41–50 of 115 posts
The output would probably be more compelling if A.I. were adopted more as an instrument by individual artists/composers to automate some of their more tedious tasks by learning their own particular styles rather than a magical music box that churns out top hits.
This algorithm is throwing down some wisdom
The melody is all over the place, and the rhythm is hard to tap a foot to, but one thing is certain: it's absolutely convinced that Christmas trees get decorated with flowers. Lots and lots and lots of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I mean by uncompressed is that you're reading the cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), or thymine (T) as being two bits per base pair (1 of 4 possibilities). There are 3 billion base pairs, which is 6 billion bits, divided by 8 to get bytes you get 750 MB. The human genome is somewhat redundant and can be further compressed. That is just the string of "ones and zeros" (ACGT) could be run through whatever comp…
I think that your "700MB uncompressed" fails to take into account that the construction, development, and maturation of the brain relies heavily on cellular and molecular mechanisms. I think it is a little disingenuous to hide the enormous wealth of information necessary to create a brain, much less understand and utilize one, inside of your compiler.
Not to mention the rest of the ecosystem. Look what happens to humans when they grow up without being properly embedded in the family, with its hundreds of thousands of years of historical contingency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
We can't even begin to describe the amount of information encoded there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, I have no way of knowing how soon "very soon" is. However, although my post may have wishful thinking in it, I think if you investigate the reality of the cells that contribute to human thinking, you will come to the conclusion that it is impossible that this or some similar system should not be modelled in computers within the next hundred years. You can look at the processing involved yourself. Just reme…
> This is like heavier-than-air flight. Yes, this is like heavier-than-air flight. It would be like if we didn't really understand how flight works so we are just imitating birds by gluing feathers to cardboard wings, flapping them, and hoping flight just sort of happens. In a similar way, we don't really understand how the human brain works, so we are just imitating neurons and hoping sentience will just sort of hap…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I mean by uncompressed is that you're reading the cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), or thymine (T) as being two bits per base pair (1 of 4 possibilities). There are 3 billion base pairs, which is 6 billion bits, divided by 8 to get bytes you get 750 MB. The human genome is somewhat redundant and can be further compressed. That is just the string of "ones and zeros" (ACGT) could be run through whatever comp…
I think that your "700MB uncompressed" fails to take into account that the construction, development, and maturation of the brain relies heavily on cellular and molecular mechanisms. I think it is a little disingenuous to hide the enormous wealth of information necessary to create a brain, much less understand and utilize one, inside of your compiler.
You and other posters are all correct regarding the huge volume of information on which human minds are trained. it's hardly unsupervised learning either :)
---------
EDIT: In response to your comment, I've given it further reflection. DNA as source code may be misleading as an "upper bounds". After all, suppose we knew for a fact (assume there were a mathematical proof or anyway just assume axiomatically) that a one hundred megabyte source code file completely described (contained every physical law etc) a deterministic Universe, and that if you ran it on enough computation to fully describe a hundred billion galaxies with a hundred billion stars each, one of those stars would have a planet and that planet would contain humans and the humans at some point in the simulation would deduce the same one hundred megabyte source code file for their Universe. (This is a bit of a stretch as it's not possible to deduce the laws of the universe rigorously.)
Anyway under that assumption in a way you could argue that the "upper bounds" on the amount of entropy that it takes to produce human intelligence is "just" a hundred megabytes, since that source code can deterministically model the entire Universe. But practically that is useless, and the humans in that simulation would have to do something quite different from modeling their universe, if they wanted to come up with AI to help them with whatever computational tasks they wanted to do.
In the same way, perhaps DNA is a red herring, as there are a vast number of cells in the human body (as in, tens of trillions) doing an incredible amount of work. So starting out with DNA is the "wrong level" of emulation, just as starting out with a 100 MB source code file for the universe would be the "wrong level" of emulation, even if we posit axiomatically that it fully describes our entire Universe from the big bang through intelligent humans.
So I will concede that it is misleading.
All that said, I think that emulating or considering the computation on the level of neurons is sufficient - so it is sufficient to look at how many neurons are in the human brain and the kind of connections they have.
