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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

#101

Post by arethuza »

Tloewald wrote: post #47
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.

At best, a copy of you living in VR gets to live until the sun explodes. Which at least is better defined than "heaven".

Or a copy of you living in VR gets to be tortured endlessly until the sun explodes. Which at least is better defined than "hell".

[Thanks to Messrs Banks, Stross and Vinge for that particular cheery thought].

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

#102

Post by eli_gottlieb »

31reasons wrote: post #25
ams6110 wrote: post #20

The missing piece for Google to become Skynet?

Robotics companies and now AI companies, Google seems to have much higher ambitions than the internet. May be they watching too many sci-fi movies in their 20% time. :)

What do you mean, maybe? The evidence is in: Google's founders have gone full hard-scifi cyber-god take-over-the-world on us.

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

#103

Post by topynate »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #93
nawitus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a goal, I'm sure they're thinking about it. Unfriendly AI is part of pop-culture, after all. As a hard mathematical problem, not so much (I was following Ben Goertzel's OpenCog project for quite some time, and he seems to have this view, even though he's affiliated to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has Friendliness as its principal concern). The trouble is that if Friendliness is the slightest bit harder to implement than just doing the most naive thing, then this approach will fail.

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

#104

Post by nl »

zvanness wrote: post #12
mjn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, quite a few ML people can vouch for someone at the company (I know someone there second-hand myself), but the details of what precisely they're doing have been kept fairly well under wraps. The broad parameters are "something to do with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)", which is a field that tries to straddle the fine line between contemporary AI and sci-fi AI, without erring too far in th…

I'm not so sure their technology is as futuristic as everyone thinks it is. If I had to take an educated guess, I would say it's some powerful AI that makes their knowledge graph smarter. Currently Google's Knowledge Graph uses more structured data sets and depends on a mechanism like this: http://www.zachvanness.com/nanobird_relevancy_engine.pdf But the real challenge is to make the knowledge graph update in real ti…

Deep learning is pretty impressive as a supplement to knowledge engineering approaches.

Google's Deep Learning team were the people who developed the alogithm that discovered cats on YouTube (without training). Presumably this team had something that impressed them.

The weakness to knowledge engineering approaches is that they tend to be fragile - they break badly with small holes in recorded knowledge. The IBM Watson team has a great video that showed how the different definitions of "fluid" and "liquid" meant a correct answer would have been missed if evidence collected in the answer verification phase of the DeepQA pipeline (no relation to Deep Learning) hadn't overridden it.

Edit: Your(?) paper on your (?) relevancy engine is interesting. It seems like an application of skip-grams (which, ironically enough are heavily used by the DeepQA answer verification phase mentioned above).

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

#105

Post by andyjohnson0 »

mdeg wrote: post #66

So, Google's list so far: - Some top ML talent: Geoffrey Hinton, Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig, Jeff Dean, Andrew Ng. - One of D-Wave's quantum computers to establish their 'Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab'. - Creepy robot maker Boston Dynamics. - A stack of other robotics companies: Schaft.inc, Industrial Perception, Redwood Robotics, Meka Robotics, Molomni, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss. - DeepMind, obviously. Am I mis…

Ray Kurzweil

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

#107

Post by andyjohnson0 »

jackgavigan wrote: post #98
kordless wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Probably. Deepmind is a UK company based in London.

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

#108

Post by sanxiyn »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #99
sanxiyn wrote: post #81

FYI, Shane Legg's theses was "Machine Super Intelligence". http://www.vetta.org/publications/

I'm really wondering where you have to go to grad-school for someone to approve a thesis that blatantly speculative.

University of Lugano, apparently.

I also quote, from the preface, "This research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grants 2100-67712.0 and 200020-107616. Many funding agencies are not willing to support such blue-sky research. Their backing has been greatly appreciated."

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

#109

Post by kamaal »

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.

I don't think a public company answerable to investors and other stake holders will ever work toward a SciFi futuristic concept.

But AI definitely has a lot of benefits. Start from self driving cars to automation in manufacturing industries. And that is just the very beginning. Google's line of businesses can benefit immensely from such work. There is endless money to be made. And it is better you grab it when it is a low hanging fruit.

Most of Kurzweil has to say about robotics, nanotechnology and AI. Has a direct benefit to humanity in the immediate future. Humans can have longer lives, the world can have a smaller population, many diseases we know can be eradicated. Problems like hunger, pollution, disease etc can be solved. The list is endless. Why wouldn't any one want a share of that business?

And yes the whole AI taking over the world and making us extinct thing- It won't happen anything like just turning on a switch. I believe even a run away super intelligent will still need biological life forms for their own very survival.

Like some one mentioned in this thread, copies of your self will continue live in the cloud and such copies will provide a great wealth of insight for the machines themselves to survive.

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

#110

Post by lispsil »

tansey wrote: post #34
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…

I actually read this paper a couple weeks ago as part of a deep learning reading group that I co-run. While several of these authors are household names in the RL community, this paper was not actually that impressive to me. The only real "deep" learning here is that they used a GPU library and stochastic gradient descent to perform Q-learning updates on a network with 3 large hidden layers. It was an interesting app…

I suspect google wants to port this to their D-wav, probably sell API access to it. Rent an AI
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