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AI

blog.samaltman.com

121–130 of 317 posts

Re: AI

#121
post #39
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what set off the down votes but we can teach a computer to recognize characters for application in OCR. We also learned those characters from being taught in school and reading bad handwriting. We teach computers the same way. How are they supposed to magically recognize them especially since they didn't invent whatever language it is? Note that I'm referring to artificial general intelligence[0]. 0. http://…

This was back in the 1990s, but I worked in what was basically a data entry company, where the processing was a mixture of scanned forms (Scantron style) and human key entry. The project I was on was image scanning the forms for other purposes, so we had a neural net handwriting recognition system that we were comparing to human key entry at a large scale - millions of documents. What we found was that human key entr…

iirc, yann-lecun's conolutional neural nets already ouperform humans at mnist digit recognition, most us mail is auto sorted by those machines...

Re: AI

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is a problem that specifically requires intelligence to solve? How do we know we're measuring intelligence, and not the programs aptitude for the particular problem?

Why does it matter? If if solves the problem then it's as good as if it was fully intelligent. Who cares what goes on inside the black box? If you worried about it overfitting to a specific problem, give it lots of problems and weight the solutions by complexity. So you heavily favor simple algorithms that can learn to solve a large class of problems, over ones that are more adapted for those specific problems.

It definitely could still be useful. However it may not posses "general intelligence," and therefore may not be applicable to as many scenarios as human like intelligence is.

Re: AI

#123
post #118

> I am quite confident that we’ll be able to make computer programs that perform specific complex tasks very well. But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? Are we so sure that "we" really are in charge of what we want to do? I believe a lot of our desires and ambitions are hardcoded into our brains and we just project them onto present goals, like getting a promotion or learning how to…

This is why the desire for Strong AI boggles my mind. In order for a computer to operate at a "human" level, it would need to make decisions based on things like ambition and fear and greed. It will also have to constantly make mistakes, just like we do.

If it didn't have character flaws, it wouldn't be operating at a "human" level. But if it does have these character flaws, how useful would it really be compared to a real human? Is the quest for Strong AI just a Frankensteinian desire to create artificial life?

I'm curious if there are any good papers looking into stuff like this.

Re: AI

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Just pick your favorite AI problem and see how well it does on that. Pick a bunch of AI problems and see how well it does on all of them. Weight the algorithms by simplicity if you are worried about it over-fitting.

With this hypothetical infinite speed computer you will get solutions that are perfect matches for your test cases but essentially random for all other inputs.

I really don't see what's so controversial about this. The universe can, as far as our understanding of physics dictates, be simulated in finite computational time. This experiment dictates infinite computational time.

Evolution is a purely physical process. Make up a series of tests more or equally complex to those evolution present, and you'll end up with intelligence - unless there happens to be something very, very special about human intelligence as opposed to other forms of intelligence. Humans are currently a local maximum in the space of intelligences which have been explored by evolution.

Re: AI

#125
post #42
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, "There are certainly some reasons to be optimistic. Andrew Ng, who worked or works on Google’s AI, has said that he believes learning comes from a single algorithm - the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things." is what w…

Fair enough, but can we imagine a better algorithm?

I think we need a better machine first. The current model of one or a handful of CPU cores with very tiny caches talking to memory over a narrow, high latency bus doesn't seem very efficient for building and querying massive (multi-petabyte), highly associative (thousands of associations) data structures.

Re: AI

#126
post #86

If anyone is interested in AI, I highly recommend joining Less Wrong, a community started by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started the community to convince people to focus on the "friendly AI problem". [1] I actually recommend that everyone read LW, but especially if you're interested in AI. [1] In a nutshell, the friendly AI problem is: assume we create an AI. It may rapidly become more intelligent than us, i…

Any suggestions for getting started in the LW community? Its barrier to entry means I can't seem to vote on anything, etc. It's quite intimidating really.

The sequences are well worth a read. They're kind of like an overview of modern philosophy in very plain language, very little jargon. Then, just participate in the comments and discussion forum as you feel. It takes very little time to collect enough karma to do whatever.

Re: AI

#127

I'm just going to stick this out there because I'm a futurist and it's my role to share with others what I'm thinking about. What I share may be flat out wrong, scary, half assed, or appear to be crazy. So be it. We've advanced a lot in the last 100 years. We're starting to see a bigger picture forming with the advent of compute and networking capabilities. Combining simple elements of these basics give rise to surpr…

I find Terrence McKenna's argument that consciousness is demonstrably entangled in the material world at a quantum mechanical, atomic level convincing. To summarize, it is known that two similar chemical compounds, differing only in the placement of a single atom on the carbon ring structure of a molecule, when administered in doses at the order of micrograms will either be psychoactive and result in a massive disruption to the human subject's baseline consciousness or be inert beyond our ability to measure an effect.

Re: AI

#128
post #10

Critically speaking, this article doesn't add anything. I don't know why I read it. Can anyone explain why they upvoted?

I've felt this way about every Sam Altman piece that's been posted in the past week (and possibly every one I've ever read). And I feel guilty because PG speaks so highly of him. And then I feel guilty for feeling guilty.

Re: AI

#129

From a pure layman's perspective: if you believe in evolution, then what separates us from a reptile (as mentioned in the post) is almost certainly something we can figure out and replicate. There is nothing "special" there. So if you believe computers today already have the "intelligence" of a reptile, or a toddler (i.e., ability to play pong), or something along those lines, it's only a matter of time before a comp…

No I don't think "belief" in evolution implies that at all. That's a big jump.

Why is that a big jump? I'm not saying it will be easy or quick. It does imply that getting from a reptile-level intelligence to a human-level intelligence was a natural process and something that can be reverse engineered.

Re: AI

#130
post #10

Critically speaking, this article doesn't add anything. I don't know why I read it. Can anyone explain why they upvoted?

Because the title on HN is "AI", which makes it a small click target [1], prone to accidental upvotes. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law

I just did that. iPad here, click target is below 44px.
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