anybody knows what happened to Elon Musk's pledge of $1B to OpenAI?
Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. You get money and give control.
Which is extremely well defined for OpenAI. One board seat, charter comes first. That's a legal agreement, not much open for interpretation.
Not quite true, azure is now the only channel by which open ai innovation can be commercialise. This is the key control point.
For example, if there is an hardware innovation which make DNN training 1000x faster (e.g. optical DNN), but it does not exist on azure, than by definition it cannot be offered on another cloud.
To sum up, this deal assure the choking point of azure/MS on any innovation that would come up from open ai.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI is a research company - that's what research is, working out how to do things we don't know how to do. Research requires some money so at one level it is a money problem.
but this is alchemy isn't it? there isn't even a theoretical framework from which we can even begin to suggest how to keep any "general intelligence" benign. good old fashioned research notwithstanding, a billion dollars is not about to change this. it reads to more to me like this is an investment in azure (ie microsoft picking up some machine learning expertise to leverage in its future cloud services). that's not…
Well, unlike alchemy there are some pretty good examples of intelligent agents around - some even involved in this project!
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
the thing is, nobody knows how to do that. it's not a money problem.
(no sarcasm) You know, I can't prove that researchers being funded is the best way of figuring out how to do things, but I have a gut intuition that tells me that. I'll look into it so that I'm not just blindly suggesting that $$ ==> people ==> research ==> progress. Thanks for the opportunity to reflect!
it really is an interesting subject to explore within the philosophy of science :)
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#75[deleted]
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#76Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody. I believe that building a beneficial warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien…
(I work at OpenAI.)
It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable.
We've talked about why we think it might be: https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-ag..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM
And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :).
EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other problem — and find it important to put in place guardrails like https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/ and https://openai.com/charter/.
Even if AGI turns out to be out of reach, we'll still be creating increasingly powerful AI technologies — which I think pretty clearly have the potential to alter society and require special care and thought.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#77Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody. I believe that building a beneficial warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien…
Your analogy would be accurate if people had spent the last century claiming that artificial transport was impossible, and then continually redefining what counted as transport until the concept was incoherent.
Are you claiming that people claimed AI was impossible and openAi (or any other "AI") has proven those people wrong. If so please provide some evidence of this happening.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#78Genuine question: In what sense is OpenAI open ?
I guess it started as one, but a pivot happened..
Mr. Musk left the lab last year to concentrate on his own A.I. ambitions at Tesla. Since then, Mr. Altman has remade OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, into a for-profit company so it could more aggressively pursue financing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/technology/open-ai-micros...
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#79Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody. I believe that building a beneficial warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien…
(I work at OpenAI.) It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. We've talked about why we think it might be: https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-ag... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :). EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other pro…
> it becomes hard to work on any other problem
This is an interesting quote. Anyone know if folks like Darwin, Marconi, etc said similar things, about the problems they were working on at the time?
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#80Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody. I believe that building a beneficial warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien…
(I work at OpenAI.) It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. We've talked about why we think it might be: https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-ag... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :). EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other pro…
> It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable.
No, it does not. I very much believe AI (or AGI, as you call it) is achievable, but may I remind you that some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest minds of his generations, said that the secret of intelligence would be unlocked within five years, and Alan Turing -- a component of your very own post-pre-AGI era's AGI -- another great believer in AI, scoffed and said that it will take at least five decades. That was seven decades ago, and we are not even close to achieving insect-level intelligence. Maybe we'll achieve AI in ten years and maybe in one hundred, but you don't know which of those is more likely, and you certainly don't know whether any of our pre-AGI technology even gets us on the right path to achieving AGI. There have been other paths towards AI explored in the past that have largely been abandoned.
OpenAI is not actually building AGI. Maybe it hopes that the things it is working on could be the path to an eventual AGI. OpenAI knows this, as does Microsoft.
This does not mean that what OpenAI does is not valuable and possibly useful, but it does make calling it "pre-AGI" pretentious to the level of delusion. Now I know there were (maybe still are) some AI cults around SV (I think a famous one even called themselves "The Rationalists" or something), but what makes for a nerdy, fanciful discussion in some dark but quirky corner of the internet looks jarring in a press release.
> If you believe AGI might be achievable any time soon, it becomes hard to work on any other problem — and it's also very important to put in place guardrails like https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/ and https://openai.com/charter/
I can't tell if you're serious, but assuming you are, the problem is that there are many other things that if you think chould be achievable any time soon would make it hard to work on any other problem, as well make it important to put guardrails in place. The difference is that no one actually knows how to put guardrails on AGI. We are doing a pretty bad job putting guardrails on the statistical clustering algorithms that some call (pre-AGI?) AI and that we already use.