Live data from Hacker News

DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

1843magazine.com

81–90 of 142 posts

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

#81
post #69

Fair questions: 1. Do you think you can predict what a super-intelligent mind would do? 2. Do you think a super-intelligent mind plotting to take over the world would jeopardize itself by letting its existence be known to the race of irrational monkeys that hold sway over all the resources necessary for its continued existence? Asking for a friend.

1.) A super-intelligent mind could predict what it would do. Then we can make it tell us.

2.) Here you conflate "intelligence" with biological power structures (energy resources, territorial plotting). That is like asking where aircraft go to the toilet.

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

#82
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...

Protein folding is still an exponential time algorithm when done inside a computer and biological systems do this in constant time, massively, in parallel. Determining whether a molecule is an agonist takes a long time to calculate. I've heard the complexity is O(N^3). Biological systems do this in constant time, trillions of times a second in parallel. If you could simulate biological systems easily, you could do dr…

So are you saying that we need not build bigger networks with huge data, but rather have better algorithms with significant parallelization? Sounds like we're back to symbolic AI again!

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of bio stuff now generates huge amounts of data and needs computational skills to collect and interpret. My undergrad degree was in CS and I still split my time between training animals and training models (plus writing and, today, RAID-babysitting). We get about 1 Gb/min of neurophysiological data (x4-6 hours/day) and I'm hoping to scale that up quite a bit soon. People doing microscopy also generate giant dat…

what sorts of tools are you using to deal with this data?

It's a hodgepodge.

Mostly Matlab, Python, and R, with a few things that have tight time/memory requirements in C++. Matlab was really popular in neuroscience for a very long time, so we still have a lot of code in m-files, but most labs are moving towards Python (and a few towards R).

The code quality varies a lot. Some of our "core" stuff is great, but there's also a lot of stuff that was written quickly and meant to be run once ("let's just try it"), which is cold comfort when you find it years later.

People also come in with varying levels of programming skill. I'm going to try to do actual code reviews with the undergrads this summer to see if we can't make our stuff a little less embarrassing.

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

#85

It angers me that Peter Thiel simultaneously advocates AGI and maintains a hardened bunker. AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon. The article speculates what the AGI will be like. The AGIs that exist will be the ones that proliferate. Ultimately, the AGIs that survive and proliferate will be ones that put their own interests before anything else. People talk about benevolent AGIs, that’s like l…

> AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon. Really? The madman with the football in a white house and the media pushing an anti Russia sentiment aren't scaring you at all?

Nuclear war is not be capable of wiping out humanity (although causing potentially billions in casualties), a hostile AGI can likely wipe out humanity to the last person.

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

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of bio stuff now generates huge amounts of data and needs computational skills to collect and interpret. My undergrad degree was in CS and I still split my time between training animals and training models (plus writing and, today, RAID-babysitting). We get about 1 Gb/min of neurophysiological data (x4-6 hours/day) and I'm hoping to scale that up quite a bit soon. People doing microscopy also generate giant dat…

Are there publicly available repositories of this kind of data? Where? What are the best modern methods to analyze them?

Yup. The neuroimaging folks are really good about sharing data. If you want to look at MRI/MEG/EEG data, https://openneuro.org might be a good place to start.

CRCNS (https://crcns.org/data-sets) has some neurophysiology data (i.e., from implanted or inserted electrodes). This sort of data is shared a little less often, in part because it's often acquired and stored in weird, homebrew formats, though that's slowly changing.

ModelDB (https://senselab.med.yale.edu/ModelDB/) has a large collection of computational models. These are mostly biophysical models, though there's some other stuff in there too.

Depending on what you're looking for, there are other more specialized repositories. NDCT (https://data-archive.nimh.nih.gov/ndct) has mental-health related clinical trial data, though you'll have to do some paperwork if you want subject-level data, which is fairly common for clinical data. MIT has a collection of eye movement data sets: http://saliency.mit.edu/datasets.html

As for the best methods, this comment box is far too small to contain all my thoughts on that :-) It depends on your question and experiment. Sometimes, all you really need is a t-test (or the randomized version), but that requires getting the experiment just right. Other times, you might need a morass of signal processing and dimensionality reduction, fed into some giant multi-level Bayesian model in a vain attempt controls for all the stuff you neglected when you designed the damn experiment. Happy to send you some pointers if you have something specific in mind though!

