Being forced to use Azure for all your ML workloads seems a stupid constraint. For example, you might be comfortable with tensorflow/TPU and changing frameworks/tooling might be costly.
Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
281–290 of 623 posts
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
I think you're making a silly mistake actually giving this "too dangerous for society" line any validity. I understand that this tech could be used for nefarious purposes, but this isn't world-ending tech. This is just hard to differentiate from human writing... The choice to keep their "too powerful model" unreleased is more an attempt to stoke sensationalism out of journalists eager to report on "The AI too dangero…
When, in any OpenAI communication, have they ever implied GPT2 is world ending tech?
> We don't live in the Ghost In the Shell universe, we live in reality, and a text-generating algorithm isn't particularly dangerous when you think about it.
Are you sure it won't be used to automatically post fake news or create artificial group cohesion by bad state actors? We can already do stuff like that, but this allows you to do it faster and cheaper. Don't you think that's at least a little scary?
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#283Earlier 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…
> If AGI is achievable (seems likely given brains are all over the place in nature) I don't see how that conclusion follows the antecedent.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need planes to flap the wings in order to fly.
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)…
Secondarily, just because neurons are complex on technical level, it does not mean that they should be complex on logical level.
For example, in computers if you would look at the CPU structure, on a low level you have quantum effects and tunneling and very insane stuff but on a logical level you are dealing with very trivial boolean logic concepts.
I would be not be surprised in a slightest if copying and reverse engineering neurons per se would not be necessary and defining aspect of anything related to AGI.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are all assumptions, and there is a lot of disagreement in the academic community around it. Humans don't seem to need anywhere near the same level of data or training that our current models need. That alone is a sign that deep learning may not be enough. The focus on deep learning research has a lot of useful benefits, so I'm not discounting that, but there are a decent amount of smart people who don't believ…
> Humans don't seem to need anywhere near the same level of data or training that our current models need. I find this to be a common misunderstanding. If I show you one Stirch Wrench, and you've never seen one before, you learn instantly and perhaps for the rest of your life you'll know what a Strich Wrench is. The problem is I didn't show you 1 example. You saw perhaps millions of examples (your conscious process f…
Here's a great article about a paper showing that humans prior knowledge does help with learning new tasks- https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610434/why-humans-learn-f...
However, that doesn't account for how quickly toddlers learn a variety of things with a small amount of information. Even more important, you can also just look at things like AlphaGo- they train on more examples than could be accumulated in a hundred human lifetimes.
For these reasons I don't believe "more data" and "more training" is the answer. We're going to need to do a lot more work figuring out how humans manage recall, how we link together all the data, and I would be surprised if this didn't involve finding out that our brain processes things in ways that are far different than our current deep neural nets. I don't believe incrementalism is going to get us to AGI.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#286Congrats 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…
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
AGI will the the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. Even if you can’t see that, you can see that it has the potential to be very bad. I know this because OpenAI literature always stresses that AGI has to be guided and developed by the right people because the alternative is rather unpleasant. So essentially its a gamble and you know it. With everyone’s lives at stake. But instead of asking everyone wheth…
I'm curious as to why you think AGI will have an inherently bad effect on society. Personally, I have a hard time believing any technology is inherently good or bad. On the other hand, if a society's institutions are weak, it's leaders evil or incompetent, or its people are uneducated, its not hard to imagine things going very, very wrong.
Humans are a technology. When there is other technology that does intelligent signal processing better than us, we will no longer proliferate. It’s amazing that we can see time and time again the arrival and departure of all kinds of technologies and yet we think we are immutable.
The reason why human history is filled with humans is because every time a country was defeated by another country or entity, the victorious entity was a group of humans. When machines are able to perform all the signal processing that we can, when they are smarter than us, this will no longer be true. The victorious entity will be less and less human each time. Eventually it will not be human at all. This is true not just in war but everywhere. In the global market. It’s just a simple and plain fact that cannot be disregarded.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do you hate all marketing or just around AI in particular? Would you bat an eye at MS investing $1B into a project + ads about say a new GPU architecture promising how "games will never be the same" because the new hardware (or even Cloud Integration) lets developers efficiently try and satisfy the rendering equation with ray tracing? FWIW I thought you were clear, but there are only so many middlebrow dismissals one…
What I'm interested in is how many dismissals of AI, most end up justified, can the field take before considering toning down the prose a bit, especially considering that the dismissals are a result of setting unrealistic expectations in the first place.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#289Earlier 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
I think continual Turing testing is the only way of concluding whether an agent exhibits intelligence or not. Consider the philosophical problem of the existence of other minds. We believe other humans are intelligent because they consistently show intelligent behavior. Things that people claim to be examples of AI right now lack this consistency (possibly excluding a few very specific examples such as AlphaZero). It is quite annoying to see all these senior researchers along with graduate students spend so much time pushing numbers on those datasets without paying enough attention to the fact that pushing numbers is all they are doing.
[1]: As a concrete example, consider the textual entailment (TE) task. In the deep learning era of TE there are two commonly used datasets on which the current state-of-the-art has been claimed to be near or exceeding human performance. What these models are performing seemingly exceptionally well is not the general task of TE, it is the task of TE evaluated on these fixed datasets. A recent paper by McCoy, Pavlick, and Linzen (https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01007) shows how brittle these systems are that at this point the only sensible response to those insistent on claiming we are nearing human performance in AI is to laugh.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#290Earlier 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…
"Guardrails" is such a cute little term. AGI is a twenty-ton semi filled with rocket fuel. Guardrails won't stop it from careening into an elementary school if it decides that's its most optimal course of action. Mostly because, despite the previous analogy; no one knows what AGI is. No one knows what it will look like. No one will know when we've created it. No one even knows what INTELLIGENCE is in humans. How can…
However, we don't need full AGI for the scenario you mention, automatic anything that is hack-able, which is anything that is connected to a network, can be a weapon of great destruction.
As an example, self-driving cars run on a model. What if they are hacked and uploaded with a malicious model which just wants to damage life and property. I'll say that hundreds of thousands of vehicles running amok would be a great weapon in any war.