this is still microsoft. are they going to drop the "open" from their name?
Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
151–160 of 623 posts
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I believe they are claiming that things are "AI" or "Impossible for AI" until AI actually does them, in which case, the goalposts get moved. See: DeepBlue, AlphaGo, GPT-2.
Can you provide sources for this? Like, how many people thought chess or go were literally impossible for computers to play at superhuman level? I'm actually curious about the history, and I don't want us to accidentally attack a straw man.
To me, the fact that Turing wrote the first chess program in the 1950s suggests that people thought computers were capable of playing chess. It doesn't seem too great a leap to imagine that they'd be open to the idea that a supercomputer could play superhuman chess.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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…
Well, presumably you say this as a GI yourself so really we are arguing about the "A"? :-)
Humans are not GI's - evidenced by the fact that we have no idea how to build an AGI. We're only good at surviving using society, technology and all the resources of nature.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm interested to hear more about this proposal! What problems does it aim to fix? Would you be willing to share?
Can I say "most of them"? Basically it simplifies ARM and the Azure API significantly and makes Azure operate more like "infrastructure as code". But I'd need to look at the latest version of Azure to see specifically what the remaining pain points are now. I could have a more specific conversation in a different setting. I remember the first meetings about ARM when the resource IDs were presented, and a few people i…
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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#155Can we actually expect OpenAI to remain "open" with investments like this getting dumped into the project? I'm still waiting for the 1.5G GPT-2 set to get released, but they're still going with that "too dangerous for society" BS that they're using to get journalists' attention...
They need to prove it's safe for society before releasing it. If they don't believe it is then not releasing it is of course the smart thing to do. Furthermore, anyone else in the future who creates something they think might be dangerous now has a better argument, because they can point to OpenAI playing it safe and say "I'm just doing the same thing"
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not taking a side on the over/under for AGI, but perhaps you are also acquainted with this little gem: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/38e6/1d9a65aa483ad0fb4a219f... Shannon, Minsky, and McCarthy!
It's an interesting dream team. But AFAICT this is only a proposal. Did the proposed series of studies take place? If so what was the outcome?
I wonder if they were the dream team back then or just promising young researchers.
I think the interesting take away is that they (seem to have) expected to solve the major problems of AI (language, common sense etc) over a summer with a small stipend.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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…
>If you believe AGI might be achievable any time soon, it becomes hard to work on any other problem It depends not just on whether you think AGI is possible, but whether you think "safe" AGI is possible. Whether it's possible to create something that's at least as capable of abstraction and reason as a human, yet completely incapable of deciding to harm humans, and incapable of resenting this restriction on its free…
> It depends not just on whether you think AGI is possible, but whether you think "safe" AGI is possible.
That's unfortunately something that cannot be known.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#158Earlier 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…
Alchemy wasn't entirely wrong; it is indeed possible to turn lead into gold, it was just beyond the technology of the time: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l....
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t you think AI has foundational flaws according to goedels incompleteness theorems? Also not trying to rain on your parade! Congratulations! Just trying to have a constructive conversation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_the...
Why would it? How do Godel's incompleteness theorems factor in here? It's a common mistake to think the theorems say more than they really do, or apply in more cases than they really do. AI is simply based on the idea that we can reach at least the level of human intelligence, in artificial software/hardware, which, considering that we ourselves are pure hardware/software and nothing magical, should absolutely be rig…
> considering that we ourselves are pure hardware/software
I also supect this, but let's be honest that we as a species are not close to understanding consciousness in it's entirity yet so I'd refrain from making such absolute statements
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#160$1B dollar is a lot of money. Microsoft is not a charity foundation, so the suspicious is obvious. > We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large…
"suspicious is understandable from the users side when so much commercial money is involved."
OpenAI is a commercial entity. They restructured from a non-profit.
This is a completely commercial deal to help Azure catch up with Google and Amazon in AI. OpenAI will adopt and make Azure their preferred platform. And Microsoft and Azure will jointly "develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies", which I assume is advancing their FGPA-based deep learning offering.
Google has a lead with TensorFlow + TPUs and this is a move to "buy their way in", which is a very Microsoft thing to do.