettes?

Does anyone contest that Facebook's AI is going to pull apart their user's public social feeds and private FB conversations to advance their own business model?

A unification of a large group of tech companies could even be seen as an anti-OpenAI. A singleton could certainly emerge as a co-operation between multiple large corporations and/or a government. An Amazon & Google partnership is particularly terrifying considering how much computing power could be rolled over to a unified AI almost instantaneously.

We do not need an organization engaged in PR for for-profit companies attempting to placate the public while lobbying regulators while unleashing their AI on the public at large. That is what this looks like. We've seen their business ethics already. It isn't a good template moving forward.

I would be less cynical if I heard anyone else besides Apple taking a public stand on keeping personal data private and AI contained in boxes. There does need to be AI ethics and safety leaders, but Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon should be following not in the lead.

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