As for the efficacy of this approach - that's the very thing that is being shown in the story we're replying to and many places elsewhere. It works. We're getting extremely strong results, that in some cases beat humans.
I believe that emulating or comparing to humans at the neural level should probably be sufficient for extremely strong results. We do not need to emulate every atom or anything like that. I consider it out of the question that we would discover that human minds form a biochemical pathway into another ethereal soul-plane and connect with our souls in a way that you can't emulate by emulating neurons and the like, and that the souls are where intellect happens and brains are just like "radio antennas" for them. Instead, I think that the approaches we're seeing will achieve in many ways similar results to what humans brains produce computationally - a much higher level of abstraction is sufficient for the results that are sought.
I'm making a note here:
Huge success!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that your "700MB uncompressed" fails to take into account that the construction, development, and maturation of the brain relies heavily on cellular and molecular mechanisms. I think it is a little disingenuous to hide the enormous wealth of information necessary to create a brain, much less understand and utilize one, inside of your compiler.
>hide... inside of your compiler. Not to mention the rest of the ecosystem. Look what happens to humans when they grow up without being properly embedded in the family, with its hundreds of thousands of years of historical contingency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) We can't even begin to describe the amount of information encoded there.
I'm cutting a lot of corners, and the human substrate in which our brains are embedded is finicky - you can't just leave a toddler in a roomful of DVD's with food and get a fully functioning adult after 48 months of unsupervised training.
but it's not "can't even begin to describe the amount of information encoded there" either. 50,000 blue ray discs' worth oughta do it.
I'm not saying we've figured out any of the other stuff - it's just that computationally (horsepower) we're there; the later training set for unsupervised learning is also there; etc.
The missing parts might well seem insurmountable - but every result that shows AI performing at the level of a 2 or 3 year old is wonderful. This is it. This is beginning of the turning point. It can happen at any moment.
Someone at this very moment could be setting up a neural net that after 48 months of training can deduce its own status in the world, make novel and correct sentences, maintain a coherent world-view, and be trained on the entirety of the Internet at 10x the speed of adult brains. (The limit is 1,000,000x speed of adult brains - because the silicon substrate we're using today propagates signals literally a million times faster - today.)
We're there. It's all there. It's "just" 86,000,000,000 neurons (with 7k connections each) and 12 years of supervised training to get to the level of a 12-year-old. 3 pounds. 20 watts. This is happening. Amazon's and Google's server farms blow it out of the water computationally compared to a brain, today. we might not come up with the same architecture but what we are coming up with is making breathtaking progress.
------------
EDIT: I've been submitting too much, but I agree with JonnieCache's thoughts below. However, as a thought exercise there is no reason we couldn't train AI interactively, putting it in a VR room and literally talking to it and correcting it, etc, like a pet. Granted this is not a normal approach to take but since we're discussing the theoretical limitations you can certainly envision it. Obviously nobody is trying to do that - we're not trying to come up with sentience using an approach like this and have no idea what steps humans go through exactly to get there. But it's not computational power that keeps us from getting there - and we could be surprised at any time.
The only thing (kind of) working well is feature/topic detection in the image (tree, christmas etc.), but that isn't really cutting edge.
The core part, learning and creating music, only produced melody and lyrics that seem not much different from accumulating random sentence and chordal fragments.
It kind of feels like a five-year-old trying to make a song. Which seems good - now they only need to improve the mechanisms and who know, maybe we'll get to the point when it's a ten-year-old?
Instead of five, don't you mean "two to three"? And under that comparison, isn't it scary how much it does sound that way? Like a kid who hears words together but don't know what they mean yet? (and doesn't really get the cultural things around it.) To me it sounds like a quite musical 2-3 year old stringing words together. Doesn't it strike anyone else that way? These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We…
Daniel Lemire has an observation here: our brains don't use all the connections, all the time (when it does it's called epilepsy); it would be interesting if we built some computers that also worked like that - with only small parts being active at a certain time, but switching quickly from one to another. That would help with the heating problem and it might allow processors a lot more complex than we have now.