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Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

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Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#91

Post by psykotic »

yen223 wrote: post #88
csense wrote: post #45

The DeepMind website [1] links to cofounder Demis Hassabis' biography on Wikipedia [2]. Read it. This guy is a world-class hacker! [1] http://deepmind.com [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

He did the AI for Black & White? My respect for him has just increased by an order of magnitude. Black & White's creature AI was nothing short of amazing.

My second-hand impression is that Richard Evans is responsible for most of what actually shipped in the game's creature AI. As the Wikipedia article says, Demis only briefly held the title of Lead AI Programmer on the project.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#92

Post by [deleted] »

karpathy wrote: post #16

I remember that they had an impressive demo at the NIPS Deep Learning Workshop in December (probably a highlight for me and a few people I talked to afterwards) of a reinforcement learning agent playing Atari 2600 Games where the input consisted of an image that was fed through a Convolutional Neural Network. There is a paper on Arxiv that describes the approach ("Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning"[0]) b…

[deleted]

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#93

Post by eli_gottlieb »

nawitus wrote: post #74
psbp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand the objective of those like Kurzweil. What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? It would be complete ego death.

The idea is to build a "friendly AI" which doesn't dissolve us.

This is a goal of which Google has made no acknowledgment whatsoever.

So let's hope they haven't gone quite as nuts as they seem to have gone.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#94

Post by eli_gottlieb »

f_salmon wrote: post #84
KVFinn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? It would be complete ego death. A lot of the singularity people think that superhuman AI in inevitable whether they work on it or not, but if the first AI isn't a friendly one (as opposed to a paperclip-optimizer that happily turns the planet in paperclips) then you don't get a second chance.

Also called "a self-fulfilling prophecy"; you make something happen by the simple statement "it will happen". It's also a smart move for your career: You can create your own job and attract lots of funding for your research, or sell your business for a lot.

It sounds like a piece of fearmongering nastiness until you think of it in terms of mathematics rather than psychology. A so-called "artificial intelligence" is just an extremely sophisticated active, online learning agent designed to maximize some utility function or (equivalently) minimize some loss function. There's no term in a loss function for "kill all humans", but neither is there one for "do what humans want", or better yet, "do what humans would want if they weren't such complete morons half the time".

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#95

Post by Ygg2 »

psbp wrote: post #44
fchollet wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that Google has now gone full Singularist. They jumped the shark when they hired Kurzweil.

I don't really understand the objective of those like Kurzweil. What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? It would be complete ego death.

Basically this: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1968

Keep in mind that creating more advance intelligence than us, while aphoristically wouldn't be difficult, is a REALLY HARD task. I doubt anything will happen within our lifetimes unless it is by some major fluke.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#96

Post by swalsh »

I recently watched the interview with Eric Schmidt on CNBC. In it they asked about the singularity (as good as any main stream finance oriented television show can). The key quote I took away from it (and sorry this is from memory) was "We've had the algorithms for AI for years, but the big difference between now, and in the past is we finally have the computer power for it".

My own speculation. One of the key concepts to come out of the experience of translation is "A billion is more than a million". When they thought they processed enough data, it still wasn't enough. They may be scaling that concept even larger. At the same time, quantum computers SHOULD be getting to the point where they pass classical computers, and its generally known that Google has had access to them.

If Roses law is true, I'd speculate that Google is ramping up to take advantage.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#97

Post by hoggle »

enscr wrote: post #56
thrush wrote: post #54

Did anybody else read this as "Goodbye Articial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M"? Google to Buy Google Buy GooBuy ~ Goodbye

Upvoted but disagree on behalf of Youtube, Android, Keyhole, etc. Some exist independently, others are absorbed.

To be fair, Youtube could have been so much more. For example they recently removed the video response feature while claiming the click-through rate was abysmal - it probably was because the focus of Youtube is more like "Newtube". TV now means on demand and broadcast via internet/web, simple and boring as that.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#98

Post by jackgavigan »

kordless wrote: post #50
outside1234 wrote: post #19

Is Google drunk? Thats $4B in basically two weeks on unproven companies.

They have an assload of cash on hand and the singularity is coming at us like a freight train. I'd think they were drunk if they weren't snatching up everything relevant in sight.

> They have an assload of cash on hand...

I wonder if they managed to pay for DeepMind out of funds that are "stuck" offshore (i.e. earnings from outside the US that can't be repatriated without incurring a big tax bill).

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#100

Post by irollboozers »

kawera wrote: post #29
PhearTheCeal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the article is correct, they bought the team.

Or some patents.

50 people should cost ~$50 million, if it's a very strict talent acquisition, maybe $200 if they're really good. I think as well that there is some hard IP involved, or that they were close enough to a breakthrough for there to be hard IP.
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