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Introducing OpenAI

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Re: Introducing OpenAI

#251

Post by tempestn »

nicolashahn wrote: post #222
athenot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he believes in the potential harm of AI, then supporting its widespread use doesn't seem logical. If you take the quote above, and substitute the word "guns" for "AI", you basically have the NRA, and the NRA is not making the world a safer place. Guns are not exactly good at healing, making or creating. A better comparison would be knives. Knives can be used for stabbing and killing but also for sustenance (cook…

You're right, guns are pure evil. Clearly, we should take them out of the hands of cops, bodyguards, hunters, and civilians defending themselves.

That's a strawman argument. Parent is pointing out that unlike guns, AI (and knives) have purposes other than use as a weapon, and therefore it is possible that their widespread proliferation would be good, even if that of weapons is bad. Certainly weapons (including guns) have non-evil purposes as well, but that's beside the point.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#252

Post by DrScump »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #49
dools wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been pretty happy to enslave animals in semi-symbiotic relationships for thousands of years. It's about the same as that.

Its going to work until it doesn't. You don't feel too bad about ants you step on, do you? Even if you're not purposely walking on them.

Ants keep other animals (aphids) as livestock, too.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#253

Post by Geee »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #196

Man I dunno about some of this media hype surrounding the topic of AI. I understand how powerful ML/AI algorithms are for general pattern matching (with a big enough computer, gradient descent can learn a lot of things...), but this whole skynet/doomsday fear thing seems ridiculous. I guess the risk is embedding into systems that manage missiles or something. But you don't need sophisticated algorithms for that to be…

In my opinion the biggest danger is letting AI to sort our news and search engine results, social media feeds etc. There was research on Facebook how they can affect people's moods by using different weights for posts. What happens when intelligent bots start writing news, blogs, comments, tweets?

In essence, I mean the dangers of using AI for large scale propaganda through Internet services. The best tools of the most dangerous people and movements have always been manipulation and propaganda; what if a perfect AI does it? Could we even notice it?

Even when the AI is given a seemingly safe task, such as "optimize for clicks" in a news web site, something dangerous might happen in the long run if that's optimal for clicks.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#254

Post by nl »

bholdr wrote: post #147

This is really great, I think. At least, I admire the motivation behind it as it was outlined by Sam. However, it seems, YC Research started by bringing in accomplished and well-known academics in the field. I wonder whether it would've been more appropriate to focus on providing PhD Scholarship and postdoc fellowship. Though, I understand and somewhat appreciate the motivation behind bring the "top-guns" of research…

Pretty sure a group like that will be looking for postdocs etc.

Andrej Karpathy only completed his PhD this month, so I guess he'd fit into that category. I imagine he had a few options to choose from.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#255

Post by yeukhon »

pbreit wrote: post #93
argonaut wrote: post #79

I find it a bit disappointing that despite originally stating that YC Research would target underfunded/underserved areas of research, they've decided to fund and dive into one of the most-hyped, well-funded areas of research: deep learning, an area of research where companies are hiring like crazy and even universities are hiring faculty like crazy. I'm reasonably sure all the research scientists had multiple job of…

I'm disappointed that you're disappointed. There's $1b coming from primarily not YC.

It is committed. There is a big difference between committed $1B (which is a proposal really) and funded with $1B.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#256

Post by yeukhon »

argonaut wrote: post #169
a-dub wrote: post #165

Oh shit. Say goodbye to reasonable g2.8xlarge spot prices...

I'm not aware of any research lab that uses AWS for these things. It's cheaper to just buy the GPU yourself.

But you don't change the GPU yourself :-) you use it as a service. That's the good part, although the spec is not very good.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#257

Post by manish_gill »

apsec112 wrote: post #186
argonaut wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are those researchers? I'll admit I don't follow the stuff written by the friendly AI folks very much; I only know of Bostrom/Yudkowsky, both of whom are very much philosophers. All of the hype around ML today is in deep learning (let's be honest, OpenAI would not exist if that wasn't the case), and AFAIk there is almost no overlap between people who are prolific in deep learning and prolific in FAI.

Here's an overview of the technical work MIRI has done: https://intelligence.org/research/ It's true that Bostrom and Yudkowsky, as individuals, aren't deep learning people. However, I know that MIRI and I think FHI/CSER do send people to top conferences like AAAI and NIPS.

MIRI is basically an organization surrounding Yudkowsky's cult. He's a senior "research fellow" who hasn't published anything in respected peer review generals, and generally holds some pretty questionable beliefs.

http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/cultofbayes.html

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#258

Post by astrofinch »

argonaut wrote: post #190
apsec112 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an overview of the technical work MIRI has done: https://intelligence.org/research/ It's true that Bostrom and Yudkowsky, as individuals, aren't deep learning people. However, I know that MIRI and I think FHI/CSER do send people to top conferences like AAAI and NIPS.

