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DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

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Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#121

Post by rollcat »

tsimionescu wrote: post #116
harry8 wrote: post #18

Some Bozo who has heard all this many times before is suspicious of claims from places like Deep Mind who have a financial incentive to make them (keep funding) where there aren't working machines to back that claim up. Some Bozo has no credentials, no reputation, no track record of publications and barely supports the claim they're making with anything much. Some Bozo has no financial incentives or otherwise to opin…

The fact that RL in the extremely vague sense used in the article is enough for AGI is uncontroversial for anyone who believes intelligence and consciousness are physical processes. However, this "result" is trivial. It is obviously equivalent to the claim that intelligence arose naturally in the biological world without influence from God.

> It is obviously equivalent to the claim that intelligence arose naturally in the biological world without influence from God.

Where did God's intelligence come from?

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#122

Post by arketyp »

admk wrote: post #114
webmaven wrote: post #3

Saying RL is sufficient to (eventually) achieve AGI is a bit misleading. One might similarly state that biological evolution is sufficient to (eventually) achieve biological general intelligence. Both statements are probably true, but the parenthetical (eventually) is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.

That is if you believe biological general intelligence is the end goal of evolution, which I believe is highly unlikely. Intelligence is simply a special side-product of evolution, there is nothing general about general intelligence. Many organisms can thrive without it. There is also a non-negligible chance that all organisms would die out before reaching intelligence. We are fortunate to live in a world that produc…

That's a bit besides OP's point though, which is about vacuous claims. Humans are the existence proof that there is some sequence of circumstances where evolution reaches GI. There's an analogous sequence of circumstances in the RL case, which happens to be the hard part.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#123

Post by cynusx »

rich_sasha wrote: post #110

Basically, any problem with a solution fits into RL: reward of 1 if you are AGI and 0 otherwise. Go learn. This setting on its own is meaningless! The “how” of the RL agent is not even 99% of the problem, it is all of it. Given our understanding of both DL and neuroscience, it is not even clear to me that we can say with confidence that Neural Networks are a sufficiently expressive architecture to cover an AGI. The h…

Thank you for stating what should be obvious.

I think there are two currently unsolved problems

1/ We have no idea what the reward function looks like that leads to AGI

2/ Deep networks are artificially constricted for computational efficiency and always optimized to solve the problem at hand;

Any solution that delivers AGI should rely imo on:

1/ reinforcement learning

2/ Happen with an unstructured reservoir of randomly connected neurons

There was a research trend towards reservoir computing and recurrent neural networks but this was mostly abandoned because progress in deep learning was amazing.

These techniques are akin to a 2D-plane in a 3D object, it's heavily simplified and circular references are prohibited.

I have some good ideas on what the reward function should look like in a reservoir setting and happy to discuss them with any active independent researcher in the field.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#125

Post by im3w1l »

So regarding objective function, one idea I just had is this: Teach them warfare.

To quote a cliche: "we live in a society". As humans we are embedded in a social environment which has a few important features: We cooperate, we compete and we die. These three pillars are the basis of our culture (a concept we should apply to AI btw). Because of competition we are forced to learn everything there is to learn (general intelligence), to get a leg up. Because of cooperation and death we need to continuously transmit and share knowledge with our friends and the next generations. Ever changing alliances means we need to get good at both deception and detecting it.

For this reason I think warfare is ideal for reaching general AI.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#126

Post by tsimionescu »

rollcat wrote: post #121
tsimionescu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that RL in the extremely vague sense used in the article is enough for AGI is uncontroversial for anyone who believes intelligence and consciousness are physical processes. However, this "result" is trivial. It is obviously equivalent to the claim that intelligence arose naturally in the biological world without influence from God.

> It is obviously equivalent to the claim that intelligence arose naturally in the biological world without influence from God. Where did God's intelligence come from?

