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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#391
post #335
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You piqued my interest, what makes you think there's any intelligence, artificial or otherwise, anywhere else but here in the Milky Way?

I think because the universe is so infinite and vast the math makes sense there would be others out there. We just don't have the technology yet to travel fast or far enough and also cant communicate/detect them.

The Milky Way is not infinite and not even that vast. As for "not having the technology", why not postulate an equal likelihood for heavenly angels? We just don't have the technology to perceive heaven, after all...

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#392
post #140
post #64

New York Times has a bit more context > Mr. Nadella said Microsoft would not necessarily invest that billion dollars all at once. It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. Microsoft is investing dollars that will be fed back into its own business, as OpenAI purchases computing power from the software giant, and the collaboration between the two companies could yield a wide array of technologies. http…

(I work at OpenAI.) > It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. The NYT article is misleading here. We'll definitely spend the $1B within 5 years, and maybe much faster. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are any of those recent? I agree that microsoft has been pretty dickish and I'm sure parts of it continue to be (see http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts as an example for why), but as a whole I feel that they are better with OSS now than they have every been.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all this talk of AGI some kind of marketing meme that you guys are tolerating? We haven't figured out sentiment analysis or convnets resilient to single pixel attacks, and here is a page talking about the god damned singularity. As an industry, we've already burned through a bunch of buzzwords that are now meaningless marketing-speak. 'ML', 'AI', 'NLP', 'cognitive computing'. Are we going for broke and adding AGI…

At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety? What "threshold" would you want to cross before you think its socially acceptable to put resources behind ensuring that humanity doesn't wipe itself out? The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate timeline looks like. We might be 10 years away from the singularity, 1000 years, or it might never ever happen! There…

The proper threshold would be the demonstration of an AGI approximately as smart as a mouse. Until then it's just idle speculation. We don't even know the key parameters for having a productive discussion.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#395
post #196
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at OpenAI.) > It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. The NYT article is misleading here. We'll definitely spend the $1B within 5 years, and maybe much faster. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!

>>"We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!" That's great, one question where can I use GYM or universe in the cloud with the render() option. I've spend many hours trying to set up the environment in cloud [1] without success. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40195740/how-to-run-open...

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#396
post #140
post #64

New York Times has a bit more context > Mr. Nadella said Microsoft would not necessarily invest that billion dollars all at once. It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. Microsoft is investing dollars that will be fed back into its own business, as OpenAI purchases computing power from the software giant, and the collaboration between the two companies could yield a wide array of technologies. http…

(I work at OpenAI.) > It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. The NYT article is misleading here. We'll definitely spend the $1B within 5 years, and maybe much faster. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#397
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a comment this precise I'm surprised you've mistaken spiders for insects :) True. They're fellow arthropods, and have similar levels of nervous complexity. (BTW, are you by any chance confusing Tarantula Hawks for spiders?) does make for less inspirational copy The levels of inspiration in the copy and generalizing across the phylum Arthropoda aside, are you effectively conceding that we're close to AGI at insect…

> are you effectively conceding that we're close to AGI at insect levels? By "we are not even close to achieving insect-level intelligence" I think I meant that what we have now is not close in intelligence (whatever that means) to insects. I don't know if we have a 50% of getting there in a decade, but I certainly wouldn't conclusively say that "we are not even close" to that. I mostly regret having chosen bikes rat…

By "we are not even close to achieving insect-level intelligence" I think I meant that what we have now is not close in intelligence (whatever that means) to insects.

Some insects are pretty stupid! Fleas and ticks have a good and highly adapted repertoire of behaviors, but for the most part, as far as we know, most individual behaviors are fairly simple.

I mostly regret having chosen bikes rather than electric scooters for my original comment.

Here's where your analogy falls down. We don't even have working examples of a complete warp drive, or anything like it. On the other hand, we don't have any commercial airliner sized beamed-power electric jets, but we have smaller conceptual models of the involved devices which demonstrate the principles. This is why I'd say we're "close to close" to insect level intelligence. 10 years and $10B would get us to the flea level. I think that's "close" like airliner sized beamed-power electric jets is close.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few, or even one, brilliant mind(s) could make a break thru in AGI in a matter of months. same goes for warp drives doesn't it? The point is that people don't see how we build THAT out of these tools we currently have. We only build pastiches of intelligence today and either we have an arrogant view of the level of our own intelligence or we can't make THAT with THIS. But maybe warp-drives, maybe world-peace too?

Not really - we're not sure if warp drive is possible given the physical constraints of the universe. AGI is possible because intelligence is possible (and common on earth) in nature.

> AGI is possible because intelligence is possible (and common on earth) in nature.

But you haven't asked if we're capable of building it. While it might be technically possible are we capable of managing its construction?

All I see today is ways of making the process more opaque at the benefit of not having to provide the implementation. How does that technique even start to scale in terms of its construction? I worry about the exponentially increasing length of the "80% done" stage, and that's on the happy path.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all this talk of AGI some kind of marketing meme that you guys are tolerating? We haven't figured out sentiment analysis or convnets resilient to single pixel attacks, and here is a page talking about the god damned singularity. As an industry, we've already burned through a bunch of buzzwords that are now meaningless marketing-speak. 'ML', 'AI', 'NLP', 'cognitive computing'. Are we going for broke and adding AGI…

At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety? What "threshold" would you want to cross before you think its socially acceptable to put resources behind ensuring that humanity doesn't wipe itself out? The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate timeline looks like. We might be 10 years away from the singularity, 1000 years, or it might never ever happen! There…

> There is a non-zero chance that we are a few breakthroughs away from creating a technology that far surpasses the nuclear bomb in terms of destructive potential.

No, there is exactly zero chance that anyone is "a few breakthroughs away" from AGI.

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