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Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

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Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#161

Post by newishuser1357 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #103
anonytrary wrote: post #23

Tangential: This title is weird. As if no one but the top minds in AI didn't know this? This isn't big news to anyone who has done even just a modicum of AI research.

Shane Legg (DeepMind cofounder) is public about predicting AGI at 2028. http://www.vetta.org/2011/12/goodbye-2011-hello-2012/ My impression is this is common among DeepMind folks and not an aberration. (See also dwiel's comment elsewhere.) It is super weird for me that Demis Hassabis says AGI is nowhere close. Is he lying? Or does he mean 10 years is not close?

> It is super weird for me that Demis Hassabis says AGI is nowhere close. Is he lying? Or does he mean 10 years is not close?

Maybe he just doesn’t believe the same thing some of his coworkers do? Seems pretty drastic to jump to the conclusion he’s lying if he implies it’s more than 10 years away.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#162

Post by mindgam3 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #36
karmasimida wrote: post #17

And no one should be surprised by this. The NN advancement of late doesn't help addressing human-style symbolic reasoning at all. All we have is a much more powerful function approximator with a drastic increased capacity (very deep networks with billions of parameters) and scalable training scheme (SGD and its variants). Such architecture works great for differentiable data, such's images/audios, but the improvement…

Maaaaybe. I tend to think that symbolic reasoning is a learning tool, rather than a goalpost for general intelligence. For example, we use symbolic reasoning quite extensively when learning to read a new language, but once fluent can rely on something closer to raw processing - no more reading and sounding out character sequences. Similarly with chess - eventually we have good mnemonics for what make good plays, and…

"Similarly with chess - eventually we have good mnemonics for what make good plays, and can play blitz reasonably well."

"let's be real - a lot of human symbolic reasoning actually happens outside of the brain"

I was a chess master at age 10. Let's be real - when I play blitz and bullet chess, I am performing multi-level symbolic reasoning at multiple frames per second. In my brain.

I am not an alien. I can do these kinds of symbolic calculations faster than 99.6% of the population mainly because I learned chess as a kid, making it a "native language", and I got good at it early so I spent much of my youth training my neurons with this perceptual task.

My point is not to claim I'm a genius. There are dozens of players who can school me in bullet the way I can school most people.

My point is that human beings DO symbolic reasoning, it is the core of our intelligence. Being able to take in different kinds of input, organize some of them into relevant higher level clusters, sort the clusters by priority, make a plan to deal with the highest prio clusters, act, rinse and repeat.

Humans simply do not have the computational ability to make decisions based on raw perceptual data in real time. Our brains are designed to act on higher levels of symbolic meaning, and we have perceptual layers to help us turn reality into manageable chunks.

In cognitive psychology this is referred to, not surprisingly, as "chunking": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

Until DeepMind starts working on anything resembling chunking, I believe they are wasting their time and money.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#163

Post by mindgam3 »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #83
kahoon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this fixation on symbolic reasoning. Do any other animals practice this? If the answer is no, then it is probably not the most important milestone to AGI or at least not the one we should be currently aiming for. Right now we can not replicate the cognition of a mouse. Feels like we want to go to Mars before figuring out how to build a rocket.

I think the the fixation on symbolic reasoning comes from ignorance at how hard classification is vs how hard pure mechanical symbolic operations are for humans. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that since a computer can rapidly multiply two numbers together (hard for humans) that they were operating at a higher level than human brains. Turns out this is wrong. Human brains are very efficient.

100% agree. I am terrible at mental arithmetic, but I am exceedingly good at performing symbolic operations playing bullet chess. It's primarily a visual or geometric calculation, not purely abstract like math.

I think most people don't realize that our brains have this ability. But all you need to do is spend a few months learning chess and you'll see for yourself.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#164

Post by mindgam3 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #108
taneq wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, at least it's a type of problem rather than a problem itself. I haven't studied enough myself yet to know the answer to this one, but what are the differences between AlphaZero and the OpenAI 5 DOTA team's approach? Would it be possible to apply AlphaZero to DOTA?

DOTA is partially observable, so I believe AlphaZero can't be applied, as-is.

Agreed. Poker is another interesting case of "partial information" game. There is some discussion of this in the links below. I suspect that AlphaZero could make a decent poker player with a non-trivial amount of tweaking.

1. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601157/could-alphago-bluf...

2. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-alphazeros-artificial-int...

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#165

Post by nradov »

995533 wrote: post #158
nradov wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stating something more times doesn't make it true. Everything you've written is pure speculation, and alarmist at that. There's no proof that AGI is even possible, and if it is possible there's no proof that it will end humanity.

Clearly, AGI-level intelligence is possible, because human brains exist. So unless you pose that a function has to rely on its materialization (there is something untouchably magic about biological neural networks, and intelligence is not multiple realizable), it should be possible to functionally model intelligence. Nature shows the way. AGI will likely obsolete humanity. Either depricate it, or consume it (make us…

It's not at all clear that AGI is technically feasible. Human brains exist but we have only a shallow understanding of how they work.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that AGI is possible, there's no scientific basis to assume that will make humanity obsolete. For all we know there could be fundamental limits on cognition. A hypothetical AGI might be no smarter than humans, or might be unable to leverage it's intelligence in ways that impact us.

Nuclear weapons and malware can cause damage but there's no conceivable scenario where they actually make us extinct.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#166

Post by nuguy »

nradov wrote: post #154
nuguy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said anything about your religious beliefs, only that your need for hard proof one way or the other is similar to the need displayed by people who want to believe in god and who dont want to believe in global warming. there are many such examples but the bottom line is that demanding me to show you a sentient computer right now is not reasonable. We have the ability to reason about things without developing f…

No that's not how it works. Currently a belief in the inevitable arrival of AGI is a secular religious faith with no basis in hard science. We have plenty of real problems to worry about (like anthropomorphic global climate change) before we waste time making public policy to prevent something that may never happen anyway. Your concerns are silly, akin to worrying about an alien invasion when we don't even know if ex…

You are an outlier. Even Hassabis and Hinton believe that agi is inevitable. I’ve never met anyone who thought otherwise. The only disagreement is about the timescale and the result of its existence. If nothing I’ve said can convince you that ai is possible, then i would just ask you to consider that the human brain exists and that we will eventually figure out how it works.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#167

Post by p1esk »

nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

* AI to be banned*

Good luck with that.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#168

Post by nuguy »

p1esk wrote: post #167
nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

* AI to be banned* Good luck with that.

So sarcasm is what will save us all?
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