Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#231

Post by tim333 » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

houzertuch wrote: post #215

gdb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at OpenAI.) It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. We've talked about why we think it might be: https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-ag... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :). EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other pro…

AGI will the the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. Even if you can’t see that, you can see that it has the potential to be very bad. I know this because OpenAI literature always stresses that AGI has to be guided and developed by the right people because the alternative is rather unpleasant. So essentially its a gamble and you know it. With everyone’s lives at stake. But instead of asking everyone wheth…

It may he the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. It may also be the best. I lean optimistic myself. The whole temporary survival machine for your genes existence we've had so far is overrated in my opinion.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#232

Post by breck » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

tedivm wrote: post #224

breck wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have no idea what's required to achieve AI Yes, we do. Lots of data, lots of training, better algorithms, more understanding of the brain...At this point we still need 10x+ improvements in a lot of areas, but it's pretty clear what we need to do. If you can process around 100 petabytes per second (1 Google Index of data per second), you could fully simulate a human being, including their brain. We're still a lit…

These are all assumptions, and there is a lot of disagreement in the academic community around it. Humans don't seem to need anywhere near the same level of data or training that our current models need. That alone is a sign that deep learning may not be enough. The focus on deep learning research has a lot of useful benefits, so I'm not discounting that, but there are a decent amount of smart people who don't believ…

> Humans don't seem to need anywhere near the same level of data or training that our current models need.

I find this to be a common misunderstanding. If I show you one Stirch Wrench, and you've never seen one before, you learn instantly and perhaps for the rest of your life you'll know what a Strich Wrench is. The problem is I didn't show you 1 example. You saw perhaps millions of examples (your conscious process filters those out, but in reality think of the slight shaking of your head, the constant pulsing of the light sources around you, etc, to be augmenting that 1 image with many examples). I think humans are indeed training on millions of examples, it's just we are not noticing that.

> That alone is a sign that deep learning may not be enough.

I 100% agree with that. It's going to take improvements in lots of areas, many unexpected, but I think the deep learning approach is the "wings" that will be near the core.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#233

Post by jorgemf » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #80

gdb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at OpenAI.) It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. We've talked about why we think it might be: https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-ag... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :). EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other pro…

> It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. No, it does not. I very much believe AI (or AGI, as you call it) is achievable, but may I remind you that some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest minds of his generations, said that the secret of intelligence would be unlocked within five years, and Alan Turing -- a component of your very own post-pre-AGI era's AG…

How do you know we are not closer to AGI? Because we don't how to create AGI we cannot know whether we are closer or not. We can say artificial neural networks are not the way to go because they are not like real neurons, but we can say very little about neurons that could be possible artificial neural networks are actually the way to achieve intelligence. The topic is so complex and we know very little that any strong claim is very likely to be wrong

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#234

Post by fullshark » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #181

pron wrote: post #40

Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody. I believe that building a beneficial warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien…

Do you have a link to the TED talk on your warp drive? Your company sounds like it's doing amazing things, and these are exactly the kind of world-changing ideas I listen to TED to hear about. (/s)

Not exactly what you are asking for, but the Onion did a great send up of techno-utopian TED talks here:

https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#235

Post by danielovichdk » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

wpasc wrote: post #83

kyruzic wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you claiming that people claimed AI was impossible and openAi (or any other "AI") has proven those people wrong. If so please provide some evidence of this happening.

I believe the comment is referring to beliefs that certain achievements like beating humans at chess and go, tagging objects in images, etc. were all at one point another considered to be AI and impossible feats. And each time one of those previously unattainable achievements is completed, critics regard it as "Well that's not true artificial intelligence, its just dueling GAN's that got really good at go". Meaning t…

We will not reach AI for anything else than super tight bounded contexts like playing chess or drivning a car.

It's not AI imo. It's a trained model that will never be able to evolve outside those tight boundaries.

And that is because, which is really simple, we don't really have any clue of how the brain works, technically. And besides that, the impact which environments has on the brain.

Why no one is talking about this being a huge driver for Microsoft Azure and what Microsoft as a company will gain from this, baffles me a little. Not sure i like it.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#236

Post by ryanmercer » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

SahAssar wrote: post #202

ryanmercer wrote: post #26

OpenAi to for-profit OpenAI to billion dollar partnership with Microsoft doesn't give me the warm and fuzzy feelings I had when I first heard of OpenAI. I saw it as "we're going to save the world by building an AGI before someone builds SkyNet" today it is "We've got in bed with a company that had one of the most famous anti-trust cases in the United States and one of the most famous anti-competition cases in the EU"…

The whole MikeRoweSoft thing was 15 years ago. I don't think it's fair to judge the company now based on that.

