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AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

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Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#61

Post by swyx »

sabujp wrote: post #31
Isinlor wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roughly half/half, skewed more towards improvements in algorithms. Measuring the Algorithmic Efficiency of Neural Networks: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.04305 In this work, we argue that algorithmic progress has an aspect that is both straightforward to measure and interesting: reductions over time in the compute needed to reach past capabilities. We show that the number of floating-point operations required to train a…

All these deepmind and openai computer scientists don't pay themselves, you're not taking their pay into consideration.

this is the definition of a nit. they dont cost 1b. still tiny vs the other projects listed

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#62

Post by _vufv »

EGreg wrote: post #41

No, just no! Because the whole thing is, a dog’s abstract mental capabilities are far below a human — thus why it would be ASTOUNDING that a dog could master even a primitive form of speaking English. On the other hand, here we are brute forcing a solution from analyzing millions of man-years of published English speech, by using a huge array of computing power to precompute various answers and sift them. It is a bit…

Excuse my presumption, but it seems that you arrive at the logical conclusion "it might be possible to simulate intelligence with a sufficiently big cheat sheet" - and then you disregard it because you're uncomfortable with it. We already know this is the case for specialized environments, so the "only" question left is how far does this generalize.

In my opinion, more ridiculous claims have already been proven by science (for example Quantum Mechanics).

Also you have to make a distinction between the optimizing process (evolution/training neural nets) and the intelligent agent itself (human/machine intelligence).

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#63

Post by mark_l_watson »

ogogmad wrote: post #19
omnicognate wrote: post #18

As someone who is skeptical, but open minded, about the impact these technologies will have on practical programming I think I'm one of the "people" in "people are complaining..." The article makes some assumptions about what such people think that certainly aren't true for me: 1. That we are unimpressed. I'm gobsmacked. 2. That we don't think these are significant advances. They're obviously huge advances. 3. That w…

I think using these tools might become a science or an art form in its own right. You'll have to give these tools the input they need to produce the most useful answers to you. In the short term at least, this is not going to take away your need to think. But it might change how you think, and it might make you more productive when your problem aligns well with these tools.

I think that you are correct, we will see AI used as a copilot for artists and content creators. I have had access to the OpenAI APIs for GPT-3 since last summer, and in addition to using this for NLP tasks, I have also experimented with using GPT-3 to help me work on a sci-fi short book that I have been occasionally writing for years. It has been useful for expanding sections that I have been stuck on. I feel that I should copyright my story as being authored by The Internet since every content creator whose text, programming listings, etc. that goes into training these language models has in some sense been a contributor to my short story.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#64

Post by erwincoumans »

ianbutler wrote: post #46
ipaddr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is overhyped because in the end it has failed to deliver the breakthrough promised years ago. Car drinking cars are a great example. The AI that has taken over google search has made a great product kinda of awful now. What breakthroughs are you referring to?

A. Most people still think Google search is good. B. Unless you work for Google specifically on that search team I'm going to say you don't know what you're talking about. So we can safely throw that point away. I've implemented a natural language search using bleeding edge work, the results I can assure you are impressive. Everything from route planning to spam filtering has seen major upgrades thanks to ML in the l…

One of Deepmind's goals is AGI, so it is tempting to evaluate their publications for progress towards AGI. Problem is, how do you evaluate progress towards AGI?

https://deepmind.com/about

"Our long term aim is to solve intelligence, developing more general and capable problem-solving systems, known as artificial general intelligence (AGI)."

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#65

Post by carapace »

EGreg wrote: post #41

No, just no! Because the whole thing is, a dog’s abstract mental capabilities are far below a human — thus why it would be ASTOUNDING that a dog could master even a primitive form of speaking English. On the other hand, here we are brute forcing a solution from analyzing millions of man-years of published English speech, by using a huge array of computing power to precompute various answers and sift them. It is a bit…

Yah, it's a bad metaphor, but I think he's only using it as a rhetorical device, he's not trying to reason from it.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#66

Post by ArnoVW »

gambiting wrote: post #48
ianbutler wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think that's done?

Definitely not with AI? I mean Photoshop could do that 10+ years ago without "machine learning" even being a thing people talked about.

This is sort of the interesting thing with AI. It's a moving target. Every time when an AI problem gets cracked, it's "yea but that's not really AI, just a stupid hack".

Take autonomous cars. Sure, Musk is over-hyping, but we are making progress.

I imagine it will go something like:

Step 1) support for drivers (anti sleep or colision).. done?

Step 2) autonomous driving in one area, perfect conditions, using expensive sensors

Step n) gradual iteration removes those qualifications one by one

.. yes, it will take 10/20 years before cars can drive autonomously in chaotic conditions such as "centre of Paris in the rain". But at each of those steps value is created, and at each step people will say "yea but..".

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#67

Post by falcor84 »

derekja wrote: post #29
omnicognate wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially, but that doesn't address the problem of replacing writing code with the (harder) process of reading, verifying and fixing it. However well I engineer my inputs I'll still have to review, verify and fix the outputs.

This problem has been (albeit imperfectly) addressed in speech recognition. When error corrections are made through the the UI the engine can learn from those corrections. Presumably over time the corrections needed in alphacode will become more semantic than syntactical. But you're right, correcting subtly flawed code or text is way harder than writing from scratch.

One of the most difficult problems in software development in general is coming up with the right test cases that cover the real-world domain's needs. If you have an AI like this at your disposal, that you can throw test cases at and it will give you the stupidest piece of code that makes them pass, then at the least you have something that helps you iterate on your test cases a lot more effectively, which would be a great boon.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#68

Post by pessimizer »

shagie wrote: post #45
EGreg wrote: post #41

No, just no! Because the whole thing is, a dog’s abstract mental capabilities are far below a human — thus why it would be ASTOUNDING that a dog could master even a primitive form of speaking English. On the other hand, here we are brute forcing a solution from analyzing millions of man-years of published English speech, by using a huge array of computing power to precompute various answers and sift them. It is a bit…

Bunny is a neat dog... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEa46rlHqEP6ClWitFd2QOQ The vocal apparatus is not there, but there is certainly more cognition than what people think dogs have (there's a question that I wonder if language enables thought or if thought enables language) And this is even something that a cat can do (not as much language skills, but there's thought going on) https://www.youtube.com/c/BilliSpeak…

I'm not so certain. Seems like the owner is doing a lot of work to make sense out of those utterances. I'd like to see Bunny say what he's about to do, then do it. Or watch his owner do something with something, then describe it.

edit: or just have a conversation of any kind longer than a 2 minute video. Or one without the owner in the room, where she talks back with the dog using the same board. That would at least be amenable to Turing.

edit2: here's a test - put headphones on the owner and block her vision of the board. Sometimes pipe in the actual buttons the dog is pressing, other times pipe in arbitrary words. See if the owner makes sense of the random words.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#69

Post by password321 »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #5
evrydayhustling wrote: post #3

I love this take. Most AI results provoke a torrent of articles listing pratfalls that prove it's not AGI. Of course it's not AGI! But it is as unexpected as a talking dog. Take a second to be amazed, at least amused. Then read how they did it and think about how to do better.

It's rarely productive to take internet criticism into account, but it feels like AI is an especially strong instance of this. It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is. Possibly because of animosity toward big tech, given big tech is driving a lot of the research and practical implementation in this area?

Well in this case I think many programmers just see it as a direct assault to their identity.
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