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Introducing OpenAI

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Re: Introducing OpenAI

#111

Post by miguelrochefort »

vox_mollis wrote: post #85
cdnsteve wrote: post #81

AI is a pretty huge field, what area are they going to focus on specifically?

Given Musk's public comments about existential threats, I assume the focus will be on friendly AI theory and implementations, akin to what MIRI does.

Friendly AI? That's no AI!

I don't understand how Yudkowsky came up with such a ridiculous idea. That's simply not a constraint you can apply to true AI.

Even if friendly AI was possible, it wouldn't make sense to have it, nor would any form of regulation enforce it.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#112

Post by samstave »

dang wrote: post #73
samstave wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic: But I have always wondered why we have a threashold to hit before we can downvote comments - but why can we never downvote posts? Or is the karma threshold just really high to have that function?

By posts do you mean stories, i.e. the kind of submission that appears on the front page? If so, HN doesn't have downvotes for those. The flagging mechanism is arguably something similar though.

Yes, I did... thanks!

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#113

Post by scott_karana »

jonknee wrote: post #58
hacker_9 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. Humans can adapt to many environments by pulling in training from other related environments and applying it to the new data. Some call this generalised learning, but I think it points more to our ability to shape everything we know to any given problem - something 'beyond' just generalising.

You were born with millions of years of training and still couldn't care for yourself without many years of personalized training.

Instinct isn't "training", really. Don't conflate neural networks and genetic algorithms in people or AI... :)

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#115

Post by argonaut »

bdcs wrote: post #101
argonaut wrote: post #79

I find it a bit disappointing that despite originally stating that YC Research would target underfunded/underserved areas of research, they've decided to fund and dive into one of the most-hyped, well-funded areas of research: deep learning, an area of research where companies are hiring like crazy and even universities are hiring faculty like crazy. I'm reasonably sure all the research scientists had multiple job of…

I agree with you that AI is a well-funded area of research, although if you take the view that traditional forms of research, eg private or academic, come with crippling problems -- short-term horizons, corrupting influence of profits, publish or parish, time wasted in meetings/grant-writing -- then you can see the potential of having a more long-term, focused, and centralized space for inventing AI. >> YC Research d…

AI research is a very deserving field. And the market/research community recognizes that! So it's not an area where there is a lack of job opportunities for researchers to do research and publish papers. That sandbox would be a faculty position. I would be more sympathetic to that idea if it weren't the case that universities are hiring machine learning faculty like crazy. There are many areas where the market/research interest is low, but the area is very deserving and of great benefit to society (clean energy?)

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#117

Post by ryanx435 »

minimaxir wrote: post #60
Numberwang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://hermiene.net/short-stories/i_have_no_mouth.html

While a great short story and should be required reading for sci-fi fans, there's a big difference between the singularity and omnipotence.

no there isn't, if you include time.

lets say that a general AI is developed and brought online (the singularity occurs). Lets also say that it has access to the internet so it can communicate and learn, and lets also say that it has unlimited amount of storage space (every harddrive in every device connected to the internet).

at first the AI will know nothing, it will be like a toddler. than, as it continues to learn and remember, it will become like a teenager, than like an adult in terms of how much it knows. Than it will become like an expert.

but it doesn't stop there! a general AI wouldn't be limited by 1) storage capacity (unlike human's and their tiny brains that can't remember where they put their keys) or 2) death (forgetting everything that it knows).

so effectively a general AI, given enough time, would be omnipotent because it would continually learn new things forever.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#118

Post by cobaltblue »

scott_karana wrote: post #110
sethbannon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does nitrogen research have the capability of solving all the world's problems?

How does AI solve all problems, either? I can think of plenty of problems with our bodies that AI might never fix. Cost-benefit and all.

Intelligence has solved all of our solved problem thus far, it's reasonable to assume that if a problem can be solved with intelligence, maybe it's a matter of doing the intellectual work to understand existence better or engineer something or in your case making efforts into making the cost-benefit tradeoff acceptable, then AI can solve all those problems. Since one of those problems is making smarter than human AI, AI can solve that one too, and thus be even better equipped to solve the others.

The problem of entropy is one I think AI might not be able to solve, but that's only using my laymen knowledge of human understandings of the universe.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#119

Post by argonaut »

mikepalmer wrote: post #99
karmacondon wrote: post #88

This is a key takeaway: "...we are going to ask YC companies to make whatever data they are comfortable making available to OpenAI. And Elon is also going to figure out what data Tesla and Space X can share." Money is great, openness is great, big name researchers are also a huge plus. But data data data, that could turn out to be very valuable. I don't know if Sam meant that YC companies would be encouraged to contr…

'The "evil" AI and safety stuff is just science fiction, but whatever.' umm... you can offer proof that we have nothing to worry about? Does the proof go like: Just as all people are inherently good, therefore all AIs will be inherently good? Or is it more like: since we can now safely contain all evil people, therefore we will be able to safely contain evil AIs? Sounds to me like there is some risk, no?

The burden of proof is on the people warning us of the impending AI apocalypse. The fact is we are nowhere close to AI. We don't understand how the brain works. A review of the ML literature will also show we barely understand how neural nets work.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#120

Post by johann28 »

_delirium wrote: post #94
johann28 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily the answer to AI, but it works remarkably well. Is it Skynet or the Terminator yet? No. There are different ideas for what constitutes AI. Expert systems and knowledge-based reasoners? Pattern-recognizer black boxes? Chatbots? AGI? Over the years the concept of AI shifted. Until recent years "AI" was mostly used for things like A* search, creating algorithms that play turn-based table games for e…

Quibble with the timeline: AI as a field has included a big chunk devoted to machine learning research pretty much continuously, especially since the '80s or so. The specific methods in vogue do change: decision trees, neural networks, SVMs, boosting, association-rule learning, genetic algorithms, Bayesian networks, etc. go through periods of waxing and waning in popularity. A few years ago boosting/bagging and other…

ML was there but at least when I started learning about these things around 8 years ago, the label "AI" was mostly used for symbolic stuff. Courses named "AI" taught from the Russell-Norvig book. Things like resolution, planning in the block world, heuristic graph search, min-max trees, etc. ML existed but it wasn't really under the label of "AI" as far as I can remember. I think it's something of a marketing term that big companies like Google and Facebook reintroduced due to the scifi connotations. But that's just my guess.
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