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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#351

Post by pron »

JamesBarney wrote: post #204
pron wrote: post #183

Earlier 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…

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…

Yeah, in this release they're not saying they're doing research towards AI, or even that they're researching AI. They're saying that they're "building artificial general intelligence" and developing a platform that "will scale to AGI." (emphasis mine) They're also calling what they're actually building "pre-AGI."

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#352

Post by pron »

breck wrote: post #305
tedivm wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you're terming a misunderstanding is actually fairly well known, but doesn't account for the magnitude of the sitution. 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…

I don’t believe incrementalism will get us their either. We need many more 10x+ advances. But I think it’s relatively clear where those advances need to be. I think simply by making 10x advances in maybe 100 or 1k domains we’ll get there. Neuralink for example, just announced many 10x+ advances, such as the number of electrodes you can put in the brain. Our lab is working on a number of things that will be also 10x a…

I think that the lack of a hundred or a thousand 10x advances (you may be more pessimistic than me) does not merit calling your work pre-AGI.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#353

Post by StreamBright »

gonehome wrote: post #303
StreamBright wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following your reasoning, flying with the speed of light is possible because photons travel with the speed of light. We are not photons though. Is it possible or not to travel with the speed of light with a spaceship?

Warp drives travel faster than the speed of light? That's what I meant by not possible. Ignoring that if we saw miniature warp drives everywhere around us in nature then yes I would be more confident they were possible.

I see your point I just wanted to point out that there are different challenges for us than for nature. Flying like a bird has dirrent challanges than flying with a Boeing 747, even though these challenges might share a subset of the physics, like the Bernoulli’s principle.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#354

Post by Synaesthesia »

bhouston wrote: post #68

Hmmm.... it reads to me that someone has co-opted an open standard. How much of this is really an investment and how much is an in-kind contribution of Azure resources? Also this sounds dangerous: "exclusive cloud provider". When an OpenAI group starts to make exclusively partnerships with one vendor, I wonder how "Open" it is. I can not imagine Khronos Group, which runs similarly named OpenGL, etc having a "exclusiv…

How open is the computer world anyway? Not very. At the hardware level not at all. So yes take it with a grain of salt. It’s still the product of billionaires and tech giants.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#355

Post by dang »

QuackingJimbo wrote: post #91
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…

Your boss is an idiot.

Breaking the site guidelines like this is a bannable offence on HN, regardless of whom you're attacking. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#356

Post by wasoante »

gonehome wrote: post #319
clmul wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Therefore we should try and figure out a way to make it safe before AGI exists. Makes no sense to me, how would you ever be able to figure out a way to make something safe before it even exists? Someone who has never built a nuclear reactor most likely could not think of a way to prevent the Chernobyl disaster. (OK, maybe this is a wrong example as someone who did couldn't do this either, but the point should be cl…

I think the argument is that decision theory and goal alignment can be worked on without knowing all the details about how an AGI will work. https://intelligence.org/2016/12/28/ai-alignment-why-its-har...

ah yes Yudkowsky, the well established AI researcher & definitely not a crank

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#357

Post by gonehome »

qqqwerty wrote: post #340
gonehome wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consi…

Sure it happens in Eureka moments which for you are when you take a break that might be a few hours, but if you're running a billion times faster then a few hours turns into a billionth of that time. That's what I'm trying to get at as an example - even assuming the exact same architecture otherwise.

For the real world success part that's where goal alignment comes in. If we're going to solve things like dealing with the sun burning out, becoming an interplanetary species, or death then having an AGI that can work on these problems with us (or as part of us if Neuralink can succeed on what they want to do) will be a big deal.

It sounds crazy, but I think success here is a lot bigger than automating what clothes you were going to buy. Incentive based systems like capitalism work pretty well, but not being able to coordinate effectively at scale is a major source of current human problems, theoretically a goal aligned AGI could do that, or at least help us do it.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#358

Post by choppaface »

gdb wrote: post #140
tosh wrote: post #64

New York Times has a bit more context > Mr. Nadella said Microsoft would not necessarily invest that billion dollars all at once. It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. Microsoft is investing dollars that will be fed back into its own business, as OpenAI purchases computing power from the software giant, and the collaboration between the two companies could yield a wide array of technologies. http…

(I work at OpenAI.) > It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. The NYT article is misleading here. We'll definitely spend the $1B within 5 years, and maybe much faster. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!

How does the funding structure, employee comp / incentives, and licensing compare to Deepmind?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#359

Post by pron »

stcredzero wrote: post #330
pron wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a comment this precise I'm surprised you've mistaken spiders for insects :) Anyway, I think that "if you gave us $10B then in ten years we have even odds of producing something as smart as a jumping spider" does make for less inspirational copy than "[we're] building artificial general intelligence with widely distributed economic benefits."

For a comment this precise I'm surprised you've mistaken spiders for insects :) True. They're fellow arthropods, and have similar levels of nervous complexity. (BTW, are you by any chance confusing Tarantula Hawks for spiders?) does make for less inspirational copy The levels of inspiration in the copy and generalizing across the phylum Arthropoda aside, are you effectively conceding that we're close to AGI at insect…

> are you effectively conceding that we're close to AGI at insect levels?

By "we are not even close to achieving insect-level intelligence" I think I meant that what we have now is not close in intelligence (whatever that means) to insects. I don't know if we have a 50% of getting there in a decade, but I certainly wouldn't conclusively say that "we are not even close" to that. I mostly regret having chosen bikes rather than electric scooters for my original comment. I think that sounds funnier.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#360

Post by noir_lord »

benl wrote: post #346

If you strip out the AGI hype then this just sounds like OpenAI is now moving to monetizing their tech. This makes sense for them but probably not for the philanthropists who originally backed them. Sadly for them, AGI is metaphysically impossible - this will be realized eventually but a lot of waste and possibly harm will happen first. We are not just super sophisticated machines, so the fact that we can think doesn…

> But philosophy does - and it tells us you can’t get mind from matter, no matter what configuration you put it in.

Curious - do you think humans have mind? because if so we are very much matter and if not well that's an interesting thought as well.

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