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

Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 252 posts

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#21

Post by visarga »

mrfusion wrote: post #13
klochner wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[X] Open Source Tools [ ] Massive Data Sets [ ] $Millions in Computing Resources I'd put it roughly on par with finding a general cure for cancer. While unlikely, quite amazing that the cure for one of the largest causes of death could be solved 3 doors down with lab supplies from amazon and a handful of mice.

Well the data sets are all around your house and yard. Think of baby human agi's. And the computing costs could be boot strapped by the ai. Put it to work earning its keep and expanding resources.

> Put it to work earning its keep and expanding resources.

It's called Google, and is already filthy rich and has a ton of computation and privileged data at its disposal.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#22

Post by Simon_says »

klochner wrote: post #6
wonderwonder wrote: post #3

I think a very interesting aspect of general AI is that while an incredibly complex technology, it is not unrealistic that it could be created for the first time in someone's home office. Unlike many other earth changing technologies there is nothing that a massive corporation has that a home tinkerer does not (besides the obvious of money and many engineers). With the rise of cloud computing and open source; everyth…

[X] Open Source Tools [ ] Massive Data Sets [ ] $Millions in Computing Resources I'd put it roughly on par with finding a general cure for cancer. While unlikely, quite amazing that the cure for one of the largest causes of death could be solved 3 doors down with lab supplies from amazon and a handful of mice.

I think wonderwonder's point is that the massive data sets and millions of dollars in resources might not be necessary. I don't have an opinion on the matter, but what if AGI falls out just from a small number of critical ideas which while being complicated and non-obvious are nevertheless straightforward to code?

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#23

Post by CuriouslyC »

Artificial general intelligence won't be invented, it will emerge, just general intelligence did in the wild. AGI is just going to be a hierarchical arrangement of specialized tools.

The first step is highly specialized AI tools for very specific problem domains.

The second step is AI tools that use other AI tools as components but address slightly larger problem domains.

The third and successive steps are recursions of the second step.

Additionally, we won't be able to tell right away when we've crossed the threshold. We can't even say for sure where "intelligence" stops in animals. We used to think we were the line, but now the bar has been pushed down to include primates, cetaceans, a number of birds, possibly some members of the bear family, etc. The reality is that it is a gradient and there is no clear line.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#24

Post by visarga »

bryananderson wrote: post #10

When he says "artificial life", is he referring to reinforcement learning?

Yes. Evolution strategies are just an alternative approach to RL. Reinforcement learning is basically solving the problem of being an intelligent agent in the world, moving about, achieving goals.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#25

Post by visarga »

grwthckrmstr wrote: post #17
visarga wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's too expensive to run a low level brain sim. In the meantime deep learning based AI achieved superhuman or close to human results in many tasks, such as image recognition, voice recognition, translation, car driving and Go. The AGI will be a reinforcement learning agent, as it will need to be able to perceive and act in the physical world. Thus the path to AGI is the path of RL. The most essential pie…

"I disagree. It's too expensive to run a low level brain sim." Interesting. Could you tell me Why is it too expensive? If it wasn't expensive, would that change things drastically, and make brain sim a viable option?

The brain has 10^14 synapses (100 trillion) synapses. Current day neural nets barely reach a hundred million, with very few exceptions. Then, besides compute, there is data movement - currently the bottleneck in AI is moving data around, not computing. Imagine the interconnect for a brain-size neural net.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#26

Post by ghthor »

tim333 wrote: post #14
Will_Do wrote: post #7

That was really interesting. I'm interested why he's so pessimistic about the simulating a brain approach. Yes it's the boring and obvious approach but it also seems the most direct. Also found this quote interesting > Might have to make it illegal to evolve AI strains or an upper bound of computation per person and closely track all computational resources on earth.

The problem with the brain simulation approach seems not that it's boring and obvious but that it's hard to do. They struggle to simulate C. elegans which has 302 neurons in a fixed layout. Humans are harder. >[OpenWorm] project coordinator Stephen Larson estimates it as "only 20 to 30 percent of the way towards where we need to get. (wikipedia) That said, figuring what we can about how the human brain works and tryi…

Numenta is doing much better than the worm brain simulation.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#28

Post by nopinsight »

indifferentalex wrote: post #2

Not on their radar, or their slides at least: Natural Language Processing based rule-based brute-force artificial intelligence (that could be augmented through sensors/motors that allow interaction with the external world). A Vulcan-like (Star Trek) AI, what do you think? Might be easier to simulate the entire brain, on the other hand it might be doable and bridge the gap to general AI.

Rule-based NLP has been tried for several decades and has (very) limited success in the real world. Current systems based on deep learning beat it for most complex tasks. DeepL, which was on HN front page a few days, is the latest example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15122764

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#29

Post by rdlecler1 »

Background: I did AI and Philosophy of Mind in undergrad, an MSc focused on ALife, then a PhD at Yale under a Macarthur Fellow who developed the theoretical framework for the 'evolution of Evolvability' where I worked on computational evolutionary biology. I can say we're not going to blindly brute force our way forward, but instead we'll need to reverse engineer nature's core algorithms to generate hard AI. Every time a major advance is made in AI the computational neuroscientist say: "why didn't you talk to us 15 years ago? We could have told you that!". Those ingredients will be embodiment, evolution, genetics (genotype-phenotype encoding), neirogenesis(gene regulatory networks directing phenotypic development from a single cell to a multicellular neural network), and ecology (evolving in adversarial and cooperative environments). And we'll need a lot of theoretical work in how to represent nature's algorithms in code. For example my PhD work just focused on how to use evolutionary algorithms to evolve simple gene regulatory networks and how that leads to properties of modularity in the genotype-phenotype map. That alone is life's work but a necessary ingredient. I don't expect to see this solved in my lifetime given how we're attacking the problem (head on) today. And until then we're going to continue to run into these dark winters of AI.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#30

Post by Jedi72 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #3

I think a very interesting aspect of general AI is that while an incredibly complex technology, it is not unrealistic that it could be created for the first time in someone's home office. Unlike many other earth changing technologies there is nothing that a massive corporation has that a home tinkerer does not (besides the obvious of money and many engineers). With the rise of cloud computing and open source; everyth…

The Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics
Post reply on HN