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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#251

Post by mac01021 »

ethbro wrote: post #189
justinhj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much everything that insects do is beyond our current AI and engineering tech. Ignoring the "engineering" feats that biological beings perform such as replication, respiration and turning other plants and creatures into their own energy source, their behaviour is very sophisticated. Imagine programming a drone to perform the work of a foraging Bee, using a computer that fits into a brain the size of a grain of…

Aside from the miniaturization, I'd be surprised if we couldn't make an exact simulacrum of a honey bee in software today, to the limits of our understanding of honey bees. As with AI... a system can be simulated to a given level of fidelity without necessarily simulating the entire original underlying system.

This doesn't necessarily say much about the state of our AI expertise, but our understanding of honey bees is an insufficient basis for the construction of anything that would survive of be an effective member of a hive. Just a week or two ago on HN there was an article about how scientist finally have just now acquired a reasonably complete understanding of the waggling language that they use to communicate with one another. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ijI-g4jHg)

Perhaps more relevantly, an automaton that could observe such a waggle dance using computer vision and then navigate to the food source described by the waggle seems to me to strain the bounds of our current capabilities, or maybe even to surpass them by an order of magnitude.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#252

Post by Jach »

intrasight wrote: post #241

I'm skeptical that AGI will exist on our planet in my lifetime. I've no doubt that it exists elsewhere in the galaxy. If an alien species does come to visit some day, I think it more likely than not that it'll be an AGI.

You piqued my interest, what makes you think there's any intelligence, artificial or otherwise, anywhere else but here in the Milky Way?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#253

Post by lstodd »

misterman0 wrote: post #184
mbesto wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By purely organic means of which we only have one current way of creating (e.g. via birth). The question is whether we can create AGI through other artificial means.

The distinction you make between organic and artificial life is understandable but perhaps not important, at least not philosophically. Something created us. God, Mother Nature, The Universe (or Aliens) created us. So we can be pretty sure it can be done. Can _we_ do it? At this point in time nothing says we can.

> At this point in time nothing says we can.

What is more important is that nothing say we can't.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#254

Post by pron »

gonehome wrote: post #237
pron wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 AG…

If AGI is achievable (seems likely given brains are all over the place in nature) and achieving it will have consequences that dwarf everything else then doesn't it make sense to focus on it? Yes, historically people were way too optimistic and generally went down AI rabbit holes that went nowhere, but two years before the Wright flyer flew, the Wright brothers themselves said it was 50 years out (and others were sti…

First of all, I was talking the language, not the work. It makes sense to study AI as it does many other subjects, but we don't know that it will "have consequences that dwarf everything else" because we don't know what it will be able to do and when (we think that it could but so could, say, a supervirus, or climate change, or the return of fascism). People hang all sort of dreams on AI precisely because of that. That cult I mentioned, The Rationalists, basically imagined AI to be a god of sorts, and then you can say "wouldn't you want to build a god?" But we don't know if AI could be a god. Maybe an intelligent being that thinks faster than humans goes crazy? Of course, we don't know that, but my point is that the main reason we think so much of AI is that at this time, we don't know what it is and what it could do.

> Why would it make sense to wait?

Again, that's a separate discussion, but if we don't know what something is or when it could arrive, it may make more sense to think about things we know more about and are already here or known to be imminent. Anyway, anyone is free to work on what they like, but OpenAI does not know that they're "building artificial general intelligence."

> I think you're way too overconfident to be as sure as you are that they're not.

I don't know that they're not, but they don't know that they are, and that means they're not "building AGI."

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#255

Post by richardwhiuk »

houzertuch wrote: post #244

I don’t understand how there can be no comments regarding the fatal flaw of AGI which is that it will completely ruin the economics of the world. The world is the way it is now because humans are the only source of intelligent signal processing. That’s the only reason why humans enjoy the limited rights and privileges that they do. That’s the only reason why life has gotten better and better with advancing medicine a…

Is your alternative "Don't invent general AI?"?

If so that seems unbelievably naive. Things generally can't be un-invented, and it's unimaginably hard to prevent people inventing things, especially with such a large economic upside for inventing it.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#256

Post by sgt101 »

tim333 wrote: post #213
pron wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 AG…

>we are not even close to achieving insect-level intelligence Then again I don't know many insects that drive cars, beat the champions at chess and go or similar.

Also Atari! Don't forget the mighty achievement of Atari somewhat mastery - the key indicator of intelligence in our time.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#257

Post by bogidon »

pron wrote: post #80
gdb wrote: post #76

Earlier 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…

> 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 AG…

Pron, I fully support your take here. Most AGI campaigners here clearly think that we must have already figured out a lot about how consciousness works. But is there any evidence to back that up? No, because we _haven't_ created consciousness. The most we've done is manipulate _existing_ consciousness. Sure, we can point to similarities between deep learning and the brain, and these avenues are interesting and, I think, worthwhile to explore. But false starts happen often in science (e.g. bloodletting / astrology / pick your own) and seem to occur at intersections where concrete evidence of results is inaccessible. No one can say with certainty we aren't in the middle of one now.

Like pron, I don't mean to dismiss the work any AI researcher is doing, but the industry has growing money and power and I just think people should be careful with statements like the one pointed out already and so often encountered: "if you believe AGI might be achievable any time soon, it becomes hard to work on any other problem."

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#258

Post by Quarrelsome »

mritchie712 wrote: post #249
gonehome wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AGI is achievable (seems likely given brains are all over the place in nature) and achieving it will have consequences that dwarf everything else then doesn't it make sense to focus on it? Yes, historically people were way too optimistic and generally went down AI rabbit holes that went nowhere, but two years before the Wright flyer flew, the Wright brothers themselves said it was 50 years out (and others were sti…

This is especially true considering we're talking about software vs. hardware (airplane). A few, or even one, brilliant mind(s) could make a break thru in AGI in a matter of months.

> A few, or even one, brilliant mind(s) could make a break thru in AGI in a matter of months.

same goes for warp drives doesn't it?

The point is that people don't see how we build THAT out of these tools we currently have. We only build pastiches of intelligence today and either we have an arrogant view of the level of our own intelligence or we can't make THAT with THIS.

But maybe warp-drives, maybe world-peace too?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#259

Post by mattnewton »

testvox wrote: post #197
mattnewton wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you do need to understand that they generate lift, and be able to mathematically describe something that generates lift. The Wright brothers wrote to the Smithsonian in 1899 and got back, among other things, workable equations for lift and drag. I think people think back propagation is the metaphorical lift equation here and we just need a “manufacturing” advancement (ie, more compute and techniques for using it)…

Yeah but we didn't need to fully understand how animal wings actually work, we just needed to understand what they do (generate lift). Similarly I don't understand the focus in this conversation on fully understanding the protein interactions that make neurons work. We just need to understand what neurons do. And I thought what they do is actually pretty simple due to the "all or nothing" principle. https://en.wikipe…

That’s pretty far from “when you do this, you get generalizable thought required for AGI”. The lyft equation said “this equation shows that when you do this, this object moves upward against the air”, which was the goal of flight- for AGI we have “when you do this, the loss goes down for this task”, we are missing so many pieces between that and the concept of AGI.

People think maybe the missing pieces might be in the other things we don’t understand about the brain. It makes sense- it does what we want, so the answer must be in there somehow. I agree we don’t need to perfectly understand it, it just seems like a good place to keep looking for those missing pieces.

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