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DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

deepmind.com

221–230 of 345 posts

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not you specifically, but I honestly don't understand how positive many in this community (or really anyone at all) can be about these news. Tim Urban's article explicitly touches on the risk of human extinction, not to mention all the smaller-scale risks from weaponized AI. Have we made any progress on preventing this? Or is HN mostly happy with deprecating humanity because our replacement has more teraflops? Even t…

Agreed. People think of the best case scenario without seriously considering everything that can go wrong. If we stay on this path the most likely outcome is human extinction. Full stop

Says a random internet post. It takes a little more evidence or argument to be convincing, besides hyperbole.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That human intelligence might just be token prediction evolving from successive small bit-width float matrix transformations is depressing to me.

Wait till you find out all of physics is just linear operators & complex numbers

Unless nature is mathematical, the linear operators & complex numbers are just useful tools for making predictive models about nature. The map isn't the territory.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#223

"The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens." This is rather mind blowing. Does it also mean that the generalist network is smaller than the sum of all specialist networks that are equivalent? Even if not, I find the idea that a single…

I don't find it surprising that a single network can do all those things with appropriate formatting of the data. In itself it just means the network has a large enough capacity to learn all the different tasks. The interesting questions imo, which they studied, is what kind of added generalization takes place by learning across the different tasks. For example, does learning multiple tasks make it better at a given…

Yeah, Figure 9 is the money figure in this paper and it actually splashes some cold water on the claims in the rest of the paper. While it generalizes OK to some tasks that are held out, it does pretty poorly on the Atari boxing task, which they openly admit is quite different from the others. Gato seems more likely to be a competent attempt at brute forcing our way towards weak general AI, which is a valid approach, but the question then will always be how does it do with something its never seen before, and how do you possibly brute force every possible situation? I think we're heading more towards a constellation of very intelligent expert machines for particular tasks that may be wrapped into a single package, but that are not strong AI.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#224

Is this the first reveal of the name Gato? It is the first I’ve heard of it and it definitely sounds like more of a murder bot than a C-3PO :) I know this is not as important as the AGI question, but I do think the branding matters as much as the attitude of the creators. They seem to be making a generalist agent to see if they can. Gato is a clear name for that: utilitarian and direct. If it was called Sunshine or G…

Gato, to me, just makes me think "cat", which kind of has a fun ring along "cats on the internet". IMO it sounds more friendly than a robot with a robo-name like C-3PO!

However, I also have a nice robot-named-Gato association[1] from Chrono Trigger. :)

[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ho1TPf2Vj3k/hqdefault.jpg

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then what? Growing tomatoes is less efficient than buying them, regardless of your metric. If you just want really cleanly grown tomatoes, you can buy those. If you want cheap tomatoes, you can buy those. If you want big tomatoes, you can buy those. And yet individual people still grow tomatoes. Zillions of them. Why? Because we are inherently over-evolved apes who like sweet juicy fruits. The key to being a success…

Humans are great at making up purpose where there is absolutely none, and indeed this is a helpful mechanism for dealing with post-scarcity. The philosophical problem that I see with the "AI overlord age" (although not directly related to AI) is that we'll then have the technology to change the inherent human desires you speak of, and at that point growing tomatoes just seems like a very inefficient way of satisfying…

Any game you play has cheat codes. Do you use them? If not, why not?

In a post-scarcity world we get access to all the cheat codes. I suspect there will be many people who use them and as a result run into the inevitable ennui that comes with basing your sense of purpose on competing for finite resources in a world where those resources are basically free.

There will also be many people who choose to set their own constraints to provide some 'impedance' in their personal circuit. I suspect there will also be many people who will simply be happy trying to earn the only resource that cannot ever be infinite: social capital. We'll see a world where influencers are god-kings and your social credit score is basically the only thing that matters, because everything else is freely available.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#226
post #182

(Former AI researcher / founder here) It always surprises me at the ease at which people jump on a) imminent AGI and b) human extinction in the face of AGI. Would love for someone to correct me / add information here to the contrary. Generalist here just refers to a "multi-faceted agent" vs "General" like AGI. For a) - I see 2 main blockers, 1) A way to build second/third order reasoning systems that rely on intuitio…

> it happens when autonomous systems optimizing reward functions fail because of problems described above in (a) -- the inability to have deterministic rules baked into them to avoid global fail states in order to achieve local success states.

yes, and there is an insight here that I think is often missed in the popular framing of AI x-risk: the autonomous systems we have today (which, defined broadly, need not be entirely or even mostly digital) are just as vulnerable to this

the AGI likely to pose extinction risk in the near term has humans in the loop

less likely to look like Clippy, more likely to look like a catastrophic absence of alignment between loci of agency (social, legal, technical, corporate, political, etc)

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the camp that thinks we're headed in a perpendicular direction and won't ever get to human levels of AGI with current efforts based on the simple idea that the basic tooling is wrong from first principles. I mean, most of the "progress" in AI has been due to getting better and learning how to understand a single piece of technology: neural networks. A lot of recent neuroscience findings have shown that human b…

HN madlibs: I'm in the camp that thinks we're headed in a perpendicular direction and won't ever achieve powered flight with current efforts based on the simple idea that the basic tooling is wrong from first principles. I mean, most of the "progress" in flight has been due to getting better and learning how to understand a single piece of technology: fixed wing aircraft. A lot of recent powered flight findings have…

We also already select from bilions people to work on this.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#228
post #182

(Former AI researcher / founder here) It always surprises me at the ease at which people jump on a) imminent AGI and b) human extinction in the face of AGI. Would love for someone to correct me / add information here to the contrary. Generalist here just refers to a "multi-faceted agent" vs "General" like AGI. For a) - I see 2 main blockers, 1) A way to build second/third order reasoning systems that rely on intuitio…

I've always assumed that the trouble will begin when we have a model for 'true' AGI and discover that the constraint "do not harm any human" renders it functionally inert.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the camp that thinks we're headed in a perpendicular direction and won't ever get to human levels of AGI with current efforts based on the simple idea that the basic tooling is wrong from first principles. I mean, most of the "progress" in AI has been due to getting better and learning how to understand a single piece of technology: neural networks. A lot of recent neuroscience findings have shown that human b…

HN madlibs: I'm in the camp that thinks we're headed in a perpendicular direction and won't ever achieve powered flight with current efforts based on the simple idea that the basic tooling is wrong from first principles. I mean, most of the "progress" in flight has been due to getting better and learning how to understand a single piece of technology: fixed wing aircraft. A lot of recent powered flight findings have…

Do you think you’ll see true AGI in your lifetime? I certainly don’t think I’ll see it in mine.

No other domain of the sciences is “complete” yet. There are still unanswered questions in physics, biology, neuroscience, every field. Why are people so sure that AI will be the first field to be “completed”, and in such an astoundingly short amount of time on a historical scale?

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#230
post #117
post #22

Slowly but surely we're moving towards general AI. There is a marked split across general society and even ML/AI specialists between those who think that we can achieve AGI using current methods and those who dismiss the possibility. This has always been the case, but what is remarkable about today's environment is that researchers keep making progress contrary to the doubter's predictions. Each time this happens, th…

>- "ML models can't perform creative work" - then came GANs, large language models, DALL-E, and more. I don't think copying other people's style of artwork is considered creative work, otherwise art forgers would be able to actually make a living doing art, since some of them are really phenomenal.

Arguments like this always make me think of Everything is a Remix [0] or how allegedly the most sincerest form of flattery is imitation.

[0] https://youtu.be/nJPERZDfyWc

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