Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

deepmind.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 345 posts

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#131

Post by jimbokun »

ReadEvalPost wrote: post #38
axg11 wrote: post #22

Slowly but surely we're moving towards general AI. There is a marked split across general society and even ML/AI specialists between those who think that we can achieve AGI using current methods and those who dismiss the possibility. This has always been the case, but what is remarkable about today's environment is that researchers keep making progress contrary to the doubter's predictions. Each time this happens, th…

Certainly we can say our ML models are becoming more general in the sense of being able to cross-correlate between multiple domains. This is quite a different story than "becoming a general intelligence." Intelligence is a property of a being with will. These models, and machines in general, do not posses will. It is we who define their form, their dataset, their loss function, etc. There is no self-generation that m…

I don’t think will us inherent to the meaning of intelligence, as it’s commonly used.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#132

Post by TOMDM »

So how long until someone trains one of these models to complete tasks by interacting directly with network/unix sockets?

At the moment, it seems like the model needs to be trained with each modality of data in mind at the start, but a generalised "supermodality" that can deliver all the others would allow truly generalised learning if the model were still capable of making sense of the input.

You'd obviously still need to finetune on any new modalities, but you wouldn't need to start from scratch.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#133

Post by VikingCoder »

Jensson wrote: post #116
VikingCoder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you get how much we've moved the goalposts on "intelligence." Once upon a time, it was considered "intelligent" to be able to add. Then "intelligence" was tool use, which we thought only humans could do. Then we swore it took "intelligence" to play Go as well as a beginner human. What set of tasks would you, right now, consider to be demonstrative of "intelligence" if a computer can do them? Then we can l…

> What set of tasks would you, right now, consider to be demonstrative of "intelligence" if a computer can do them? Be able to apply for, get and hold a remote job and get paid for a year without anyone noticing, or something equivalent to that. I said this many years ago and it still hasn't happened. The people who are moving the goalposts aren't the sceptics, it is the optimists who always move the goalposts to exa…

Why must it apply for a job, rather than just DO a job?

But maybe some combination of this [1] and this [2] would do it.

If you want to know about a computer actually DOING a remote job for a year without anyone noticing, I'll conclude with many links [a-i].

[1] : https://thisresumedoesnotexist.com/ (Sorry for the bad certificates.)

[2] : https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktoker-wrote-code-spam-kel...

[a] : An original claim of just that: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/s2igq9/i_automate...

[b] : Coverage of that post: https://www.newsweek.com/no-harm-done-it-employee-goes-viral...

[c] : https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/p3wvdy/i_automate...

[d] : https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jcdad/my_wife_wo...

[e] : https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/277zi...

[f] : https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_...

[g] : https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/vomtn/update_my_...

[h] : https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/ew6gmd/aita_...

[i] : https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/7tjdk...

I mostly share the last few because of all of the "me, too" comments on them.

There are several instances in there where an employer has no idea they are paying a salary, but a computer is doing the vast majority of the actual work.

I feel like this is a "business world Turing test," like, "would an employer pay money for it, thinking it was a human." And I feel like I've provided evidence that has actually occurred.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#134

Post by gurkendoktor »

gcheong wrote: post #112
axg11 wrote: post #22

Slowly but surely we're moving towards general AI. There is a marked split across general society and even ML/AI specialists between those who think that we can achieve AGI using current methods and those who dismiss the possibility. This has always been the case, but what is remarkable about today's environment is that researchers keep making progress contrary to the doubter's predictions. Each time this happens, th…

I don’t know if we could sufficiently prepare ourselves for such a world. It would seem almost as if we have to build it first so it could determine the best way to prepare us.

For one thing, we could try to come up with safety measures that prevent the most basic paperclip maximizer disaster from happening.

At this point I almost wish it was still the military that makes these advances in AI, not private companies. Anyone working on a military project has to have some sense that they're working on something dangerous.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#135

Post by solveit »

davesque wrote: post #109
solveit wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it's hard to find flaws with generated content I do wonder if you were to apply the same level of scrutiny to individual humans, you wouldn't also conclude that most people cannot do creative work.

I was thinking more about things like the weird, blurry, dream-like artifacts that you see in some GAN-generated content. Things that look like work done by someone who was both severely impaired yet somehow still extremely meticulous. Things like that seem characteristically un-human.

Ah I see, I agree that GAN-generated content has inhuman tells. But I don't think that necessarily speaks to the creativeness of the work.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#136

Post by mach1ne »

PaulHoule wrote: post #98
nmca wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really, truly believe this problem is impossible to solve though? Even simple things make strides, eg: https://www.deepmind.com/publications/gophercite-teaching-la...

