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DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

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Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#31

Post by xmprt »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #28

> Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. Surely this is a function of location? I understand the U.S.-English term “person o color” to be convoluted language for “not white”. One simple thing I notice i…

The problem is that AI (and the English language to some extent) transcends borders. So even if it's an AI developed in the US, it can potentially impact people outside the US and it makes ethical sense to build something that doesn't exclude groups based on arbitrary conditions.

Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#32

Post by neom »

torbTurret wrote: post #13
neom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got into a very long debate with an openai person 4/5 years ago about this + adversarial learning + access to a quantum computer (think just straight up world class abacus) was close to the primitives required for more generalized AI. They didn't agree with me, but that's ok! :)

What’s your argument?

I hope I didn't come off like I think know anything about this field, because I don't. A friend who use to work for openai (Jack Clark) and I spend some time once discussing over beers some stuff around general purpose AI, and I proposed that I believe quantum is a dark horse on the road to general purpose AI, and he disagreed.

Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#33

Post by Blikkentrekker »

xmprt wrote: post #31
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #28

> Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. Surely this is a function of location? I understand the U.S.-English term “person o color” to be convoluted language for “not white”. One simple thing I notice i…

The problem is that AI (and the English language to some extent) transcends borders. So even if it's an AI developed in the US, it can potentially impact people outside the US and it makes ethical sense to build something that doesn't exclude groups based on arbitrary conditions.

Yes, but to offset that, many a.i. in English were also made outside of English-speaking regions, in what one assumes to be proportional degree.

This is probably why there is more variance when searching for English terms as wel, as a Lingua Franca. If I search “house” I do see some styles of architecture not commonly found in Anglo-Saxon nations, whereas all occurrences of “huis” do seem to be situated in the Netherlands.

Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#34

Post by saltyfamiliar »

runnerup wrote: post #22
saltyfamiliar wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know if we understand enough about natural, generally intelligent brains to dismiss the idea that they are using quantum phenomenon for computation? Is it unlikely for any reason?

I believe plenty of "quantum phenomenon" are utilized in humans' biochemistry[0]. Whether the brain "calculates" things using a method that is particularly similar to the methods used in today's quantum computers is...unlikely. It probably is "quantum" in other ways though. 0: https://www.the-scientist.com/infographics/infographic--quan...

Quantum computers don't seem very useful yet, but brains are extremely useful (and they use much less power). Maybe current generation quantum computers would be better if they used quantum mechanics more similarly to the ways our brains use it. The article you linked mentions that entanglement and qubits are being "studied in human consciousness" but I'm not sure what exactly that entails.

Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#35

Post by mschuster91 »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #28

> Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. Surely this is a function of location? I understand the U.S.-English term “person o color” to be convoluted language for “not white”. One simple thing I notice i…

Searching for "child" or "house" will yield what has been classified as such in training - and searching for Japanese or Thai labels will do the same. No surprise there, if the labels don't get normalized before training.

And normally, that's harmless - as you said, you'd expect to see an AI finding pictures of houses in the region/culture you are searching it. But in a multi-cultural/multi-ethnic society, searching for "people" and showing up only what is considered the "majority" has a whole different lot of ethical implications.

Identifying and ideally remediating such issues is why ethics research is so sorely needed.

Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#36

Post by baxter001 »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #28

> Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. Surely this is a function of location? I understand the U.S.-English term “person o color” to be convoluted language for “not white”. One simple thing I notice i…

Completely not the focus of the article, and you've turned the result of an error rate of 0.8 percent for gender classification of light-skinned men and a 34.7 percent error rate for the same classifier on dark-skinned women - into some kind of google image search language game?

I can only quote Joy Buolamwini on this:

“To fail on one in three, in a commercial system, on something that’s been reduced to a binary classification task, you have to ask, would that have been permitted if those failure rates were in a different subgroup?”

Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#37

Post by tialaramex »

runnerup wrote: post #22
saltyfamiliar wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know if we understand enough about natural, generally intelligent brains to dismiss the idea that they are using quantum phenomenon for computation? Is it unlikely for any reason?

I believe plenty of "quantum phenomenon" are utilized in humans' biochemistry[0]. Whether the brain "calculates" things using a method that is particularly similar to the methods used in today's quantum computers is...unlikely. It probably is "quantum" in other ways though. 0: https://www.the-scientist.com/infographics/infographic--quan...

Yes. It's unavoidably "quantum" in the sense that, as a physical machine in our universe it's subject to the rules, including quantum physics. However there is no apparent mechanism by which "thinking" could harness any interesting properties of quantum physics, it's just not happening at the right scale, like the way kids sand walls on the beach don't alter the world's tides.

Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#38

Post by b9a2cab5 »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #28

> Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. Surely this is a function of location? I understand the U.S.-English term “person o color” to be convoluted language for “not white”. One simple thing I notice i…

The meaning in woke terminology is more subtle than just "not white". For example Asians would likely be excluded in this case, and Middle Easterners and other minorities. "People of color" in this case means blacks and dark skinned Latinos.

The idea that AI itself can be biased (as opposed to the dataset) also has some significant problems. The lead of Facebook AI Research got canceled on Twitter because he pointed out that it's the bias in the dataset used to train the AI that results in bias in the AI and not the AI itself that's biased. I'd also question whether Gebru is a "widely respected leader in AI ethics research". Model interpretability is not even close to a solved problem so just because you can demonstrate some correlation between images of black people and worse performance does not imply that "black person" is a causative factor. It could literally be dataset distribution or image contrast or any number of other plausible explanations that are easily fixable by an ML engineer.

Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#39

Post by b9a2cab5 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #35
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #28

> Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. Surely this is a function of location? I understand the U.S.-English term “person o color” to be convoluted language for “not white”. One simple thing I notice i…

Searching for "child" or "house" will yield what has been classified as such in training - and searching for Japanese or Thai labels will do the same. No surprise there, if the labels don't get normalized before training. And normally, that's harmless - as you said, you'd expect to see an AI finding pictures of houses in the region/culture you are searching it. But in a multi-cultural/multi-ethnic society, searching…

No, remediating such issues (only predicting the maximum likelihood class in the dataset) is a problem of _machine learning and optimization_ research, not ethics research. There is nothing an ethicist can do to solve this problem. It is easy to point out problems with existing AI and write a bunch of papers to get yourself tenure. It is very hard to fundamentally advance our understanding of deep learning models past a fancy maximum likelihood estimation problem.

Re: DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size

#40

Post by Blikkentrekker »

mschuster91 wrote: post #35
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #28

> Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. Surely this is a function of location? I understand the U.S.-English term “person o color” to be convoluted language for “not white”. One simple thing I notice i…

Searching for "child" or "house" will yield what has been classified as such in training - and searching for Japanese or Thai labels will do the same. No surprise there, if the labels don't get normalized before training. And normally, that's harmless - as you said, you'd expect to see an AI finding pictures of houses in the region/culture you are searching it. But in a multi-cultural/multi-ethnic society, searching…

> And normally, that's harmless - as you said, you'd expect to see an AI finding pictures of houses in the region/culture you are searching it.

I am not actually; I am searching for “huis”, not “Nederlands huis”; I'd expect the result I obtain from the former with the latter.

I'd actually expect “house” and “huis” to reveal similar results from a good search engine. Obviously this is not easily possible with how it is trained with corpora in a specific language, but from usability I think this is undesirable, if I specifically want Dutch houses I can always add that term as a specification; there is no way to simply search for houses, wherever they might be, in Dutch, or English, or Thai, or any other language.

That is to say, I'm not arguing that there is no problem; I'm arguing that the problem is highly dependent upon location, and that he article should not take such a U.S.A.-centric stance and act as though the reset of the world not exist.

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