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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it is naturally occurring and not artificially reproducible (or possible for US to reproduce). Why should we assume that it is? Because we have reproduced other things? That doesn't necessitate our ability to create everything conceivable.

>Perhaps it is naturally occurring and not artificially reproducible What does that even mean? Nature doesn't operate on special nature-physics distinct from the physics of artificial systems.

One way of looking at it: it means there's a DAG of causation and you don't have access to the entire root set.

(I'm not advocating for that idea being true, but I don't think it can be dismissed on the grounds of not having a clear meaning.)

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#202

OpenAi to for-profit OpenAI to billion dollar partnership with Microsoft doesn't give me the warm and fuzzy feelings I had when I first heard of OpenAI. I saw it as "we're going to save the world by building an AGI before someone builds SkyNet" today it is "We've got in bed with a company that had one of the most famous anti-trust cases in the United States and one of the most famous anti-competition cases in the EU"…

The whole MikeRoweSoft thing was 15 years ago. I don't think it's fair to judge the company now based on that.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#203
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all this talk of AGI some kind of marketing meme that you guys are tolerating? We haven't figured out sentiment analysis or convnets resilient to single pixel attacks, and here is a page talking about the god damned singularity. As an industry, we've already burned through a bunch of buzzwords that are now meaningless marketing-speak. 'ML', 'AI', 'NLP', 'cognitive computing'. Are we going for broke and adding AGI…

Sentiment analysis is at 96% and increasing rapidly. http://nlpprogress.com/english/sentiment_analysis.html

'Sentiment analysis' of pre-canned pre-labelled datasets is a comparatively trivial classification task. Actual sentiment analysis as in 'take the twitter firehose and figure out sentiment about arbitrary topic X' is only slightly less out of reach than AGI itself.

Actual sentiment analysis is a completely different kind of ML problem than supervised classification 'sentiment analysis' that's popular today but mostly useless for real world applications.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#204
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying.. it comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable within our lifetime? Or even worth contributing to at all even. I think the parent has made their position pretty clear through their employment choices, that’s a level of skin in the game that naysayers don’t really have.

Perhaps I haven't been clear. I have no issue with the research OpenAI is performing, nor with anyone's beliefs in AI's imminence or their personal role in bringing it about. However, no one knows whether what they're doing is even on the right path towards AI, and certainly not when it will be achieved, plus the topic has been subject to overoptimism for decades now, so I do take issue with publicly calling what you…

I think you're issue with the language is not shared by most people. In research we rarely know beforehand what research is on the right or wrong path. But we are comfortable with someone saying they are researching something even if they don't know beforehand whether the research will be useful or a wild goose chase. For example most people's first though to hearing "I'm researching ways to treat Alzheimer's" isn't "Only if it passes phase 3 trials!".

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "model behavior"? We have AI systems that can learn walking, running and other behavior with just trial and error, I would call that simple behavior. Now here's a more advanced example to teach a virutal character how to flex in the gym: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kie4wjB1MCw That's a bit more advanced than simple walking. Here's a deployed AI to a real robot "crab": https://www.youtube.com/w…

"We have AI systems that can learn walking, running and other [...]" In one of your examples, which are all of narrow AI, we see a mechanical crab powered by ML that has become specialized in walking with a broken limb, which is not even close to what we need if we aim for AGI. For AGI we don't need agents that mimic simple behavior. In my opinion, _mimicking_ behavior will not lead to AGI. What _will_ lead to AGI? N…

macleginn's complaint was that we haven't even modelled simple behavior and I brought these narrow AI examples as a counter argument since they demonstrate that we can, even complex ones. Domain specific? Yeah, bummer.

Nowhere I have stated this is the clear path to AGI and you are right, we are missing key building blocks. But I feel like there's too much skepticism agains this field while the advancements are not appreciated enough.

I don't know either what will lead there, but I see more and more examples of different networks being combined to achieve more than they are capable of individually.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#206
I'm quite suspicious about private companies helping open source.It seems to me that by relying on private companies open source is tailored to create standards that work best in platforms that are doing financing and cementing monopolies and oligopolies.In my opinion open source should have same status as science and be financed by government.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it is naturally occurring and not artificially reproducible (or possible for US to reproduce). Why should we assume that it is? Because we have reproduced other things? That doesn't necessitate our ability to create everything conceivable.

>Perhaps it is naturally occurring and not artificially reproducible What does that even mean? Nature doesn't operate on special nature-physics distinct from the physics of artificial systems.

"Nature doesn't operate on special nature-physics distinct from the physics of artificial systems."

Who said that is does?. You asked how could it not be possible to recreate, and pointed to our own general intelligence as evidence of existence. But the existence of a thing does not necessitate our ability to create that thing.

What if the conditions of nature and the universe over billions of years led to natural intelligence occurring in humans and that is the only way? This scenario is entirely possible, and answers your question of how could it not be possible. Along with an infinite other amount of explanations. Just because something has a chance at being possible doesn't mean that it HAS to be, or that we will ever achieve it.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#209

Congrats on the fundraise Greg and team! Does this mean that OpenAI may not disclose progress, papers with details, and/or open source code as much as in the past? In other words, what proprietary advantage will Microsoft gain when licensing new tech from OpenAI? I understand that keeping some innovations private may help commercialization, which may help raise more funds for OpenAI, getting us to AGI faster, so my o…

We'll still release quite a lot, and those releases won't look any different from the past.

> I understand that keeping some innovations private may help commercialization, which may help raise more funds for OpenAI, getting us to AGI faster, so my opinion is that could plausibly make sense.

That's exactly how we think about it. We're interested in licensing some technologies in order to fund our AGI efforts. But even if we keep technology private for this reason, we still might be able to eventually publish it.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#210
post #193
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Yes they are? They are making breakthroughs/incremental advances that required to get there, and building components along the way. It would be like you saying well Henry Ford isn't building a vehicle, he's just building a wheel, and a tire, and an engine, e…

> They are making breakthroughs/incremental advances that required to get there They don't know that. We have no idea what's required to achieve AI. Now I don't know how long before Ford actually built cars he started saying he's building cars, but if Wikipedia is to be believed, it could not have been more than three-four years. Also, when he started building cars, he pretty much knew what's required to build them.…

> We have no idea what's required to achieve AI

Yes, we do. Lots of data, lots of training, better algorithms, more understanding of the brain...At this point we still need 10x+ improvements in a lot of areas, but it's pretty clear what we need to do.

If you can process around 100 petabytes per second (1 Google Index of data per second), you could fully simulate a human being, including their brain. We're still a little bit from that, but it's pretty clear we'll get there (barring usual disclaimers about an asteroid, alien invasion, etc).

Source: I work in medical research, doing deep learning, and do research on programming languages and deep learning for program synthesis.

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