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AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

newscientist.com

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Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#31

Post by phreeza »

argonaut wrote: post #14

A nuance that is underappreciated by a lot of people / the media is the degree to which any of the AI generates X models (faces, drawings, fills in photos, increases sharpness, etc.) simply copy and paste and interpolate from the training set. Unlike general supervised learning problems, for many of the deep learning "generative" models that get posted to HN regularly, there is no objective "test set" to measure gene…

One way to check for overfitting is to compare samples to their nearest neighbors in the training set. Of course that doesn't cover interpolations between two points in the training set, but I would argue plausible interpolations are already something "learned".

A different problem I see with faces in particular though is that our visual system is actually wired to do some really heavy denoising/pattern matching on faces (for example people seeing the face of Jesus on slices of toast), so the generation of faces doesn't actually need to be that good to produce results that seem appealing to humans.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#32

Post by zoul »

serndo4 wrote: post #26
onion2k wrote: post #19

I thought this would take longer. "Developer" will stick around as a job for people who need new and unique things, or for apps that need speed, but if your job is making forms to take in data, putting it in a database, performing some sort of analysis on it, and then printing a report to the screen then you should really starting learning something else, because those jobs will not exist in 10 years.

i don't think so. the problem is human computer interaction. to specify what is needed is harder than the actual coding. i would guess this will be implemented in an IDE and will reduce coding times tremendously

Specifying exactly what is needed is coding. The hope for some kind of high-level language you would generate the actual code from is decades old, see compilers. (And it does reduce coding times tremendously!)

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#33

Post by 317070 »

argonaut wrote: post #14

A nuance that is underappreciated by a lot of people / the media is the degree to which any of the AI generates X models (faces, drawings, fills in photos, increases sharpness, etc.) simply copy and paste and interpolate from the training set. Unlike general supervised learning problems, for many of the deep learning "generative" models that get posted to HN regularly, there is no objective "test set" to measure gene…

Actually, there is a formal method to evaluate generative models. All you need is a validation set. Then you need to find what the odds are that the model would have generated your validation set. That probability is the one you want to maximize [0]. In order to be able to calculate or estimate this probability, you need to make some amendments to your model architecture. But for instance PixelCNN's know the probability exactly, variational auto-encoders have a lower bound on the probability, etc. It is mainly the generative adverserial networks (GANs) which cannot. And this is the reason research in the latter is limited, despite the remarkable visualizations it produces.

But the judging of models by their visualizations is something which is still done too often, and it annoys quite some researchers in the area that those papers still pass review at machine learning conferences. They should be sent to computer graphics conferences, because that is what they actually do /vent.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.01844

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#34

Post by darpa_escapee »

yetihehe wrote: post #2

It will allow programmers to make errors much faster :D. Programmer: why is my program not working? AI: Strange, it's working for me.

Ah, but it will help us debug errors faster if we train it on a troubleshooting dataset! :)

  Programmer: why is my program not working?
  AI: Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#36

Post by serndo4 »

zoul wrote: post #32
serndo4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think so. the problem is human computer interaction. to specify what is needed is harder than the actual coding. i would guess this will be implemented in an IDE and will reduce coding times tremendously

Specifying exactly what is needed is coding. The hope for some kind of high-level language you would generate the actual code from is decades old, see compilers. (And it does reduce coding times tremendously!)

that's kind of what i meant.

someone has to tell the thing what to do, in a understandable way. and this will not be the client/manager/whoeverneedssomething.

and that's not coding. that's software engineering. maybe codingmonkeys will disappear but a "developer" is, imo, a guy who does more than code

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#39

Post by p1esk »

darpa_escapee wrote: post #34
yetihehe wrote: post #2

It will allow programmers to make errors much faster :D. Programmer: why is my program not working? AI: Strange, it's working for me.

Ah, but it will help us debug errors faster if we train it on a troubleshooting dataset! :) Programmer: why is my program not working? AI: Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I'm not sure if you're aware, but this has already been done, pretty much literally: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.05869
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