Does anyone have any thoughts on Vicarious, the non-deep-learning competitor to OpenAI?
I'm also curious about this, haven't heard anything about them in a while
Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
571–580 of 623 posts
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is your alternative "Don't invent general AI?"? If so that seems unbelievably naive. Things generally can't be un-invented, and it's unimaginably hard to prevent people inventing things, especially with such a large economic upside for inventing it.
Prove me wrong if it is so obvious. As the people at OpenAI have rightly said, AGI is a compute-gated problem. It is a problem that can only be solved with very, very large amounts of compute. The world has some total amount of computing power in terms of silicon based computation. For AGI to happen, there are two requirements: that this total be equal or greater than some theoretical threshold value for AGI and that…
Nothing in that sounds easy.
If there are N governments in the world, and they all agree to not regulate to not create general AI, then it's strongly in all of their interests to betray the others, create general AI, and capture the economic growth.
Even if general AI is impossible, it's in their interests to develop huge computing capacity, because that's demonstrably economically useful.
You are hypothesizing that's it's easy to get 7 billion people to all agree to co-operate in a game of prisoner's dilemma, when if a small fraction of them choose to betray, they have the potential to capture massive value.
And you want to do this under the premise that AGI might be a problem.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sentiment analysis is at 96% and increasing rapidly. http://nlpprogress.com/english/sentiment_analysis.html
'Sentiment analysis' of pre-canned pre-labelled datasets is a comparatively trivial classification task. Actual sentiment analysis as in 'take the twitter firehose and figure out sentiment about arbitrary topic X' is only slightly less out of reach than AGI itself. Actual sentiment analysis is a completely different kind of ML problem than supervised classification 'sentiment analysis' that's popular today but mostly…
Not-actual sentiment analysis is already useful (to some) and used in real world applications (though I'm not a fan of those applications), unless perhaps you're referring to the "actual real world" that lives somewhere beyond the horizon as well.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#574I 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…
Their handling of OpenAIFive rubbed me the wrong way as well. The whole operation smelled very PR-ish to me personally -- unnecessarily/unjustifiably HYPE representatives, complaining that the Dota community wanted to see OpenAIFive play a normal Dota match against pros rather a heavily constrained environment to benefit the bots, among other things.
Same. They left the OpenAI project half baked and thats very disappointing.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does that matter? Does diversity for the cause of diversity lead to better results? Is there any data around this? Hiring the most qualified people is the most important thing. As long as there isn't an inherent bias for not hiring someone who is hispanic, black, or brown, it should b e fine.
What you're posing is an age-old counterargument based around an irrational fear of white people experiencing prejudice and losing out on opportunities to underqualified people they would have otherwise had. There have been studies done around diversity, conducted both privately and publicly, which consistently conclude that increased diversity does result in enhanced decision-making, collaboration, and organizationa…
Those studies are a pretty weak argument. The first link isn't about the type of diversity grandparent was talking about, but "informational diversity". The paper produces no direct correlation. The pragmatic angle is overblown.
It being the right thing to do is a much stronger argument imo. Which I agree with, but companies generally aren't interested in it, unless they can use it for marketing.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn’t compare OpenAI to the Manhattan Project. I was pointing out that if a small number of people discover a plausible conceptual pathway to AGI, a similar project will happen.
And I'm pointing out that the conceptual breakthroughs that preceded such an engineering sprint happened in the open literature. Wells was writing sci-fi about atomic weapons in 1914. He based it off of a pop-science book written in 1909. We don't have any such understanding, or even a definition, of 'AGI'.
Wells’ atomic bombs sci-fi was of the type «there is energy in the atom, and maybe someone will use this in bombs someday». Nowhere close to the physical reality of a weapon, more in the realm of philosophy that strong AI currently is. We have an existence proof of intelligence already, after all. The idea is not based on pure fantasy, even though the practicalities are unknown.
Leo Szilard had more plausible philosophical musings in the early thirties, that did not have root in any workable practical idea. The published theoretical breakthroughs you mention didn’t happen until the late thirties. Nuclear fission, the precursor to the idea of an exponential chain reaction, happened only in 1938, 7 years before Trinity.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#577Earlier 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!
Will this be $1 billion in cash, or in Azure credits?
Cash investment, pointed out elsewhere in the thread.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#578Earlier 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…
We can model some aspects of insect behavior. The simulation even looks convincing at first glance (just as simple "AI" looks convincing with a superficial examination of a conversation or text-generation). But we have not been able to fully model the behavior of, say, a bee (which may be enough to solve self-driving cars and then some).
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#579Azure is the worst...open AI better take that in cash....
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm skeptical his claims are substantive. As with all things philosophy there are competing and supporting theories, and with this age-old question of AGI I doubt the field is as conclusive on the matter as he believes.
I used to be a believer of the theory that we are super sophisticated machines. When I read some of the philosophy on the subject I changed my mind. I now believe there must be some immaterial component to our minds. There’s a lot to read out there on this subject, but I found expositions of the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas to be the clearest and most convincing for me. Lots of different books and articles exi…
> I used to be a believer of the theory that we are super sophisticated machines. When I read some of the philosophy on the subject I changed my mind.
What philosophy? Be specific
> I now believe there must be some immaterial component to our minds.
What specific points or ideas made you believe that?
> There’s a lot to read out there on this subject
So provide some examples, be as specific as possible
> but I found expositions of the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas to be the clearest and most convincing for me
These two wrote a lot on many subjects, can you be specific on the points that convinced you that we are not super sophisticated machines. Don't vaguely point at a couple of authors, we are talking about a very specific idea.
> Lots of different books and articles exist on them both - pick one that sounds like it suits your style of understanding.
If there's lots then cite some examples, or better yet, rather than vaguely pointing at a book, (which is only marginally more useful than vaguely pointing at an author) let's discuss the specific ideas exactly.