Well, I don't believe God exists, so I can't really answer the question.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#127

Post by [deleted] »

tinco wrote: post #80
0xB31B1B wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protein folding is a well modeled math problem. The alpha fold solution is extremely good at pruning (aka guessing) folding chain structure possibilities. I am Impressed and this is a difficult problem but this is extremely different from AGI as this is a well scoped easily modelable problem that is basically a chain of 26 inputs types of links of arbitrary length. I am not trying to take away that the protein foldin…

It is entirely not necessary for an AGI to be able to drive a car. Frankly, after seeing AlphaZero and AlphaFold I'm surprised they didn't declare AGI right there and then. People assume that when AGI happens, computers can suddenly outsmart humans in every way and solve every problem imaginable. The reality is just that it could in theory given enough time and resources. It is like quantum computing. In theory it ca…

[deleted]

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#128

Post by candiodari »

rich_sasha wrote: post #110

Basically, any problem with a solution fits into RL: reward of 1 if you are AGI and 0 otherwise. Go learn. This setting on its own is meaningless! The “how” of the RL agent is not even 99% of the problem, it is all of it. Given our understanding of both DL and neuroscience, it is not even clear to me that we can say with confidence that Neural Networks are a sufficiently expressive architecture to cover an AGI. The h…

I assure you 99% of the problem of any RL project is the simulator. Generally you can't let an RL algorithm control anything real from the start, so you have to implement a reasonably reliable simulator for whatever you want done.

This is the big challenge in practice.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#129

Post by exporectomy »

neltnerb wrote: post #4
webmaven wrote: post #3

Saying RL is sufficient to (eventually) achieve AGI is a bit misleading. One might similarly state that biological evolution is sufficient to (eventually) achieve biological general intelligence. Both statements are probably true, but the parenthetical (eventually) is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.

Yes, it's easy to be convinced on either side, the arguments write themselves. Yes, eventually a learning system might learn enough to be indistinguishable from intelligence. Or this might be entirely the wrong path and detracting from genuine new innovations in how we think about AI. We won't be able to tell whether it's AGI or just good enough at trained tasks to trick us.

It can prove its intelligence by making testable predictions of the future better than us. As for whether it's "real" AGI or just acts like it, doesn't really matter. I think the Chinese room problem has been agreed on as not a problem, hasn't it?

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#130

Post by seaorg »

The layman and the AI expert have both written off the possibility of creating AGI for the entirety of this latest AI spring. In the past decade I have basically never encountered anyone who thought that AGI was going to happen in our lifetimes or even anyone who believed that it would be a problem if it did.

One time I discussed AGI with a good friend. And I gently pressured him to play through the scenario of the advent of AGI. And he made a guilty confession to me. I could tell he was embarrassed to share his opinion. He said “can’t we just unplug it?” This is a microcosm of the entire issue. It’s something a child might say. For global warming, can’t we just turn on the air conditioning? No, we can’t just unplug it.

Here is how you can understand what is happening. An AI model is just a program. A program that is written by another program.

Consider a list of programs that contains every possible program. It is infinite. Make it finite by limiting the size of the programs based on some practical consideration. It’s still a very long list.

What is in this list? Pong. StyleGAN. AGI? Almost certainly. How small might AGI be? It probably appears more than once on the list — how many are there? But let’s ask the real question here and boil this down. How many items on the list are something we will regret having discovered? A great, great many.

Every day, people are exploring the list. They are using primitive methods to sift through all these programs and find the ones that have interesting behavior. The process of program discovery is automated with things called “training algorithms.” As our computers get faster and capital allocation grows larger we mine this list more and more quickly. The problem is that we keep finding things that surprise us. And that is the core and substance of the entire issue. We have demonstrated to ourselves over and over again that our own intuition about the contents of this list is completely wrong. Despite the mind-boggling level of mental gymnastics performed in the wake of GTP-3, enough to constitute a three ring circus, the fact of the matter is that GTP-3 and soon to be 4 is not supposed to exist according to every single AI expert. Compute is only getting cheaper and capital is only getting bigger and the list is only getting shorter and it’s not going to stop surprising everyone including the “experts.” Just because we don’t know how to make something we will truly regret doesn’t mean we aren’t capable of creating it.

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