Physics has historically had a huge leg up on the other sciences because they had real models that made testable, quantitative predictions. We're finally starting to learn enough about the brain that we can do this for neural data too, and I'm really excited about that!

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protein folding is still an exponential time algorithm when done inside a computer and biological systems do this in constant time, massively, in parallel. Determining whether a molecule is an agonist takes a long time to calculate. I've heard the complexity is O(N^3). Biological systems do this in constant time, trillions of times a second in parallel. If you could simulate biological systems easily, you could do dr…

So are you saying that we need not build bigger networks with huge data, but rather have better algorithms with significant parallelization? Sounds like we're back to symbolic AI again!

New computing architectures like quantum computing could simulate these systems far more efficiently than classical architectures -- in theory. The engineering still needs more work though.

Also, new AI techniques are good at finding good enough equivalents to exactly replicating human cognition for many things, but that might get harder as the problems become even more general.

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of very few things that once created, inherently doom the world. It is possible for humanity to come back from nuclear war. There is zero possibility of surviving AGI proliferation. Therefore, the option of never developing it in the first place demands consideration. It doesn’t hurt you to just consider it. Cloud computing will soon make compute-as-service cheaper than anyone ever imagined. It will be mu…

> AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon > There is zero possibility of surviving AGI proliferation You're spreading unsubstantiated FUD. In another post from your account you suggest it's unethical to have children because AGI will be so bad. The vast majority of experts do not support any of these beliefs. Most experts believe we are not anywhere near close to AGI, and/or that we are missing fu…

The condescending tone you have does not help you. And you seem to be more concerned with looking at my account history or brushing me off as “fud” than actually addressing the substance of my comment. And yes, I do so completely believe in what I’ve written that I have opted to not have children until it is clear that a solution will be implemented.

There are two parts to my argument: the substrate for AGI to spring from is basically here or around the corner. Human level ai is fundamentally incompatible with human society. Pick the one that you think is wrong and tell me the chain of logic that proves I’m wrong.

It is obvious to anyone that AI has the potential to be more dangerous than anything humans have ever encountered or created. We can come back from viruses and nuclear bombs and colliding with interstellar columns of gamma radiation. AGI is the first thing ever to pose the threat of truly wiping out humanity. And then there is the question of how the economics would play out of it didn’t destroy us, which I have shown informally to not work out very well. At the bare minimum, this demands caution and proactive, defensive measures. The burden is on YOU to prove it’s safe. So please save your “fud” and anything else that does not address the core of the matter.

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

#89

It angers me that Peter Thiel simultaneously advocates AGI and maintains a hardened bunker. AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon. The article speculates what the AGI will be like. The AGIs that exist will be the ones that proliferate. Ultimately, the AGIs that survive and proliferate will be ones that put their own interests before anything else. People talk about benevolent AGIs, that’s like l…

I agree with your comment, but just a minor point: has Thiel made it clear that his bunker is to protect against potential AGI threats? I thought it's insurance for nuclear warfare.

You’re right. It was just a kind of loose association and it’s not related to or important for the core point of my comment.

Just as a subjective thing, the bunker doesn’t strike me well. If peter is advocating anything that has the potential to upset the global economy/global order then it should be him to stick his hand in the proverbial hole first; but apparently he’s going to let us do it while he watches from the safety of his bunker.

A bunker might help with the initial destabilization caused by AI but it would of course not help him if one of the more horrible outcomes were to transpire.

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

#90

Is the article true in claiming that the model doesn't work if we increase the size of the paddle? Or change anything else?

Yeah, pretty much. It might continue to work fine with very minor changes, but as we know how to design and build them today deep neural networks are often very sensitive to minor changes in the input distribution. The key insight here though is not about deep nets, but about our true progress towards AGI. These systems don't hypothesize about the best strategy to take, think about different approaches, formulate alternatives, etc. They basically memorize paths that have worked based on random exploration. We have what seems like a long way to go (nobody can know whether we are 1 or 100 key ideas away) before an AI already trained to play 5 Atari games can be turned towards a new game and play very well based on its experience with related genres. Today they are trained from scratch for each game, so although the model might be the same the AI is not able to transfer theories and strategies from one domain to another.
Post reply on HN