Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

openphilanthropy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 186 posts

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#141

Post by nbouscal »

icebraining wrote: post #122
jaibot wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be really useful if there were some historical example of a sudden increase in intelligence leading to a new class of agents taking over the Earth and determining it's future. Or maybe if there were any evidence that AI capabilities are increasing, like becoming dominant at Chess or Go, driverless cars, or a slew of recent papers on transfer learning. Maybe if one of the co-authors of the leading AI textbook…

Driverless cars are a great example. Thirty years after the Navlab¹, and twenty after it did a travel from Washigton to San Diego mostly by itself², we still don't have a viable model that can safely navigate even an highway. But "human-level AI" is ten year away? To me, all these discussions sound like someone who read The Earth to the Moon in 1865 and started working on how to avoid getting humans harmed by the exp…

Nobody is saying human-level AI is ten years away, people are saying there's some chance of it in ten years. Median 50% estimate is quite a bit longer. But a 10% chance just means divide the impact by ten, and with an event like this that still leaves you with a really damn big number.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#142

Post by icebraining »

nbouscal wrote: post #139
icebraining wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but then you just have 29 responses in total.

The word "just" feels awfully out of place in this context. If you were doing some kind of broad-based polling of public opinion, of course you'd want a bigger sample size, but 29 of the top 100 researchers in a field sounds like a hell of a good sample to me, and well worth listening to.

If they were 29 random researchers, I'd agree, but since they were voluntarily selected, not really. They try to check if the sample is biased, but it's not convincing.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#143

Post by icebraining »

nbouscal wrote: post #141
icebraining wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driverless cars are a great example. Thirty years after the Navlab¹, and twenty after it did a travel from Washigton to San Diego mostly by itself², we still don't have a viable model that can safely navigate even an highway. But "human-level AI" is ten year away? To me, all these discussions sound like someone who read The Earth to the Moon in 1865 and started working on how to avoid getting humans harmed by the exp…

Nobody is saying human-level AI is ten years away, people are saying there's some chance of it in ten years. Median 50% estimate is quite a bit longer. But a 10% chance just means divide the impact by ten, and with an event like this that still leaves you with a really damn big number.

I get that, I still find the numbers absolutely unrealistic. They're just setting it up for another AI winter.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#144

Post by schoen »

Smaug123 wrote: post #86
joshuamorton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that there's no such thing as the field of "AGI" (or if there is, its a subfield of philosophy). Asking modern ML and Deep Learning researchers about their thoughts on AGI is like asking the wright brothers about a mars mission. Sure, they're the closest thing we have to "experts", but there's not just one, but likely 5 or 10 more field, if not world-changing leaps we need to make before the technologies we ha…

"We can formally prove what a system is capable of." This is not true. By Rice's theorem, either the system is too dumb to be useful, or we can't prove what it can do.

This is an abuse of Rice's theorem (which seems to be getting more common).

Rice's theorem says that no program can correctly decide what an arbitrary program will do, not that no properties of programs can be proven. There are useful programs about which non-trivial properties can be, and have been, proven, and Rice's theorem is no limit on the complexity of an individual program about which a property may be proven, or the complexity of a property which an individual program may be proven to exhibit.

Usually programs with provable properties have been intentionally constructed to make it possible to prove those properties, rather than having someone come along and prove a property after-the-fact.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#145

Post by joshuamorton »

Smaug123 wrote: post #91
joshuamorton wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An airgapped computer is not going to be capable of taking over the world. Further, Turing completeness is not required to be "useful". You can get to the moon without Turing completeness.

I didn't address airgappedness at all, but you may still be wrong: we use the superintelligence's output, or else why would we have created it, so we are the channel by which it affects the world. Anyway, who knows what can be done by a superintelligence which can control a stream of electrons emitted from its own CPU!

Well, exactly as much as any other cpus can do by solely controlling it's output electrons: not much. Let's not ascribe deity-like powers to things that we can understand fairly well.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#146

Post by engx »

icebraining wrote: post #102
reachtarunhere wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this as a problem. If I had tons of money and knew someone (by any connection) who was doing amazing work I would definitely chip in.

It's not his money, though. Also, when you invest in your friend's business, you don't get to deduct that in your taxes.

It's not a business, it's a non profit founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others, with $1 billion in committments to funding.

How is this controversial? Just because some people know each other?

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#147

Post by dang »

idlewords wrote: post #57

Scroll to the end. This is a $30M grant to the guy's roommate and future brother-in-law. Unbelievable.

I scrolled to the end and can see why someone would question that. But framing it as a personal grant is misleading. If we're going to keep telling users that on HN we want them to make substantive points thoughtfully and apply the principle of charity, it's only fair to say so here as well. We like pith, but fairness more.

(In case anyone is curious, I don't know anything about the story; I just saw it on HN.)

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#148

Post by dilemma »

richardbatty wrote: post #106
dilemma wrote: post #52

Two organizations that exploit the implications of the word "Open" as it is used in the world of technology to market their own private companies and organizations.

The Open Philanthropy Project uses the word 'Open' to mean ( http://www.openphilanthropy.org/what-open-means-us ): "Open to many possibilities ... instead of starting with a predefined set of focus areas, we’re considering a wide variety of causes where our philanthropy could help to improve others’ lives." and "Open about our work ... Very often, key discussions and decisions happen behind closed doors, and it’s dif…

My criticism is that it isn't open, which is more or less absolute. Every organization is "a little" open, sharing the information that benefits them. And that seems to be what OpenAI intends to do: be open about that which suits them.

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#149

Post by metricodus »

idlewords wrote: post #57

Scroll to the end. This is a $30M grant to the guy's roommate and future brother-in-law. Unbelievable.

Copied for convenience: "OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano are both technical advisors to Open Philanthropy and live in the same house as Holden. In addition, Holden is engaged to Dario’s sister Daniela."

Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI

#150

Post by riffraff »

nbouscal wrote: post #129
riffraff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That poll is interesting, but IMHO shows the implicit meaninglessness of predictions to 10/20 years. Do you feel we've done 30% of the work towards human level AI between 2014 and 2017, given a target of 2024?

We went from not even beating good amateurs at go to beating the best pros in the world. I don't think it's like a progress bar we should be expecting to fill at a linear pace, but, that certainly seems like a strong indicator we've come a long way (and it's one of many examples I could have chosen).

it certainly isn't a linear bar, but any improvement in AI in the last three years does not look at all as getting closer to human level intelligence.

We have just become better at some tasks that we knew how to automate for a long time, albeit badly. We don't have a clue on how human intelligence is supposed to work.

Post reply on HN