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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#431

Post by benl »

feanaro wrote: post #401
benl wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I used to hold that view too. But actually it turns out that the null hypothesis is that mind is at least partly immaterial, because all attempts to demonstrate the opposite philosophically are fraught with difficulty. I’ve found that the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas, when explained by modern philosophers, best explains to me why that’s the case.

> ... because all attempts to demonstrate the opposite philosophically are fraught with difficulty. Can you give at least a rough sketch or gist of the argument you are referring to?

I’ll try because you asked me to, but i think I’ll do a bad job. You’ll get a much better understanding by reading on the topics of philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Here goes, though:

1. Purely immaterial things exist. Think of mathematics or the laws of logic or physics - these things exist as ideas or concepts, not arrangements of matter.

2. Some abstract concepts cannot be embodied in matter at all. For example, you can make a shoe, you can draw a shoe, but you can’t draw shoe-ness. You can understand and reason about what makes something a shoe in the abstract, but you can only make or draw an individual shoe.

3) the mind contains these purely immaterial things when we think about and reason about them.

4) If we can use the abstract concepts, but the abstract concepts can’t be embodied in matter, then the mind must be at least partly immaterial in order for the concepts to be in our mind.

I hope that helps a but please don’t rely on my exposition of the case - a real philosopher would do it justice.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#432

Post by _ptgt »

feral wrote: post #21

I want to take everything OpenAI says at face value (seem like good folk), but I can't help but wonder at the recent choice to keep GPT2 closed, on what seemed like pretty thin safety arguments to me. Now, the demonstrated ability to produce new models which are closed, but maybe can be used as services on a preferred partner's cloud, looks very commercially relevant? How will these conflicts be managed, or is it mor…

Their handling of OpenAIFive rubbed me the wrong way as well. The whole operation smelled very PR-ish to me personally -- unnecessarily/unjustifiably HYPE representatives, complaining that the Dota community wanted to see OpenAIFive play a normal Dota match against pros rather a heavily constrained environment to benefit the bots, among other things.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#433

Post by PeterStuer »

neiman wrote: post #27

$1B dollar is a lot of money. Microsoft is not a charity foundation, so the suspicious is obvious. > We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large…

Does that mean OpenAI will (co-)develop the Azure AI platform, and then pay Microsoft for using it?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#434

Post by benl »

emanuensis wrote: post #419
benl wrote: post #346

If you strip out the AGI hype then this just sounds like OpenAI is now moving to monetizing their tech. This makes sense for them but probably not for the philanthropists who originally backed them. Sadly for them, AGI is metaphysically impossible - this will be realized eventually but a lot of waste and possibly harm will happen first. We are not just super sophisticated machines, so the fact that we can think doesn…

Sounds like @benl has been afflicted with the "Cartesian wound". Such dualistic thinking and ideas like free will are ~hard for us to work through. But perhaps the more important, and immediately tractable, question @benl brings up is what our approach should be? Should we make an AGI or better IA, Intelligence Augmentation? ~hard Daniel Dennett From Bacteria to Bach and Back

You might be more familiar with the field than me, but my understanding is that’s Dennett position is not well-thought-of in the fields of philosophy of mind and metaphysics. At the very least there are very good cases made that unpick his position very carefully. They’re not all Cartesian views - I grasp the Aristotelian views best myself.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#435

Post by mritchie712 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #426
mritchie712 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, do you mean how can Azure scale to AGI? I have no opinion on Azure, I just meant someone smart will figure it out. There are huge financial incentives to do so, when that happens, we (humans) figure shit out.

> Oh, do you mean how can Azure scale to AGI? No, not in the slightest. I mean as we progress the dev cycles get harder and slower. Then we need more engineers and the administration of more engineers working together makes everything harder. Have you ever considered that making a rock think might be one of the greatest engineering projects our species has ever taken on? Sure humans might figure it out but I'm of the…

Fair point, but I think admin needs have gotten lighter. It took 400k people to get us to the moon. I want to see the results of 400k engineers working independently or in small teams on AGI.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#436

Post by dang »

wasoante wrote: post #356
gonehome wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is that decision theory and goal alignment can be worked on without knowing all the details about how an AGI will work. https://intelligence.org/2016/12/28/ai-alignment-why-its-har...

ah yes Yudkowsky, the well established AI researcher & definitely not a crank

Personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of whom you're attacking. Can you please not post like this to HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#437

Post by jacques_chester »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #326
ilaksh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its just like the bag of sugar I have in my cabinet that claims to be low calorie. It says "ONLY 16 CALORIES (per 4 grams in tiny letters)". I mean, sugar is pretty much the definition of a high calorie food. Its like, pure calories. And can affect insulin regulation, etc. That's why they need to put some marketing on it.

Super nitpicky: sugar is 4 kcal/gram, but so is protein, and fats is 9 kcal/g, over double the caloric content. By saying sugar is "pure calories," I guess you mean that it doesn't contain any fibre or micronutrients that might give it redeeming qualities (besides its taste), which is true.

Most people are not putting spoonfuls of beef in their coffee.

Sugar is, quite literally, pure carbohydrates. Most sources of protein are not, unless you're consuming refined amino acids (pro tip: they taste awful).

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#438

Post by emanuensis »

benl wrote: post #434
emanuensis wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like @benl has been afflicted with the "Cartesian wound". Such dualistic thinking and ideas like free will are ~hard for us to work through. But perhaps the more important, and immediately tractable, question @benl brings up is what our approach should be? Should we make an AGI or better IA, Intelligence Augmentation? ~hard Daniel Dennett From Bacteria to Bach and Back

You might be more familiar with the field than me, but my understanding is that’s Dennett position is not well-thought-of in the fields of philosophy of mind and metaphysics. At the very least there are very good cases made that unpick his position very carefully. They’re not all Cartesian views - I grasp the Aristotelian views best myself.

Thanks, i will keep studying. In the mean time my actions will veer more towards IA than AI

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#439

Post by jacques_chester »

pron wrote: post #40

Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody. I believe that building a beneficial warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien…

Sam Altman is, so far as I can determine, quite sincere.

Since I am not a particular fan of Sam Altman, I'm not a fan of his hand on any tiller steering towards AGI. But it's not up to me. It'll happen or not. If it doesn't happen, fine, we merely live with the infinite omnicreepiness that AI/ML has begun to spread into modern society. If it does happen, then I hope it's not buggered up.

The thing is, we won't hear the understated work. Because it's understated. The press loves a big story. Love 'em or hate 'em, big egos get clicks and views.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#440

Post by idlewords »

DuskStar wrote: post #389
nradov wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to worry. No one is anywhere close to achieving true AGI so any safety concerns are a moot issue. It's akin to worrying about an alien invasion.

> No one is anywhere close to achieving true AGI No one knows how far off true AGI is, just like no one in 1940 (or 1910) knew how far off fission weapons were. EDIT: I quite liked this article from a few years back [0], and the fission weapon prediction example is stolen from there. 0: https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/

This is a flawed analogy. The conceptual basis of nuclear weapons was well understood as soon as it was learned that the atom has a compact nucleus. The energy needed to bind that nucleus together gives a rough idea of the power of a fission weapon. If that energy could be liberated all at once, it would make an explosive orders of magnitude more powerful than anything known.

It was hard to predict when or if such a thing could be made, but everyone knew what was under discussion.

Compare this to AGI, some vaguely emergent property of a complex computer system that no one can define to anyone else's satisfaction. Attempts to be more precise what AGI is, how it would first manifest itself, and why on earth we should be afraid of it, rapidly devolve into nerd ghost stories.

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