A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#41

Post by jtbayly » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 1:02 AM UTC

jcims wrote: post #40

Animats wrote: post #5

"Contextual adaptation" is what they want, but that doesn't mean it's coming in the near future. However, this does mean that funding for research on it will be available. As I've said for years, the big lack in AI is in the "common sense" and unstructured manipulation area. Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations i…

This is one of my favorite little videos to illustrate the dichotomy - https://i.imgur.com/o7lI08Y.gifv For all of our mastery of information processing, our ability to fabricate and motivate fine differentiated structures is really quite incredibly poor relative to biology. The little beetle is basically alien technology relative to the toy. But add in the fact that it can feed itself, repair itself and reproduce it…

Why doesn't that play in Safari?

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#42

Post by gwern » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 1:13 AM UTC

BTW, the Tay example in the slides is bogus. Zero AI involved. You should ask what's cut off when you see a tweet reply like that. This is what's cut off: https://twitter.com/daviottenheimer/status/71288991553350041...

Tay had a 'repeat after me' feature (an ancient feature of any IRC chatbot to just echo or print a given string). That's all this is. A troll account issued the command 'Repeat after me' and then tweeted '@TayandYou HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG!', and the Tay daemon dutifully repeated it back to the troll in that thread.

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#43

Post by jcims » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

jtbayly wrote: post #41

jcims wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of my favorite little videos to illustrate the dichotomy - https://i.imgur.com/o7lI08Y.gifv For all of our mastery of information processing, our ability to fabricate and motivate fine differentiated structures is really quite incredibly poor relative to biology. The little beetle is basically alien technology relative to the toy. But add in the fact that it can feed itself, repair itself and reproduce it…

Why doesn't that play in Safari?

Interesting. No idea. Here's a beat up version of the same video on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkteAT64YtQ

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#44

Post by hotpotamus » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 1:25 AM UTC

zardo wrote: post #12

davidmanheim wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - those systems simulate "control" at the level of giving commands, not actual motor control. So practically, current AI can win at Go and play at superhuman levels, but still cannot drive a car as well as most adults.

You can sit down for a game of Go or StarCraft against an AI, and it will wipe the floor with you. But if you want it control a robot that's going to bring out a pot of tea while you play, you'll be wiping the floor.

Even just laying bricks or picking fruit seems well beyond machines as of yet, despite all the promises to eliminate toil.

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#45

Post by pklee » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

jcims wrote: post #43

jtbayly wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't that play in Safari?

Interesting. No idea. Here's a beat up version of the same video on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkteAT64YtQ

Reminded me of this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awG09liCMD4

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#46

Post by runnerup » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 3:31 AM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #10

hans1729 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation. Isn’t that what alpha go or the StarCraft league are? Organic strategies in well-defined contexts (action options of the squirrel at Tn)? “Squirrel” is a nice reference frame.

Manipulation in the sense of being able to physically pick things up and manipulate them. Which is a difficult problem. StarCraft is moving a mouse pointer and clicking.

AlphaStar dropped the pretenses of even doing that much because it added too much complexity. For its show matches in Starcraft2, AlphaStar just uses an API to say "Target this specific enemy carrier". It doesn't have to do any vision recognition or differentiate between multiple overlapping units like humans do.

That was the original intent, but it appears the dropped it before public demos.

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#47

Post by mach1ne » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 7:16 AM UTC

gwern wrote: post #42

BTW, the Tay example in the slides is bogus. Zero AI involved. You should ask what's cut off when you see a tweet reply like that. This is what's cut off: https://twitter.com/daviottenheimer/status/71288991553350041... Tay had a 'repeat after me' feature (an ancient feature of any IRC chatbot to just echo or print a given string). That's all this is. A troll account issued the command 'Repeat after me' and then tweet…

How much of the controversy surrounding Tay is a result of this specific command?

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#48

Post by jonplackett » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 7:57 AM UTC

jcims wrote: post #40

Animats wrote: post #5

"Contextual adaptation" is what they want, but that doesn't mean it's coming in the near future. However, this does mean that funding for research on it will be available. As I've said for years, the big lack in AI is in the "common sense" and unstructured manipulation area. Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations i…

This is one of my favorite little videos to illustrate the dichotomy - https://i.imgur.com/o7lI08Y.gifv For all of our mastery of information processing, our ability to fabricate and motivate fine differentiated structures is really quite incredibly poor relative to biology. The little beetle is basically alien technology relative to the toy. But add in the fact that it can feed itself, repair itself and reproduce it…

I find the comparison with AI and insects really interesting to illustrate just how far off the mark we still are.

You have a room sized super computer that trains for zillions of hours and can’t even pick out pedestrians with especially good precision.

Then you have a bee with a minuscule brain that can do complex pattern recognition to find flowers, complex manipulation to get nectar and pollen out of them, object avoidance, swarming behaviour, and fancy communicative dances (both performing and interpreting), plus all the other stuff bees do to get by in the world.

Something is up there for sure.

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#49

Post by jd115 » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 8:27 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #5

"Contextual adaptation" is what they want, but that doesn't mean it's coming in the near future. However, this does mean that funding for research on it will be available. As I've said for years, the big lack in AI is in the "common sense" and unstructured manipulation area. Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations i…

The low-level thing that isn't understood is that intelligence is not progressive. You can not build up to it. Sure, you can forever continue to build better and better approximations of certain aspects of intelligence and pretend you're making progress, but you are not. Of course, there is great utilitarian value in those approximations, so we MUST continue to do this.

Still, my position is that NO progress has ever been made in the area of AI, and no progress will be made any time soon.

I'll take it a step further (in case I don't get enough downvotes for what I've written so far). I maintain that you CAN NOT build intelligence. You can only TAP INTO it. So the very direction in which all of our AI efforts are headed is a dead-end.

Re: A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence [pdf]

#50

Post by grapescheesee » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 8:32 AM UTC

jd115 wrote: post #49

Animats wrote: post #5

"Contextual adaptation" is what they want, but that doesn't mean it's coming in the near future. However, this does mean that funding for research on it will be available. As I've said for years, the big lack in AI is in the "common sense" and unstructured manipulation area. Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations i…

The low-level thing that isn't understood is that intelligence is not progressive. You can not build up to it. Sure, you can forever continue to build better and better approximations of certain aspects of intelligence and pretend you're making progress, but you are not. Of course, there is great utilitarian value in those approximations, so we MUST continue to do this. Still, my position is that NO progress has ever…

I agree. We need to stop this over use, actually the use of AI as some grounded in science matter of fact. What we have is ML, and thus a system for algorithmic refinement and definition.