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DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

venturebeat.com

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Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#191
post #18

Some Bozo who has heard all this many times before is suspicious of claims from places like Deep Mind who have a financial incentive to make them (keep funding) where there aren't working machines to back that claim up. Some Bozo has no credentials, no reputation, no track record of publications and barely supports the claim they're making with anything much. Some Bozo has no financial incentives or otherwise to opin…

Said anonymous account on HN... If you're going to question other people's credentials, reputation, track record and claims make sure your own are solid. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Finally, if you're going to attack someone's article: attack the article, not the person that wrote it. This is the lowest level of attack possible: the personal one. It's as ad-hominem as it gets.

> Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

So if we're gonna have an opinion we need to do the whole academia & job in the industry dance?

That's quite a terrible way to view the world and quite limiting. A world without diversity is a stale and rotten world.

So fuck that and the glass houses and the boxes this kind of worldview puts people in. Everyone should be able to throw stones, and if the hit hurts, well guess there is a reason.

The thesis is that DeepMind has financial incentive to state "we can achieve AGI with what we're doing", to keep up the funding and hopes for the field, not "the author is an idiot".

And the thesis is true, they do have financial incentives. That's not ad-hominem.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#192
post #3

Saying RL is sufficient to (eventually) achieve AGI is a bit misleading. One might similarly state that biological evolution is sufficient to (eventually) achieve biological general intelligence. Both statements are probably true, but the parenthetical (eventually) is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.

I think the title of the paper makes more sense if you consider that ten years ago, someone could have written a paper in a similar spirit with a different take on "what is enough". Back then, it would probably have been titled: "Backpropagation of errors is enough". The last ten years have shown that backpropagation -- while a crucial component -- is not enough. Personally, I would not be shocked to find out in the…

Why are forgetting and sleep relevant? If someone invented a pill that gave you a perfect memory and removed the need to sleep, would you stop being generally intelligent if you took it?

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#193
post #114
post #3

Saying RL is sufficient to (eventually) achieve AGI is a bit misleading. One might similarly state that biological evolution is sufficient to (eventually) achieve biological general intelligence. Both statements are probably true, but the parenthetical (eventually) is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.

That is if you believe biological general intelligence is the end goal of evolution, which I believe is highly unlikely. Intelligence is simply a special side-product of evolution, there is nothing general about general intelligence. Many organisms can thrive without it. There is also a non-negligible chance that all organisms would die out before reaching intelligence. We are fortunate to live in a world that produc…

> biological evolution is sufficient to (eventually) achieve biological general intelligence

Says nothing about this:

> biological general intelligence is the end goal of evolution

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that RL in the extremely vague sense used in the article is enough for AGI is uncontroversial for anyone who believes intelligence and consciousness are physical processes. However, this "result" is trivial. It is obviously equivalent to the claim that intelligence arose naturally in the biological world without influence from God.

> It is obviously equivalent to the claim that intelligence arose naturally in the biological world without influence from God. Where did God's intelligence come from?

From the authors imagination.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the title of the paper makes more sense if you consider that ten years ago, someone could have written a paper in a similar spirit with a different take on "what is enough". Back then, it would probably have been titled: "Backpropagation of errors is enough". The last ten years have shown that backpropagation -- while a crucial component -- is not enough. Personally, I would not be shocked to find out in the…

Why are forgetting and sleep relevant? If someone invented a pill that gave you a perfect memory and removed the need to sleep, would you stop being generally intelligent if you took it?

Because they are strongly associated with all known examples of generalized intelligence. Why wouldn’t they be relevant?

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#196
post #18

Some Bozo who has heard all this many times before is suspicious of claims from places like Deep Mind who have a financial incentive to make them (keep funding) where there aren't working machines to back that claim up. Some Bozo has no credentials, no reputation, no track record of publications and barely supports the claim they're making with anything much. Some Bozo has no financial incentives or otherwise to opin…

Unfortunately i'm rooting for the Bozo, the current AI Revolution won't lead us anywhere and will ebb down eventually.

It won't ebb down. Eventually we'll hit limits of what's practical on current hardware and we'll be back to the 70's and 80's when everything becomes theoretical until hardware catches on. AI is going to continue to advance.

What will happen is that capital will become more skeptical about the limits of what's feasible with AI and it'll be harder to sell bullshit. You're already seeing that with companies like Uber selling off their self driving divisions.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#197
post #18

Some Bozo who has heard all this many times before is suspicious of claims from places like Deep Mind who have a financial incentive to make them (keep funding) where there aren't working machines to back that claim up. Some Bozo has no credentials, no reputation, no track record of publications and barely supports the claim they're making with anything much. Some Bozo has no financial incentives or otherwise to opin…

DeepMind is arguing from first principles. SomeBozo is arguing by analogy. DeepMind will achieve something and SomeBozo will achieve nothing.

The vast majority of ideas are wrong. Every idea is wrong until it leads to the one that is right.

This idea might be the right one, or it might be close to the right one, or it might be far from the right one, but the trajectory is headed toward the right idea. SomeBozo has no trajectory. The best he can do is watch from the sidelines.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#198
post #114
post #3

Saying RL is sufficient to (eventually) achieve AGI is a bit misleading. One might similarly state that biological evolution is sufficient to (eventually) achieve biological general intelligence. Both statements are probably true, but the parenthetical (eventually) is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.

That is if you believe biological general intelligence is the end goal of evolution, which I believe is highly unlikely. Intelligence is simply a special side-product of evolution, there is nothing general about general intelligence. Many organisms can thrive without it. There is also a non-negligible chance that all organisms would die out before reaching intelligence. We are fortunate to live in a world that produc…

i mean if the end goal is to propagate the organism, surely intelligence will be helpful to this - interplanetary scale

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#199
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's easy to be convinced on either side, the arguments write themselves. Yes, eventually a learning system might learn enough to be indistinguishable from intelligence. Or this might be entirely the wrong path and detracting from genuine new innovations in how we think about AI. We won't be able to tell whether it's AGI or just good enough at trained tasks to trick us.

It can prove its intelligence by making testable predictions of the future better than us. As for whether it's "real" AGI or just acts like it, doesn't really matter. I think the Chinese room problem has been agreed on as not a problem, hasn't it?

I think proof of “real” intelligence by answering harder and harder questions is barking up the wrong tree. I think evidence and proof are a better way to denote varying levels of understanding.

A deductive system can come with an answer and a proof of that answer, where proof is whatever counts as proof in that system.

So the notion of “does it really understand it’s answers” gets punted off its Q&A abilities and onto its ability to justify its answers.

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