MIT IQ: The MIT Intelligence Quest • Hacker News Board

Re: MIT IQ: The MIT Intelligence Quest

#41

Post by zaptheimpaler » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:00 PM UTC

kough wrote: post #23

MIT is in the process of converting its brand's value into money. It's interesting, because the brand is so strong that they probably can announce even more stupid "quests" and "initiatives" and "labs" (like the IBM "collaboration") to extract value from industry without seriously harming the quality of the students who apply. But as a current student it's kind of heartbreaking. This place has been so special for so…

I don't see anything super wrong about marketing & presenting a research endeavor. I mean its a lot more accessible than a 10 year old website by a professor with a bunch of links to papers, and if it helps get people from different fields, and across academia and industry collaborate then great.

Re: MIT IQ: The MIT Intelligence Quest

#42

Post by sebleon » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:01 PM UTC

> And today, by tapping the united strength of these and other interlocking fields and capitalizing on what they can teach each other, we seek to answer the deepest questions about intelligence — and to deliver transformative new gifts for humankind.

Ugh, this kind of corporate-speak is nauseating. Can anyone understand what this "quest" actually entails?

Re: MIT IQ: The MIT Intelligence Quest

#43

Post by sampo » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #36

lucozade wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. enord's saying that they'll all sit down together and realise that they don't know very much about intelligence after all. So all the current excitement around super-intelligent AIs, and whatnot, will go the same way as it has the previous times we all got excited.

But isn't AI getting percievably better every run?

The finish line of a marathon is getting nearer every step, but we've yet to clear even the first mile.

Re: MIT IQ: The MIT Intelligence Quest

#44

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 10:56 PM UTC

enord wrote: post #39

nopinsight wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is some evidence or reasoning that we are reaching certain hard limits as you mentioned?

I never mentioned limits, and the reasoning is purely inductive, based on previous events. We are far away from understanding intelligence in all directions. Top down, bottom up, neurologically, psychologically, logically, mathematically and last but not least philosophically. There's optimism at the moment, because we are doing more stuff with more annotated data (the annotations providing the semantic grounding, as…

The annotation is not even particularly smart. In supervised classification, labels are basically scalars, standing for... whatever the researcher means them to stand for. The class represented by the label can be as broad or as narrow as the researcher wants it to be. Even the relation of the class with the data it is supposed to represent is arbitrary and its choice entirely unprincipled and based on instinct alone.

Which goes to show that a) our machine learning models are dumb as bricks and b) they are as far from AGI as worms are from building a rocket to go to the moon, where their god lives (see all those holes up there?).

Re: MIT IQ: The MIT Intelligence Quest

#45

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #40

randcraw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, machine translation from one human language to another has been acclaimed as one of the big success areas in deep learning. But when one looks deeper, there be dragons... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-s...

Oh wow. That's Douglas Hofstadter in great form. Could you please submit that to HN so it has a chance to get to the fist page?

Never mind- there's already a conversation. Thanks for posting anyway.