Skimming through that list, are any of those papers about actual running AI systems? It's important to realize that all the stuff about deep learning is mostly heavy engineering work (which is why one criticism of deep learning is the lack of theory - which is a totally valid criticism as most work is in engineering/devising new architectures). Real systems implemented in Cuda/C++ that you can download and run on you…

What I've heard is that MIRI has an explicit philosophy of concentrating on the more abstract & theoretical aspects of AI safety. The idea being that if AI safety is something that you can just tack on to a working design at the end, they don't have a comparative advantage there: it's difficult to predict which design will win and the design's implementor is best positioned to tack on the safety bit themselves.

>...imagine a hypothetical computer security expert named Bruce. You tell Bruce that he and his team have just 3 years to modify the latest version of Microsoft Windows so that it can’t be hacked in any way, even by the smartest hackers on Earth. If he fails, Earth will be destroyed because reasons.

>Bruce just stares at you and says, “Well, that’s impossible, so I guess we’re all fucked.”

>The problem, Bruce explains, is that Microsoft Windows was never designed to be anything remotely like “unhackable.” It was designed to be easily useable, and compatible with lots of software, and flexible, and affordable, and just barely secure enough to be marketable, and you can’t just slap on a special Unhackability Module at the last minute.

>To get a system that even has a chance at being robustly unhackable, Bruce explains, you’ve got to design an entirely different hardware + software system that was designed from the ground up to be unhackable. And that system must be designed in an entirely different way than Microsoft Windows is, and no team in the world could do everything that is required for that in a mere 3 years. So, we’re fucked.

>But! By a stroke of luck, Bruce learns that some teams outside Microsoft have been working on a theoretically unhackable hardware + software system for the past several decades (high reliability is hard) — people like Greg Morrisett (SAFE) and Gerwin Klein (seL4). Bruce says he might be able to take their work and add the features you need, while preserving the strong security guarantees of the original highly secure system. Bruce sets Microsoft Windows aside and gets to work on trying to make this other system satisfy the mysterious reasons while remaining unhackable. He and his team succeed just in time to save the day.

>This is an oversimplified and comically romantic way to illustrate what MIRI is trying to do in the area of long-term AI safety...

http://lukemuehlhauser.com/a-reply-to-wait-but-why-on-machin...

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#259

Post by gmac »

nicolashahn wrote: post #222
athenot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he believes in the potential harm of AI, then supporting its widespread use doesn't seem logical. If you take the quote above, and substitute the word "guns" for "AI", you basically have the NRA, and the NRA is not making the world a safer place. Guns are not exactly good at healing, making or creating. A better comparison would be knives. Knives can be used for stabbing and killing but also for sustenance (cook…

You're right, guns are pure evil. Clearly, we should take them out of the hands of cops, bodyguards, hunters, and civilians defending themselves.

Ironically, you're absolutely right. Cops, bodyguards and civilians defending themselves generally only need guns because their adversaries have guns. Just take them out of everyone's hands. I know this works, if you can make it happen, because I've seen the gun death statistics for countries with effective gun control.

Hunters are a different case, but their weapons are rather different too. To be honest I wouldn't that much care about depriving them of a pastime if it meant turning US gun death figures into European ones. But that's probably unnecessary.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#260

Post by rebootthesystem »

vonnik wrote: post #150

> Musk: I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower. In a sense, we have no other defense. AI is just math and code, and I know of no way to distinguish good linear algebra from evil linear algebra. The barriers to putting that math and code tog…

> If you take the quote above, and substitute the word "guns" for "AI", you basically have the NRA, and the NRA is not making the world a safer place.

Sorry but this "guns > NRA > bad > evil" thing is getting pretty old. I don't even own a gun and I have trouble making the "gun > bad" connection when there are hundreds of millions of guns in the US. We should have rivers of blood running down every street. We don't.

Just stop it. They are not the problem. Crazy people are the problem.

Crazy people with drones are a problem. That does not make drones bad.

Crazy people, well, intelligent crazy people, with AI are a problem. That does not make AI bad.

If we are going to have intelligent arguments let's first be intelligent. The minute someone makes the "guns > NRA > bad > evil" argument in some form I know they are making it from a total ideological corner or from political indoctrination. I challenge anyone to put the numbers to Excel and make an argument to support "guns > NRA > bad > evil" or "drones > no rules > bad > evil" or "AI > watched Terminator too many times > bad evil" without having a crazy person as part of the equation.

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