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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#491
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…

I would ask for evidence to support your claim, but I think Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword probably applies in this case.

Well, machine is a name for a stance of analysis, there are no machines in the real world (which is not to say that there no are mechanical linkages) only in our minds.

FWIW, consciousness has no properties and so cannot be studied scientifically.

However, consciousness can be explored experientially, i.e. two conscious beings can merge and experience self as one being. (See Charles Tart's experiment with mutual hypnosis.)

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#492
post #140
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!

Probably a bit off topic here, I was wondering if you could shade some light on why Elon Musk parted away from OpenAI. On Twitter he said he disagreed on what OpenAI wanted to do. Could you please tell me more on that? It seems what OpenAI is doing is pretty great.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#493
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree... but also think the world will benefit as well. "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.

1 billion worth of Azure credits?

What is that in SchruteBucks?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A computer being able to simulate a brain that thinks for itself is the logical extrapolation of current brain-simulation efforts Except that our current neural networks have nothing to do with the actual neurons in our brain and how they work.

I believe ekianjo wasn't talking about neural networks, but simulations using models that are similar to how neurons work. Computational neuroscience is a thing.

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The atomic bomb was based on science theory. Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too. > A computer ... will never be able to think by itself. Turing wrote an entire paper about this (Computing Machinery and Intelligence), where he rephrases your statement (because he finds it to be meaningless) and devises a test to answer it. He also directly attacks your phrasing of "but it will never": > I…

> Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too. Can you elaborate which part of sciences you are talking about here?

All sciences that collaborate with the field of AI: Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Systems Theory, Decision Theory, Information Theory, Mathematics, Physics, Biology, ...

Any AI curriculum worth its salt includes the many scientific and philosophical views on intelligence. It is not all alchemy, though the field is in a renewal phase (with horribly hyped nomenclature such as "pre-AGI", and the most impressive implementations coming from industry and government, not academia).

And eventhough the atom bomb was based on science too, there is this anecdote from Hamming:

> Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done—either you have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it was, he said, "It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere." I decided I would check it myself! The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, "The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen—after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels." He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, "What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?" I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you."

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#498
post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but you're simply contesting the definition of intelligence that I assumed we were operating with, which is humanlike intelligence. Regardless of its extent, I think we would agree that intelligent behavior is consistent. My main point is that the current way we evaluate the artificial agents is not emphasizing their inconsistency. Wikipedia defines Turing test as "a test of a machine's ability to e…

I'm not interested in categorizing for the sake of categorizing, I'm interested in how AI researchers and those otherwise involved can get a measure of where they're at and where they can expect to be. If AI researchers were growing neurons in vats and those neurons were displaying abilities on par with chimpanzees I'd want those researchers to be able to say ‘hold up, we might be getting close to par-human intellige…

>no results to many incredible results

What exactly is incredible (relatively) about the current state of things? I don't know how up-to-date you are on research, but how can you be claiming that we had no results previously? This is the kind of ignorance of previous work that we should be avoiding. We had the same kind of results previously, only with lower numbers. I keep trying to explain that increasing the numbers is not going to get us there because the numbers are measuring the wrong thing. There are other things that we should also focus on improving.

>dismissing our measures of progress and improved generality with ‘nowhere near as robust as [...] humans’ is certainly not the way figure it out.

It is the way to save this field from wasting so much money and time on coming up with the next small tweak to get that 0.001 improvement in whatever number you're trying to increase. It is not a naive or spiteful dismissal of the measures, it is a critique of the measures since they should not be the primary goal. The majority of this community is mindlessly tweaking architectures in pursuit of publications. Standards of publication should be higher to discourage this kind of behavior. With this much money and manpower, it should be exploding in orthogonal directions instead. But that requires taste and vision, which are unfortunately rare.

>People can't multiply thousand-digit numbers in their heads; why should that in any way invalidate their other measures of intelligence?

Is rote multiplication a task that we're interested in achieving with AI? You say that you aren't interested categorizing for the sake of categorizing, but this is a counterexample for the sake of giving a counterexample. Avoiding this kind of an example is precisely why I said "a measure that we care about improving".

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#499
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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!

Probably a bit off topic here, I was wondering if you could shade some light on why Elon Musk parted away from OpenAI. On Twitter he said he disagreed on what OpenAI wanted to do. Could you please tell me more on that? It seems what OpenAI is doing is pretty great.

This might help answer that:

- https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Elon-Musk-quit-OpenAI-Is-he-af...

- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-17/elon-musk...

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is in the scale of the intelligence, not just the technology. AGI is inherently no greater in scale than human intelligene, so scale is not a difference with AGI, though it might be with AG super I. But that's a different issue than mere AGI, and may be impossible or impractical even if AGI is doable; we have examples of human-level intelligence so we know it is physically acheivable in our universe,…

I think that's somewhat of an arbitrary distinction likely not to exist in practice. If you have an AGI you can probably scale up its runtime by throwing more hardware at it. Maybe there's some reason that'll prevent this from being true, but I'm not sure that should be considered the default or most likely case. Biology is limited in ways that AGI would not be due to things like power and headsize constraints (along…

> If you have an AGI you can probably scale up its runtime by throwing more hardware at it

Without understanding a lot more than we do about both what intelligence is and how to acheive it, that's rank speculation.

There's not really any good reason to think that AGI would scale particularly more easily than natural intelligence (which, in a sense, you can scale with more hardware: there are certainly senses in which communities are more capable of solving problems than individuals.)

> Biology is limited in ways that AGI would not be due to things like power and headsize constraints

Since AGI will run on physical hardware it will no doubt face constraints based on that hardware. Without knowing a lot more than we do about intelligence and mechanisms for achieving it, the assumption that the only known examples are particularly suboptimal in terms of hardware is rank speculation.

Further, we have no real understanding of how general intelligence scales with any other capacity anyway, or even if there might be some narrow “sweet spot” range in which anything like general intelligence operates, because we don't much understand either general intelligence or it's physical mechanisms.

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