If it was the only instance, I'd say sure, but:

- Lindows

- Microwindows

- wxWindows

- Windows Commander

- Suing Amish Shah

- MikeRoweSoft

Then all of the various anti-trust/anti-competition lawsuits against them by both companies and government entities (Be Inc, Nescape, the EU, Spain, the US Government, Caldera, Opera Software. Also individuals in numerous class actions).

Plenty of reason to feel slightly concerned.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#237

Post by gonehome » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #80

gdb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at OpenAI.) It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. We've talked about why we think it might be: https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-ag... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :). EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other pro…

> It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. No, it does not. I very much believe AI (or AGI, as you call it) is achievable, but may I remind you that some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest minds of his generations, said that the secret of intelligence would be unlocked within five years, and Alan Turing -- a component of your very own post-pre-AGI era's AG…

If AGI is achievable (seems likely given brains are all over the place in nature) and achieving it will have consequences that dwarf everything else then doesn't it make sense to focus on it?

Yes, historically people were way too optimistic and generally went down AI rabbit holes that went nowhere, but two years before the Wright flyer flew, the Wright brothers themselves said it was 50 years out (and others were still publishing articles about human flight being impossible after it was already flying).

People are bad at predictions, in the Wright brothers case since they were the people that ultimately ended up doing it two years later they were likely the best to make the prediction and were still off.

Given that AGI is possible and given the extreme nature of the consequences, doesn't it make sense to work on alignment and safety? Why would it make sense to wait? If you accidentally end up with AGI and haven't figured out how to align its goals then that's it, the game is probably over.

Maybe OpenAI is on the right path, maybe not - but I think you're way too confident to be as sure as you are that they are not.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#238

Post by Jach » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #183

chillacy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying.. it comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable within our lifetime? Or even worth contributing to at all even. I think the parent has made their position pretty clear through their employment choices, that’s a level of skin in the game that naysayers don’t really have.

Perhaps I haven't been clear. I have no issue with the research OpenAI is performing, nor with anyone's beliefs in AI's imminence or their personal role in bringing it about. However, no one knows whether what they're doing is even on the right path towards AI, and certainly not when it will be achieved, plus the topic has been subject to overoptimism for decades now, so I do take issue with publicly calling what you…

Do you hate all marketing or just around AI in particular? Would you bat an eye at MS investing $1B into a project + ads about say a new GPU architecture promising how "games will never be the same" because the new hardware (or even Cloud Integration) lets developers efficiently try and satisfy the rendering equation with ray tracing?

FWIW I thought you were clear, but there are only so many middlebrow dismissals one can make towards AI or AGI efforts and I think I've seen them all plus the low-value threads they generate. (I've made some too, and suspect we might get brain emulations before AGI, but I try to avoid the impulse and in any case it doesn't stop me from hoping (and minor contributing) for the research on the article's load-bearing word "beneficial" to precede any realistic efforts of building the actual thing. At least the OpenAI guys aren't entirely ignorant of the importance of the "beneficial" problem.)

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#239

Post by bo1024 » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #194

pron wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. No, it does not. I very much believe AI (or AGI, as you call it) is achievable, but may I remind you that some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest minds of his generations, said that the secret of intelligence would be unlocked within five years, and Alan Turing -- a component of your very own post-pre-AGI era's AG…

> calling it "pre-AGI" pretentious to the level of delusion. I don't think you know what you are talking about. Do you do Deep Learning? If you are not actively engaged in the field, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss others who are (especially not others who are at the top of the field). That being said, you brought up some interesting points, even if I think your overall position is wrong--I think OpenAI is definite…

I study ML, and I completely agree with the quoted statement. Deep networks have gotten pretty good at recognizing correlations in data. That's not on the same map as AGI. I don't know what "pre-AGI" means exactly, but I would include things like counterfactual reasoning or ability to develop and test models of the world, which are far from our AI capabilities so far. (edit: yes I am including RL, considering the relative performances of model-based vs model-free, I think this is a fair statement. Don't mean to be pessimistic, just realistic and trying to set expectations to avoid more winters.)

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#240

Post by danielovichdk » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

tedsanders wrote: post #152

leesec wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they are claiming that things are "AI" or "Impossible for AI" until AI actually does them, in which case, the goalposts get moved. See: DeepBlue, AlphaGo, GPT-2.

Can you provide sources for this? Like, how many people thought chess or go were literally impossible for computers to play at superhuman level? I'm actually curious about the history, and I don't want us to accidentally attack a straw man. To me, the fact that Turing wrote the first chess program in the 1950s suggests that people thought computers were capable of playing chess. It doesn't seem too great a leap to im…

It humors me, that we still talk about playing chess when we talk about socalled AI.

That's how long we've come. Playing chess. On a superhuman level. Wow. What is superhuman anyways?