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DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

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Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#251
post #18

Some Bozo who has heard all this many times before is suspicious of claims from places like Deep Mind who have a financial incentive to make them (keep funding) where there aren't working machines to back that claim up. Some Bozo has no credentials, no reputation, no track record of publications and barely supports the claim they're making with anything much. Some Bozo has no financial incentives or otherwise to opin…

Wrong: Some Bozo does have a stake.

The existence of human crafted general AI forces him to struggle with the possibility that there is no such thing as a soul.

I know a lot of people don't fall in that camp, but I heard enough "serious" people make such desperate claims to avoid thinking about the topic in a way that might challenge their underlying religious beliefs[1]. I think no one likes to admit that religion and spirituality often force someone to reject the possibility that AI is actually really much simpler than they think it "should" be, because then humans aren't special after all.

[1] Numerous arguments boil down to an argument that complexity is non reducible. You see it here, hidden in various comments as well.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#252

It is not enough. Machine learning only gets you so far, even the best general-purpose algorithms. Deriving reasoning and common sense demands something more than learning. I agree with the other commenter here that the smartest systems are less intelligent than the common housefly. A brain the size of a pinpoint can navigate, eat, reproduce, and live a full life without big data or internet.

On the one hand; award winning ai specialists. On the other: an anonymous internet commenter. I'm not going to take bets on who is right, but simply saying "nuh uh" is not exactly breaking ground.

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Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#253
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was a fun position paper, if not exactly groundbreaking. They did avoid one common pitfall at least. They are (intentionally?) vague about which number systems the rewards can come from, apparently leaving it open whether the rewards need be real-valued or whether they can be, say, hyperreals, surreals, computable ordinals, etc. This avoids a trap I've written about elsewhere [1]: traditionally, RL rewar…

There are more real numbers than programs. Computers cannot represent the vast majority of real numbers. AFAICT, it's not even clear that the universe is continuous rather than discrete. I really don't believe that using approximations of real numbers is going to be the bottleneck for AGI.

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Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#254

Basically, any problem with a solution fits into RL: reward of 1 if you are AGI and 0 otherwise. Go learn. This setting on its own is meaningless! The “how” of the RL agent is not even 99% of the problem, it is all of it. Given our understanding of both DL and neuroscience, it is not even clear to me that we can say with confidence that Neural Networks are a sufficiently expressive architecture to cover an AGI. The h…

Problem: you don't understand it therefore you think RL isn't sufficient.

There is no evidence that the thing you don't understand isn't based on RL too.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#255
post #241

I'm not a neuroscientist, an AI specialist, or a hardware engineer. But as an enthusiast of all three I really think that AGI is a hardware problem, not a software problem. Reinforcement learning on a massive corpus of data is how we train all biological intelligence. The crazy thing is that in humans we manage to do it on ~3 watts an hour. I think we have the software cracked, my gut thinks silicon just isn't the ri…

Silicon is likely fine as a material. GPU cost per operation is still dropping insanely quickly. A lot of really hard ML problems are just making big things feasible, or sampling big things enough to get decently precise estimates. With 10x the GPU power and memory, a lot of this gets easy. With 100x, some hard things get trivial. At the end of the day, GPUs and TPUs drive AI research more than anything else as models grow massively.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#256
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you 99% of the problem of any RL project is the simulator. Generally you can't let an RL algorithm control anything real from the start, so you have to implement a reasonably reliable simulator for whatever you want done. This is the big challenge in practice.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't that mean the entire world would have to be simulated? Or at least some subset of society?

The human brain does have a simulator. It's well known. How do you know where to move your hand to catch a ball? Or what is happening when you blink?

Your brain is constantly simulating a few milliseconds ahead.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#257

For those of you ‘generalised’ AI sceptics like me, I can highly recommend reading Søren Brier’s book on Cybersemiotics (“why information is not enough”). It’s a comprehensive reader into the physicalistic, reductionist field of AI and all of its shortcomings. General AI implies the ability to abduct (not just deduction and induction), which I highly doubt will ever be possible.

Why would artificial intelligence have any limitations that biological intelligence does not have?

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#258
>DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

When a company like DM makes such statements, you have to take into account the fact that they've essentially bet the farm and the neighbor's on RL.

As such, the statement isn't really carrying much weight.

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#259

Does anyone know if deepmind is working on driverless technology? It seems like one of the largest values they could bring to society would be to solve driverless technology. Currently their best partner would be Tesla due to the amount of data Tesla has, but I doubt Google would allow that collaboration…

I'm curious why you feel their best partner would be Tesla instead of Alphabet's own Waymo?

Because of how much data Tesla’s fleet is generating every day (gathering while the user drives).

Re: DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does AGI imply human-level intelligence, or would the intelligence of a housefly qualify?

I'm assuming you are aware of the difficulties for machines to do even the most basic of things that a living being can do with a brain the size of a pea. A housefly can fly and navigate effortless through most complex scenarios that it evolved to navigate (even though the same fly can get stuck behind a glass window and eventually die). So yeah, even getting that level of intelligence would be a huge win. However, m…

Doesn't the G in AGI imply that narrow specializations aren't the target?
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