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Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

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Re: Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

#141

Post by unityByFreedom »

nopinsight wrote: post #78

Top people including DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis and Prof Stuart Russell, a AAAI and AAAS fellow who is a co-author of the AI textbook used at most of top universities, agree that AGI is definitely possible and going to happen. [1] Hassabis also stated in another session that there are probably at least half a dozen mountains to climb before reaching AGI and he would be surprised if it takes more than 20. He also s…

Stuart Russel doesn't put a specific date on the arrival of AGI. That puts him at odds with Musk, who predicts 2030-2040.

It's also at odds with the study that has the very biased question asking experts "when do you think AGI will arrive?". Many chose not to answer the question, and thus their answers can't be averaged in.

Many of the AGI safety conscious crowd skip over the question of whether we will be able to create AGI and just assume we will.

There's no precedent for this kind of discovery. Fire, the lightbulb, and nuclear weapons all pale in comparison.

Re: Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

#142

Post by backpropaganda »

pgodzin wrote: post #139
backpropaganda wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say RL is not hard when you manage to teach all aspects of the SOTA RL algorithm ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06887 ) to your class such that they are able to answer any question about it (not just implement it). Good luck teaching metric spaces to code monkeys. You guys are doing good work teaching tensorflow and algorithms/models researchers are coming up with, but are slapping those same researchers by dis…

Not sure why the exact details of state of the art research is relevant here. Obviously that definition of RL is dumbing it down, as I'm sure Rachel knows, but the point is simple - teaching a computer to do something specific a human can without explicitly telling it whether something is good or bad, but rather have it learn on its own. The latest research in RL isn't getting us that much closer to AGI. We can't plo…

Before 2012, you also couldn't run a system to classify among 1000 classes. Just because RL isn't there yet, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

The reason we're discussing hardness of RL is fast.ai's narrative of "you don't need math for AI" and "AI is easy". Sure, implementing and applying AI is easy, and you just need to learn tensorflow, but doing even a modicum of novel research in RL requires a tremendous background in all kinds of math. I appreciate what fast.ai is doing to democratize as much of AI as possible, but that doesn't need to be at odds with other people prioritizing RL research.

Re: Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

#143

Post by nopinsight »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #141
nopinsight wrote: post #78

Top people including DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis and Prof Stuart Russell, a AAAI and AAAS fellow who is a co-author of the AI textbook used at most of top universities, agree that AGI is definitely possible and going to happen. [1] Hassabis also stated in another session that there are probably at least half a dozen mountains to climb before reaching AGI and he would be surprised if it takes more than 20. He also s…

Stuart Russel doesn't put a specific date on the arrival of AGI. That puts him at odds with Musk, who predicts 2030-2040. It's also at odds with the study that has the very biased question asking experts "when do you think AGI will arrive?". Many chose not to answer the question, and thus their answers can't be averaged in. Many of the AGI safety conscious crowd skip over the question of whether we will be able to cr…

We also don't know how long it will take to solve Provably Safe AI problem. Wouldn't it be wiser to start preparing now?

Nuclear weapons were deemed impossible by some experts at the time. Throughout history, whenever there are a number of experts who believe something to be impossible and a substantial number who believe it to be possible, the latter are almost always right.

See also my other answer that begins with "Unlike airplanes, ..."

Re: Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

#144

Post by unityByFreedom »

AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #7

I agree with this article: all the fear about AGI taking over the species seems the hide the far more dangerous likelihood of efficient but non-general AI ending up in the hands of intelligences with a proven history of oppressing humans: i.e. other humans. Besides which AGI, when it comes, is just as likely be a breakthrough in some random's shed rather than from a billion dollar research team's efforts to create so…

> help create a world that doesn't need 'fixing' when such an AGI emerges.

I wish we would run with this rather than relying on tech and the market to solve all our woes.

Re: Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

#145

Post by pgodzin »

backpropaganda wrote: post #142
pgodzin wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why the exact details of state of the art research is relevant here. Obviously that definition of RL is dumbing it down, as I'm sure Rachel knows, but the point is simple - teaching a computer to do something specific a human can without explicitly telling it whether something is good or bad, but rather have it learn on its own. The latest research in RL isn't getting us that much closer to AGI. We can't plo…

Before 2012, you also couldn't run a system to classify among 1000 classes. Just because RL isn't there yet, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. The reason we're discussing hardness of RL is fast.ai's narrative of "you don't need math for AI" and "AI is easy". Sure, implementing and applying AI is easy, and you just need to learn tensorflow, but doing even a modicum of novel research in RL requires a tremendous backgr…

fast.ai's narrative is "AI is easy for what you probably want to use it for". There are a ton of awesome applications that are enabled by the level of AI taught in the course. However, Rachel's article is about how AGI is actually really, really hard. So much so that we have no idea how to get there and can't predict when it will happen. So instead of fearmongering about AI, we should instead be encouraging everyone to do awesome new stuff with AI.

