I am interested in working at OpenAI and similar companies. What background would you recommend? What skills should graduate students focus in to be competitive?
CS and/or ML and/or Neuroscience and/or Maths (including statistics).
Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its just like the bag of sugar I have in my cabinet that claims to be low calorie. It says "ONLY 16 CALORIES (per 4 grams in tiny letters)". I mean, sugar is pretty much the definition of a high calorie food. Its like, pure calories. And can affect insulin regulation, etc. That's why they need to put some marketing on it.
Off topic, I know, however, this reminded me of TV adverts we used to have in my country when I was young where they were saying how great sugar is because it has 0% fat... If only the butter companies responded with adverts about how they're 0% sugar, that would have been fun. :/
Low carb / no carb is gaining in popularity (and some products label it). Sugar is finally becoming the bad guy despite enormous lobbying efforts over a very long time (since the 60s?).
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you!
Have you thought about using AI instead of parts of the government? There must be a lot of bits that can be automated. Do you think that an AI led government could remove the left/right divide that there is at the moment? If everyone just filled in a huge form that told the AI what was important to them, this could be used to drive policy.
Filling in a from about what is important is just a proxy for voting.
I don't think an AI would help the Left/Right divide in this way because certain news outlets would still have the same incentives to manipulate what people desire in a more extreme directions.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#334I want to take everything OpenAI says at face value (seem like good folk), but I can't help but wonder at the recent choice to keep GPT2 closed, on what seemed like pretty thin safety arguments to me. Now, the demonstrated ability to produce new models which are closed, but maybe can be used as services on a preferred partner's cloud, looks very commercially relevant? How will these conflicts be managed, or is it mor…
An earlier comment mentions that they are for-profit now (changed from non-profit a while ago).
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#335I'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?
I think because the universe is so infinite and vast the math makes sense there would be others out there. We just don't have the technology yet to travel fast or far enough and also cant communicate/detect them.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#336Earlier 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...
Any sense in which Godel's incompleteness theorem implied that Artificial General Intelligence was impossible would also imply that General Intelligence is impossible; the human brain isn't immune to the laws of logic. The human brain is just a very complex, possibly quantum, computer. Short of believing in some kind of supernatural human soul, there's no reason to expect a sufficiently complex computer couldn't matc…
I think that there are other mechanisms apart from computation; the question is - are they operant in our universe? The implication of the answer being "no" is that we are automaton, free will does not exist (it isn't even an illusion, you are as much a puppet thinking about it as you are trying to change your fate. Well, moving on from there we can dismantle all of the morality and humanity of our lives and not change one jot becuase we have no choice. I don't believe that any one has observered anything that isn't reducable to computation, but then again, perhaps our cognitive capabilities simply can't do that.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 eve…
Eventually open ai?
Maybe eventually openAI
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> macleginn's complaint was that we haven't even modelled simple behavior No, the complaint was about modelling the behavior of simple organisms . Certainly we can model some of their behaviors, many of which are highly stereotyped. But the real fly (say) doesn't only walk/fly/scratch/etc, it also decides when to do all of these things. It has ways to decide what search pattern to fly given confusing scents of food n…
I linked to modeled organisms, I always feel the HN crowd expects academic level of precision and discussions, but that kills regular discussions I would have at dinner tables with friends, I wish it would be a more casual place. Yes, I meant "behavior of simple organisms" :) Since everything here is loosely defined I feel it's totally pointless to discuss AI, but it's still an intriguing topic. If you look at those…
Terrible? Not at all.
I'm sorry and apologize if you feel I was one to kill the discussion you wanted to have around AI.
I'm one of those dreamers who think AGI is or at least should be possible, soon, through means we have not yet discovered but will, soon. I base that on absolutely nothing, I suppose, other than the fact we have lots of "bright/smart/crazy" devs working on it. It's my own personal "believie", as Louis CK would say about things we believe in but cannot or care not prove.
Just like you I'm looking at organisms much simpler than us as a way forward. Many specialized neural network does not make up AGI, is what I think. Is it the organic and human neuron we should model? I don't necessarily think so. Also. robotics + ML is a dead end to me. An amoeba that can evolve into something more complex, is perhaps what we should model.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 eve…
Eventually open ai?
"maybe" eventually openAI
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would AGI dwarf anything? There are at least 7 billion beings on the planet with AGI already. I think a bigger problem is the general well being of the aforementioned 7 billion entities.
For a simple thought experiment take one human brain architecture (say it can operate at 100 operations per second), scale that up to a billion operations per second. It can think centuries worth of human thinking in a couple of hours. If you have an AGI that has goals that are not aligned with your interests it'll dwarf everything else because it thinks faster than you (and can therefore act faster than you) in purs…
But human intelligence is weird. It's not clear to me that increasing the speed of my brain would really accomplish much in my day-to-day life. A lot of the value that I add happens during these 'Eureka' moments, often triggered when I am working on a different problem, taking a break, or after a good nights sleep. Adding more processing speed may or may not make that process more scalable.
And another thing to consider, is that in the real world success is not easy to define and it is only loosely correlated with intelligence. We have 7 billion people, each attempting random little variations on 'succeeding at life'. And the 'winners' generally require that some of the 7 billion people agree to 'reward' them (i.e. by giving them money). My last 3 purchases were watermelon seeds for my garden, a pair of jeans, and a dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. It's not clear to me how AI would take over any of those transactions. Maybe make the jean manufacturing more efficient, but the price I paid was already pretty low.