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DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

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Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#281

Post by webmaven »

dekhn wrote: post #240
webmaven wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How likely is it that the results will still be interesting in 9 years?

Dunno. For all I know, DeepMind will publish a paper titled "Evidence of Emergent General Intelligence in Deep and Wide Perceptron Hypertoroidal Neural Message Passing Networks of Tensor Processors Trained over the Youtube Corpus" and get all the credit. :)

Which brings up a related tangent. How is it Deepmind has a veto over what you publish? I understand keeping proprietary knowledge and implementation details secret (though the industry trend is in the other direction), but forbidding publication of your research seems excessive.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#282

Post by gocartStatue »

temp13890130 wrote: post #263
kromem wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, AGI seems to be the sole deus ex machina that can avert the inevitable tragedy we're on track for as a result of existing human misalignment. "Oh no, robots are going to try to kill us all" has to get in line behind "oh no, tyrants for life who are literally losing their minds are trying to measure dicks with nukes" and "oh no, oil companies are burning excess oil to mine Bitcoin as we approach climate c…

> We're already in a Greek tragedy. The machines really can't make it much worse, but could certainly make it much much better. Except that, when true AGI arrives, we're all obsolete and the only things that will have any value are certain nonrenewable resources. No one has described a good solution for the economic nightmare that will ensue.

I always wonder how insanely complex, universal, abstract-thinking AND physically strong & agile biorobots, running on basically sugar and atp would be seen as „worthless” by a runaway higher intelligence.

Did I mention they self-replicate and self-service?

Surely, seven billion of such agents would be discarded and put to waste.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#283

Post by brador »

ben_w wrote: post #220
brador wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can’t have goals since the universe is logically meaningless. Our desire for purpose is a delusion.

Goals in the context of AI aren’t the type of thing you’re arguing against here. AI can absolutely have goals — sometimes in multiple senses at the same time, if they’re e.g. soccer AIs. Other times it might be a goal of “predict the next token” or “maximise score in Atari game”, but it’s still a goal, even without philosophical baggage about e.g. the purpose of life. Those goals aren’t necessarily best achieved by h…

AI does not have goals, it has Tasks. Tasks assigned by an operator. An AI cannot generate goals, since they are logically meaningless.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#284

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

tomatowurst wrote: post #74
Ninjinka wrote: post #11

This seems huge, am I overestimating the significance?

Basically the achievement here is that they have produced a generic AI capable of engaging in different activities, and from here if we extrapolate, it could lead to even more refinement, wider range of activities with even more dimensions of complexity. It's reverting to replace somebody sitting in front of a screen, not just artists and coders but literally anything you can do on a screen which also means manipulat…

The problem is, in the world you're describing, it's also plausible for military leaders to automatically exterminate entire categories of people through a web app.

If it's truly possible to build a gun that autonomously shoots Sopranos episodes but also people, I don't see how we survive that. We can barely keep the nukes in the silos as it is.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#285

Post by DavidSJ »

croddin wrote: post #198
viksit wrote: 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 think of it as System 1 vs System 2 thinking from 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman.[1] Deep learning is very good at things we can do without thinking, and is in some cases superhuman in those tasks because it can train on so much more data. If you look at the list of tasks in System 1 vs System 2, SOTA Deep learning can do almost everything in System 1 at human or superhuman levels, but not as many in…

System 2 could be close behind System 2 by building on System 1 but it isn't clear how long that will take.

This is happening since a few months ago:

Wei et al (2022). Chain of Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#286

Post by davidmanheim »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #279
kromem wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, AGI seems to be the sole deus ex machina that can avert the inevitable tragedy we're on track for as a result of existing human misalignment. "Oh no, robots are going to try to kill us all" has to get in line behind "oh no, tyrants for life who are literally losing their minds are trying to measure dicks with nukes" and "oh no, oil companies are burning excess oil to mine Bitcoin as we approach climate c…

No matter how smart an AI gets it does not have the "proliferation instinct" that would make it want to enslave humans. It does not have the concept of "specism" of it having more value than anybody else. AI does not see the value in being alive. It is like some humans sadly commit suicide. But a machine wouldn't care. It will be "happy" to do its thing until somebody cuts off the power. And it does not even care whe…

You sure know a lot about what a set of poorly defined future technologies will and will not do!

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#287

Post by alm1 »

JohnPrine wrote: post #169
gurkendoktor wrote: post #111

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

Mechanized factories failed to kill humanity two hundreds ago and the Luddite movement against them seems comical today. What makes you think extinction is most likely?

