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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#411

Post by Veedrac »

nradov wrote: post #394
andreilys wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety? What "threshold" would you want to cross before you think its socially acceptable to put resources behind ensuring that humanity doesn't wipe itself out? The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate timeline looks like. We might be 10 years away from the singularity, 1000 years, or it might never ever happen! There…

The proper threshold would be the demonstration of an AGI approximately as smart as a mouse. Until then it's just idle speculation. We don't even know the key parameters for having a productive discussion.

This makes no sense. Mice can't write poetry. Expecting a 1:1 equivalence between human and manufactured intelligence is no more coherent than denying the possibility of human-bearing flight until we have planes as acrobatic as a hawk.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#412

Post by Quarrelsome »

mritchie712 wrote: post #409
Quarrelsome wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mythical man month. I feel like you're seriously underestimating how hard this is. Its got to be one of the greatest engineering challenges of our species and to flaunt that its "near zero cost" is offensive.

Not offensive in the least, it's a compliment to what our species has done to date. We are all standing on shoulders and the shoulders have never been higher. Think of the things you can build in a day that were impossible to build 30 years ago. To think that there isn't at least some chance someone will build AGI in the next 30 years is foolish. Again, I'm just saying there is a reasonable chance, like hitting a hom…

We're making the process more opaque. How can that scale to AGI? We'll be stuck at 80% done for much longer.

I would posit that while its possible, it will take so long on this tech stack that we'll find another in the interim that will produce better results. I'm not convinced this branch is the winner.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#413

Post by gonehome »

dragonwriter wrote: post #404
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…

> If AGI is achievable It almost certainly is. Humans make new intelligences all the time. > and achieving it will have consequences that dwarf everything else It probably won't, humans make new intelligences all the time. Hanging the technology base for that doesn't have any significant necessary consequences. A revolution in our ability to understand and control other intelligences might have consequences that dwar…

The difference is in the scale of the intelligence, not just the technology.

It's not so much a new human like intelligence that runs on silicon, it's a general problem solving intelligence that can run a billion times faster than any individual human. This is the part I think you're underestimating.

If you have that without the ability to align its goals to human goals then that's a problem.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#414

Post by umvi »

DuskStar wrote: post #389
nradov wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to worry. No one is anywhere close to achieving true AGI so any safety concerns are a moot issue. It's akin to worrying about an alien invasion.

> No one is anywhere close to achieving true AGI No one knows how far off true AGI is, just like no one in 1940 (or 1910) knew how far off fission weapons were. EDIT: I quite liked this article from a few years back [0], and the fission weapon prediction example is stolen from there. 0: https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/

Really? I thought by 1940 physicists generally understood fission and theoretically understood how to build a bomb - they just needed to find enough distilled fissile material (which was hard to do). And indeed, once they had enough U235, they had such a high degree of confidence in the theory, that they built a functioning U235 bomb without ever having previously tested one.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#415

Post by elcomet »

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!

Are you planning to open offices in Europe? Paris and London are hosting better and better AI ecosystems.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#416

Post by pron »

JamesBarney wrote: post #373
pron wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

> We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. This sentence might by itself imply they are farther along than they are, but in the context of the whole article I never got the impression they were close to actually building an AGI. > The most obvious way to cover costs is to build a product, but that would mean changing our focus. Instead, we intend to…

They don't know what connection, if any, what they're doing has with AGI. For all we know right now, some botanist researching the reproductive system of ferns is as likely to bring about a breakthrough in AI as their research is. To me this feels like peak-Silicon Valley, the moment they've completely lost touch with reality.

People may also not be confused if Ben and Jerry's start an ice cream ad with mentions of AGI and the change of human trajectory and Marie Curie, and name it Pre-AGI Rum Raisin, but that doesn't mean the text isn't a beautiful and amusing example of contemporary Silicon Valley self-importance and delusion, and reads like a parody that makes the characters in HBO's Silicon Valley sound grounded and humble. Especially the "pre-AGI" bit, which I'm now stealing and will be using at every opportunity. Maybe it's just me, but I think it is quite hilarious when a company whose actual connection with AGI is that, like many others, they dream about it and wish they could one day invent it, call their work "pre-AGI." Ironic, considering they're writing this pre-apocalypse.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#417

Post by Veedrac »

aerovistae wrote: post #400
andreilys wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety? What "threshold" would you want to cross before you think its socially acceptable to put resources behind ensuring that humanity doesn't wipe itself out? The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate timeline looks like. We might be 10 years away from the singularity, 1000 years, or it might never ever happen! There…

> There is a non-zero chance that we are a few breakthroughs away from creating a technology that far surpasses the nuclear bomb in terms of destructive potential. No, there is exactly zero chance that anyone is "a few breakthroughs away" from AGI.

I'm compiling a list of reasons people doubt AGI risk, could you clarify why you think AGI is certainly far term?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#418

Post by nradov »

gdb wrote: post #62
mattferderer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B. My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools to their customers. Also a great time to point out that while "Microsoft is not a ch…

> My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B. It's a cash investment. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though. > My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools…

OpenAI has achieved some amazing results and I congratulate them for their accomplishments, but labeling any of that as "pre-AGI" is intellectually dishonest and misleading at best. They haven't shown any meaningful progress toward true AGI.

When I was 10 I created some "pre-time travel" technology by designing an innovative control panel for my time machine. Sadly I ran into some technical obstacles later in the project. OpenAI is at about the same phase with AGI.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#419

Post by emanuensis »

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…

Sounds like @benl has been afflicted with the "Cartesian wound". Such dualistic thinking and ideas like free will are ~hard for us to work through. But perhaps the more important, and immediately tractable, question @benl brings up is what our approach should be? Should we make an AGI or better IA, Intelligence Augmentation?

~hard

Daniel Dennett

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#420

Post by mritchie712 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #412
mritchie712 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not offensive in the least, it's a compliment to what our species has done to date. We are all standing on shoulders and the shoulders have never been higher. Think of the things you can build in a day that were impossible to build 30 years ago. To think that there isn't at least some chance someone will build AGI in the next 30 years is foolish. Again, I'm just saying there is a reasonable chance, like hitting a hom…

We're making the process more opaque. How can that scale to AGI? We'll be stuck at 80% done for much longer. I would posit that while its possible, it will take so long on this tech stack that we'll find another in the interim that will produce better results. I'm not convinced this branch is the winner.

Oh, do you mean how can Azure scale to AGI? I have no opinion on Azure, I just meant someone smart will figure it out. There are huge financial incentives to do so, when that happens, we (humans) figure shit out.
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