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Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

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Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#171

Is Google drunk? Thats $4B in basically two weeks on unproven companies.

They have an assload of cash on hand and the singularity is coming at us like a freight train. I'd think they were drunk if they weren't snatching up everything relevant in sight.

"They have an assload of cash on hand"

Companies with excess cash are supposed to pay dividends and/or buy back stock.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#172
post #66

So, Google's list so far: - Some top ML talent: Geoffrey Hinton, Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig, Jeff Dean, Andrew Ng. - One of D-Wave's quantum computers to establish their 'Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab'. - Creepy robot maker Boston Dynamics. - A stack of other robotics companies: Schaft.inc, Industrial Perception, Redwood Robotics, Meka Robotics, Molomni, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss. - DeepMind, obviously. Am I mis…

Nest to apply ML techniques to home automation.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#173
post #66

So, Google's list so far: - Some top ML talent: Geoffrey Hinton, Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig, Jeff Dean, Andrew Ng. - One of D-Wave's quantum computers to establish their 'Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab'. - Creepy robot maker Boston Dynamics. - A stack of other robotics companies: Schaft.inc, Industrial Perception, Redwood Robotics, Meka Robotics, Molomni, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss. - DeepMind, obviously. Am I mis…

pretty sure a lot of cat herding is about to ensue

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an assload of cash on hand and the singularity is coming at us like a freight train. I'd think they were drunk if they weren't snatching up everything relevant in sight.

"They have an assload of cash on hand" Companies with excess cash are supposed to pay dividends and/or buy back stock.

I think it's debatable based on your view of a company's purpose: is it to serve its stockholders or is it to serve its customers?

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#175
post #164

I don't know anyone on the team, but Om Malik was not impressed and he's usually reliable: https://twitter.com/om/status/427653907766972416 > A $400 million talent acquisition with little talent. That's how Google rolls now! There's also word that it was more than $400m, perhaps as high as $500m. That's a lot for talent any way you slice it.

How is he qualified to judge ML talent? DeepMind wasn't just a 3 man team, Yann Lecun posted on G+ that 3 of his PhD students were on the team and I've heard that they were recruiting more people.

Exactly. Interesting, Yann LeCun in his G+ post (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+YannLeCunPhD/posts/LnKBPi9cCWm) explicitly mentioned that the acquired ML scientists have been focused in reinforcement learning. Also, they have published ArXiv paper on the subject: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singularity is not BS, and I'm pretty sure they want to make it happen. It would be a shame if Google wanted all this AI talent to improve ad revenue or just for self-driving cars. I for one hope they are not that short-sighted. I think, hope, that with "all these robotics and AI companies", they literally want to build the future of mankind.

Singularity is BS because there's no such thing as "machine surpassing human intelligence". Human intelligence is not a one dimensional measurement that can be "surpassed". There's not much challenge to write AI that surpasses all humans in IQ tests. You can't even say if one human surpassed other human in intelligence, how are you gonna measure machine? In the same way every one of us are intelligent in some specifi…

> You can't even say if one human surpassed other human in intelligence, how are you gonna measure machine?

It's not because something is difficult to measure that it does not exist(1). Even if you don't believe in IQ tests, you gotta admit that those people Google just hired are more intelligent than the average Joe. They sure are more intelligent than me anyway. Probably more intelligent than you as well.

In the same way, the idea that one day a machine could be more intelligent than any human being would be very real the day a machine will write scientific papers, program its own code, design high-tech devices, win a Nobel price and stuff like that.

This machine would be more intelligent than Demis Hassabis (the founder of DeepMind) for exactly the same reasons that I can say that Demis Hassabis is more intelligent than me: he does more intelligent things.

1: for example, the famous conundrum "how long is the coast of Britain?" does not suggest that Britain has no coast.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#177
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand the objective of those like Kurzweil. What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? It would be complete ego death.

> What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Living forever / getting rid of death, fixing world problems, countless amazing technological achievements, colonizing the galaxy. In probable order of happening. > Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? Not necessarily; that's an actual research field.

The universe still dies, so you still die. A trillion years is still quite finite and small.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#178
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand the objective of those like Kurzweil. What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? It would be complete ego death.

> What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Living forever / getting rid of death, fixing world problems, countless amazing technological achievements, colonizing the galaxy. In probable order of happening. > Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? Not necessarily; that's an actual research field.

> Not necessarily; that's an actual research field.

http://intelligence.org/research/, also Omohundro's and Bostrom's works.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#179
post #81

FYI, Shane Legg's theses was "Machine Super Intelligence". http://www.vetta.org/publications/

I'm really wondering where you have to go to grad-school for someone to approve a thesis that blatantly speculative.

Whatever the uni. He was working at IDSIA, one of the main contributors to deep learning. Also, his advisor, Markus Hutter, did some serious stuff on AGI.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#180
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Living forever / getting rid of death, fixing world problems, countless amazing technological achievements, colonizing the galaxy. In probable order of happening. > Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? Not necessarily; that's an actual research field.

The universe still dies, so you still die. A trillion years is still quite finite and small.

"Small" compared to what?
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