If you've been involved in efforts to develop advanced technologies you might eventually encounter an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote which is described as a risk in great detail https://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-W-Livingston/dp/0... it's quite a terrible risk because you often think "if only I double or triple the resources I apply to do this I'll get it." Really though you get from 90% there to 91%…

Could you link some of these models? An interesting perspective that asymptote.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#137

Post by jimbokun »

dougabug wrote: post #78
chrisco255 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we prepare for super human intelligence? Do you think that the AI will also develop its own motives ? Or will it just be a tool that we're able to plug into and use for ourselves?

In machine learning, there’s a long term trend towards automating work that used to be done manually. For instance, ML engineers used to spend a lot of time engineering “features” which captured salient aspects of the input data. Nowadays, we generally use Deep Learning to learn effective features. That pushed the problem to designing DNN architectures, which subsequently led to the rise of AutoML and NAS (Network Ar…

And that’s when Asimov’s Laws of Robotics come into play.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#138

Post by Barrin92 »

axg11 wrote: post #22

Slowly but surely we're moving towards general AI. There is a marked split across general society and even ML/AI specialists between those who think that we can achieve AGI using current methods and those who dismiss the possibility. This has always been the case, but what is remarkable about today's environment is that researchers keep making progress contrary to the doubter's predictions. Each time this happens, th…

I don't think many people were making the claims that AI can't solve any scientific problems or can't perform creative work at all. That sounds like a big strawman. Before ML was getting big there were AI systems that created art.

What sceptics have actually been saying is that the first step fallacy still applies. Getting 20% to a goal is no indication at all that you're getting 100% to your goal, or as its often put, you don't get to the moon by climbing up trees. For people who work with gradients and local maxima all day that idea seems weirdly absent when it comes to the research itself. In the same sense I don't have the impression that the goalpost of AGI has been moved up, but that it's been moved down. When Minsky et al. started to work on AI more than half a century ago the goal was nothing less than to put a mind into a machine. Today our fridges are 'AI powered', and when a neural net creates an image or some poetry there's much more agency and intent attributed to it than there actually is.

I think it was Andrew Ng, a very prominent ML researcher himself who pointed out that concerns about AGI make about as much sense as worrying about an overpopulation on Mars. We make models bigger, we fine tune them and they perform better. I don't think many AGI sceptics would be surprised by that. But I don't think there is any indication that they are moving towards human level intellect at some exponential rate. If DALL-E suddenly started to discuss philosophy with me I'd be concerned, it making a better image of a bear if you throw some more parameters at it is what we'd expect.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#139

Post by humpday69 »

sharikous wrote: post #60
axg11 wrote: post #22

Slowly but surely we're moving towards general AI. There is a marked split across general society and even ML/AI specialists between those who think that we can achieve AGI using current methods and those who dismiss the possibility. This has always been the case, but what is remarkable about today's environment is that researchers keep making progress contrary to the doubter's predictions. Each time this happens, th…

And still some properties of humans are innate and you can't "train" on them. So brute force imitation is limited as a method for producing content. An erotic novelist has their human brain and human instincts to guide them in writing their work. An AI learns by examples, or at best on a dataset of works labeled by humans. But it doesn't have a human brain at their disposal to query directly and without interfaces to…

> An erotic novelist has their human brain and human instincts to guide them in writing their work.

An ML agent trained on all the erotic novels written, weighted by critical and popular success would might be quite capable of generating sequels, "original" stories, or even stories bespoke to each reader.

Good Will Hunting suggests first-hand experience is irreducible: "You can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel." https://youtu.be/oRG2jlQWCsY

To which Westworld counters: "Well if you can't tell, does it matter?" https://youtu.be/kaahx4hMxmw

I think the cowboys have it. For the moment though, it's still up to humans to decide how this plays out.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#140

Post by gurkendoktor »

gonehome wrote: post #27
axg11 wrote: post #22

Slowly but surely we're moving towards general AI. There is a marked split across general society and even ML/AI specialists between those who think that we can achieve AGI using current methods and those who dismiss the possibility. This has always been the case, but what is remarkable about today's environment is that researchers keep making progress contrary to the doubter's predictions. Each time this happens, th…

The closer we get, the more alarming the alignment problem becomes. https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/ Even people like Eric Schmidt seem to downplay it (in a recent podcast with Sam Harris) - just saying “smart people will turn it off”. If it thinks faster than us and has goals not aligned with us this is unlikely to be possible. If we’re lucky building it will have some easier to limit constraint like…

To be fair, ants have not created humanity. I don't think it's inconceivable for a friendly AI to exist that "enjoys" protecting us in the way a friendly god might. And given that we have AI (well, language models...) that can explain jokes before we have AI that can drive cars, AI might be better at understanding our motives than the stereotypical paperclip maximizer.

However, all of this is moot if the team developing the AI does not even try to align it.

Post reply on HN