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DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

1843magazine.com

11–20 of 142 posts

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#11
> "DeepMind has found a way around this by employing vast amounts of computer power. AlphaGo takes thousands of years of human game-playing time to learn anything."

It seems the author may not have been familiar with AlphaGo Zero, which used substantially less processing power. https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#12
post #2

"But human intelligence is limited by the size of the skull that houses the brain." When you think about it this way, it seems impossible that we haven't duplicated the capability of the human brain in an airplane hangar somewhere. What's going on inside our heads that we can't mimic? That magical algorithm...

Modern supercomputers are still a factor of 10 off of the brains compute power(~1 Exaflop) but I don't think anyone in the field believes that you suddenly get consciousness once you reach a critical mass of compute. It's clearly a software problem.

Estimates vary over many orders of magnitude: https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#13
post #9
post #2

"But human intelligence is limited by the size of the skull that houses the brain." When you think about it this way, it seems impossible that we haven't duplicated the capability of the human brain in an airplane hangar somewhere. What's going on inside our heads that we can't mimic? That magical algorithm...

this is wrong. look at the size of an elephant brain. they are smart, but not smarter than humans. similarly, bird brains are tiny, but birds have shown significant intelligence, crows in particular have been well studied.

The point is that we're trying to duplicate something with the ability of the human brain, and we aren't constrained by size. We can cheat (e.g. 1,000,000 times bigger with 1,000,000 times the power, etc). We're just missing an algorithm or two.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#14
post #11

> "DeepMind has found a way around this by employing vast amounts of computer power. AlphaGo takes thousands of years of human game-playing time to learn anything." It seems the author may not have been familiar with AlphaGo Zero, which used substantially less processing power. https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/

Less power doesn't necessarily mean fewer games. According to the paper on AlphaGo Zero, they trained it on ~4.9 million games.

> Over the course of training, 4.9 million games of self-play were generated, using 1,600 simulations for each MCTS, which corresponds to approximately 0.4 s thinking time per move.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#15

Apologies in advance for the meta-comment (feel free to disregard) about this: > [Opening Paragraph of Article:] One afternoon in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he pursed his lips into a brief smile and began to speak: [...]…

Yeah, you'd be in the minority. Technical people are already in the minority. Technical people who read The Economist voraciously are an even smaller minority. 1843magazine.com looks like it's run by The Economist. I believe their target readers love reading this style of writing. It's illustrative and engaging for when you're reading a story. For gathering technical information, 1843magazine.com should not be your first option.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern supercomputers are still a factor of 10 off of the brains compute power(~1 Exaflop) but I don't think anyone in the field believes that you suddenly get consciousness once you reach a critical mass of compute. It's clearly a software problem.

Estimates vary over many orders of magnitude: https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/

~1 Exaflop leaves room for error.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#17

Apologies in advance for the meta-comment (feel free to disregard) about this: > [Opening Paragraph of Article:] One afternoon in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he pursed his lips into a brief smile and began to speak: [...]…

This is classic Wired- style writing. They want a protagonist, a hero, a villain. It's always painted as far too simple and dramatic when most technology is actually developed in the most mundane boring ways.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Estimates vary over many orders of magnitude: https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/

~1 Exaflop leaves room for error.

I suppose my point is I distrust your certainty. It's quite possible 20 petaflops may be enough. Maybe we will need many exaflops. We don't really know.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know nothing about how it works, it seems to derive its information and results from somewhere else as if it's hooked some bigger brain ( which can't see ), so analyzing brain alone we don't find anything.

This is inaccurate. We understand much of how it works, how vision, speech, etc work but we don't understand consciousness which is quite different.

Well, maybe it just doesn't exist and my Roomba is as conscious as me.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#20
post #14
post #11

> "DeepMind has found a way around this by employing vast amounts of computer power. AlphaGo takes thousands of years of human game-playing time to learn anything." It seems the author may not have been familiar with AlphaGo Zero, which used substantially less processing power. https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/

Less power doesn't necessarily mean fewer games. According to the paper on AlphaGo Zero, they trained it on ~4.9 million games. > Over the course of training, 4.9 million games of self-play were generated, using 1,600 simulations for each MCTS, which corresponds to approximately 0.4 s thinking time per move.

Assuming a go game takes 30 minutes on average, and you are never sleeping, resting, etc, you can do approx 18k games per year. In order to reach 4.9 million games you'd have to play for approx 280 years. So yeah, definitely not thousands of years :). Still, we are maybe one or two orders of magnitude away from the amount of games that humans need to play to become world class players.

That being said, the AlphaGo zero paper ends with the words:

> Humankind has accumulated Go knowledge from millions of games played over thousands of years, collectively distilled into patterns, proverbs and books. In the space of a few days, starting tabula rasa, AlphaGo Zero was able to rediscover much of this Go knowledge, as well as novel strategies that provide new insights into the oldest of games.

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