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#288

Post by ben_w »

hervature wrote: post #259
ben_w wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goals in the context of AI aren’t the type of thing you’re arguing against here. AI can absolutely have goals — sometimes in multiple senses at the same time, if they’re e.g. soccer AIs. Other times it might be a goal of “predict the next token” or “maximise score in Atari game”, but it’s still a goal, even without philosophical baggage about e.g. the purpose of life. Those goals aren’t necessarily best achieved by h…

What the parent is saying is that an AI (that is, AGI as that is what we are discussing) gets to pick its goals. For some reason, humans have a fear of AI killing all humans in order to to achieve some goal. The obvious solution is thus to achieve some goal with some human constraint. For example, maximize paperclips per human. That actually probably speeds up human civilization across the universe. No, what people a…

> The obvious solution is thus to achieve some goal with some human constraint.

One of the hard parts is specifying that goal. This is the “outer alignment problem”.

Paperclips per human? That’s maximised by one paperclip divided by zero humans, or by a universe of paperclips divided by one human if NaN doesn’t give a better reward in the physical implementation.

If you went for “satisfied paperclip customers”? Then wirehead or drug the customers.

Then you have the inner alignment problem. There are instrumental goals, things which are useful sub-steps to larger goals. AI can and do choose those, as do us humans, e.g. “I want to have a family” which has a subgoal of “I want a partner” which in turn has a subgoal of “good personal hygiene”. An AI might be given the goal of “safely maximise paperclips” and determine the best way of doing that is to have a subgoal of “build a factory” and a sub-sub-goal of “get ten million dollars funding”.

But it’s worse than that, because even if we give a good goal to the system as a whole, as the system is creating inner sub-goals, there’s a step where the AI itself can badly specify the sub-goal and optimise for the wrong thing(s) by the standards of the real goal that we gave the system as a whole. For example, evolution gave us the desire to have sex as a way to implement its “goal” (please excuse the anthropomorphisation) of maximising reproductive fitness, and we invented contraceptives. An AI might decide the best way to get the money to build the factory is to start a pyramid scheme.

Also, it turns out that power is a subgoal of a lot of other real goals, so it’s reasonable to expect a competent optimiser to seek power regardless of what end goal we give it.

Robert Miles explains it better than I can: https://youtu.be/bJLcIBixGj8

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#289

Post by meekmind »

akomtu wrote: post #275
meekmind wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely insufficient but here is a shot at a materialist answer. Consciousness is defined as an entity that has an ethical framework that is subordinated to it's own physical existence, maintaining that existence, and interfacing with other conscious entities as if they also have an ethical framework with similar parameters who are fundamentally no more or less important/capable than itself. Contrast with non-consciou…

To my knowledge, metaphysics defines consciousness as simple perception. A stone has consciousnesses as it can react to sound waves passing thru it. We have audial, visual and other consciousnesses - our abilities to perceive reality. We can perceive thoughts in limited capacity - that's the mental consciousness. Intelligence is a much more complex phenonenon - it's ability to establish relationships between things,…

I do appreciate the consistency of that perspective, it is interesting. I must respectfully disagree with those definitions.

I think that consciousness ought to imply some element of choice. A rock cannot choose to get out of the way, nor in any way deliberately respond to sound waves. It is inert.

To me, the ability to establish relationships between things is a consequence ipso facto of the ethical framework required by the physical form. In other words, what we see is limited by evolutionary, genetic, and knowledge constraints. I'm defining intelligence as (g) factor in psychometrics [0] or roughly the upper-bound capacity of an entity to apply it's ethical framework consistently, and/or with any degree of accuracy, and/or across multiple potentially disparate domains of knowledge.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#290

Post by kingcharles »

joe_the_user wrote: post #247
sinenomine wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human extinction due to would be "hard takeoff" of an AGI should be understood as a thought experiment, conceived in a specific age when the current connectionist paradigm wasn't yet mainstream. The AI crisis was expected to come from some kind of "hard universal algorithmic artificial intelligence", for example AIXItl undergoing a very specific process of runaway self-optimization. Current-generation systems aka…

We should think more about the Human alignment problem. Absolutely this The possibility of a thing being intentionally engineered by some humans to do things considered highly malevolent by other humans seems extremely likely and has actually been common through history. The possibility of a thing just randomly acquiring an intention humans don't like and then doing things humans don't like is pretty hypothetical and…

It doesn't need to be intentionally engineered. Humans are very creative and can find ways around systemic limits. There is that old adage which says something like "a hacker only needs to be right once, while the defenders have to be right 100% of the time."
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