Re: Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

#146

Post by unityByFreedom »

nopinsight wrote: post #143
unityByFreedom wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuart Russel doesn't put a specific date on the arrival of AGI. That puts him at odds with Musk, who predicts 2030-2040. It's also at odds with the study that has the very biased question asking experts "when do you think AGI will arrive?". Many chose not to answer the question, and thus their answers can't be averaged in. Many of the AGI safety conscious crowd skip over the question of whether we will be able to cr…

We also don't know how long it will take to solve Provably Safe AI problem. Wouldn't it be wiser to start preparing now? Nuclear weapons were deemed impossible by some experts at the time. Throughout history, whenever there are a number of experts who believe something to be impossible and a substantial number who believe it to be possible, the latter are almost always right. See also my other answer that begins with…

> We also don't know how long it will take to solve Provably Safe AI problem. Wouldn't it be wiser to start preparing now?

Sure, go for it. I think this has been in the news a lot recently because Musk told government leaders to expect AGI as early as 2030-2040.

It's a bit of a ridiculous claim. One of the biggest AI competitions, ImageNet, expects to run for the next 12 years, and that's just for making sense of images.

Perhaps it'll be done in less than 12, however, the predictions of the ML community and Musk do not line up.

> Nuclear weapons were deemed impossible by some experts at the time.

I suppose time will tell with regards to AGI then. I suspect we'll have another economic dip before 2030, and all this hype will die down before then. And, we'll remember this time as any other in the past when we predicted flying cars by the year 2000

Re: Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

#147

Post by nopinsight »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #146
nopinsight wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also don't know how long it will take to solve Provably Safe AI problem. Wouldn't it be wiser to start preparing now? Nuclear weapons were deemed impossible by some experts at the time. Throughout history, whenever there are a number of experts who believe something to be impossible and a substantial number who believe it to be possible, the latter are almost always right. See also my other answer that begins with…

> We also don't know how long it will take to solve Provably Safe AI problem. Wouldn't it be wiser to start preparing now? Sure, go for it. I think this has been in the news a lot recently because Musk told government leaders to expect AGI as early as 2030-2040. It's a bit of a ridiculous claim. One of the biggest AI competitions, ImageNet, expects to run for the next 12 years, and that's just for making sense of ima…

It was announced this year's ImageNet competition would be the last. Any change to this? http://image-net.org/challenges/beyond_ilsvrc

Edit: I think the announcement above is about object recognition on still images, which is largely solved. The "new ImageNet" one on Kaggle in the reply below is for videos.

Re: Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

#148

Post by unityByFreedom »

nopinsight wrote: post #147
unityByFreedom wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We also don't know how long it will take to solve Provably Safe AI problem. Wouldn't it be wiser to start preparing now? Sure, go for it. I think this has been in the news a lot recently because Musk told government leaders to expect AGI as early as 2030-2040. It's a bit of a ridiculous claim. One of the biggest AI competitions, ImageNet, expects to run for the next 12 years, and that's just for making sense of ima…

It was announced this year's ImageNet competition would be the last. Any change to this? http://image-net.org/challenges/beyond_ilsvrc Edit: I think the announcement above is about object recognition on still images, which is largely solved. The "new ImageNet" one on Kaggle in the reply below is for videos.

Hosted by Kaggle now: https://www.kaggle.com/c/imagenet-object-detection-from-vide...

I don't really understand the press release on image-net.org. Maybe they meant the last competition hosted by the same group?

Edit: See page 84 of the PDF linked here: https://www.google.com/search?q=kaggle+site%3Aimage-net.org

Ps- screw you Google for not letting me copy links to PDF search results via my phone

Re: Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots

#149

Post by nopinsight »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #148
nopinsight wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was announced this year's ImageNet competition would be the last. Any change to this? http://image-net.org/challenges/beyond_ilsvrc Edit: I think the announcement above is about object recognition on still images, which is largely solved. The "new ImageNet" one on Kaggle in the reply below is for videos.

Hosted by Kaggle now: https://www.kaggle.com/c/imagenet-object-detection-from-vide... I don't really understand the press release on image-net.org. Maybe they meant the last competition hosted by the same group? Edit: See page 84 of the PDF linked here: https://www.google.com/search?q=kaggle+site%3Aimage-net.org Ps- screw you Google for not letting me copy links to PDF search results via my phone

By the way, since you appear to be reasonable skeptic, would you mind replying to my comment beginning with "Unlike airplanes, ..."? Specifically I wonder what would be a minimum threshold for you to believe that AGI is likely possible.
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