I think I can develop GAI for less, in a shorter time-frame. Doubt anyone believes me enough to give me $$$.
Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
461–470 of 623 posts
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
1932 neutron discovered
1942 first atomic reactor
1945 fission bomb
1897 electron discovered
1940's vacuum tube computers
1970's integrated circuits
1980's first AI wave fails, AI winter begins
2012 AI spring begins
2019 AI can consistently recognize a jpeg of a cat, but still not walk like a cat
???? Human level AGI
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought from day one that the name «OpenAI» would at best be a slight misnomer, and at worst indicative of a misguided approach. If AGI is close to being achieved, sharing key details of the approach to any actors at all could trigger a Manhattan Project-type global arms race where safety was compromised and the whole thing became insanely risky for the future of humanity. Glad to see that the team is taking a prag…
The atomic bomb was based on science theory. A computer can run many programs and do a great many things, but it will never be able to think by itself.
That's quite a claim, considering that we don't know what the word "think" means.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think continual Turing testing is the only way of concluding whether an agent exhibits intelligence or not. So you think it's impossible to ever determine that a chimpanzee, or even a feral child, exhibits intelligence? This seems rather defeatist.
No, interpreting "continual" the way you did would mean I should believe that we can't conclude our friends to be intelligent either (I don't believe that). Maybe I should've said "prolonged" rather than "continual". Let me elaborate on my previous point with an example. If you look at the recent works in machine translation, you can see that the commonly used evaluation metric of BLEU is being improved upon at least…
My comment was not on ‘continual’ but on ‘Turing test’.
If you gave 100 chimps of the highest calibre 100 attempts each, not a single one would pass a single Turing test. Ask a feral child to translate even the most basic children's book, and their mistakes will be so systematic that Google Translate will look like professional discourse. ‘Humanlike mistakes’ and stability with respect to input in the sense you mean here are harder problems than intelligence, because a chimp is intelligent and functionally incapable of juggling more than the most primitive syntaxes in a restricted set of forms.
I agree it is foolish to just draw a trend line through a single weak measure and extrapolate to infinity, but the idea that no collation of weak measures has any bearing on fact rules out ever measuring weak or untrained intelligence. That is what I called defeatist.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Sounds like a great idea and I'm all for it but I'm talking about the integration of that mess. It will be like trying to hit an ant on the moon with the precision of 18th century artillery.
> Well we've removed its irrational hatred of penguins but now it struggles with the concept of Wednesday again...
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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/
The Manhattan Project is a very apt analogy. Even if you believe that AGI is impossible, it should be possible to appreciate that many billions would quickly be invested in its development if somehow a viable pathway to it became clear. Even if just to a few well-connected experts. This is what happened when it became known nuclear weapons were a viable concept. The technology shifted power to such an extreme degree…
Why do we assume that AGI requires billions of $? Fundamentally, we don't know how to do it, so it may just require the right software design.
Nuclear weapons required enriched uranium, and the gaseous diffusion process of the time was insanely power-hungry. Like non-negligable (>1% ?) percentage of the US's entire electrical generation power-hungry.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
1932 neutron discovered 1942 first atomic reactor 1945 fission bomb Now for AI 1897 electron discovered 1940's vacuum tube computers 1970's integrated circuits 1980's first AI wave fails, AI winter begins 2012 AI spring begins 2019 AI can consistently recognize a jpeg of a cat, but still not walk like a cat ???? Human level AGI It doesn't seem comparable one way or the other, in many ways. But if we do compare them,…
Beer * beets * bears * Battlestar Galactica
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Manhattan project happened when the entire conceptual road map to fission weapons was understood. This is manifestly not the case with AI, which can be charitably described as "add computers until magic".
I didn’t compare OpenAI to the Manhattan Project. I was pointing out that if a small number of people discover a plausible conceptual pathway to AGI, a similar project will happen.
And I'm pointing out that the conceptual breakthroughs that preceded such an engineering sprint happened in the open literature. Wells was writing sci-fi about atomic weapons in 1914. He based it off of a pop-science book written in 1909.
We don't have any such understanding, or even a definition, of 'AGI'.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I thought by 1940 physicists generally understood fission and theoretically understood how to build a bomb - they just needed to find enough distilled fissile material (which was hard to do). And indeed, once they had enough U235, they had such a high degree of confidence in the theory, that they built a functioning U235 bomb without ever having previously tested one.
In 1939, Enrico Fermi expressed 90% confidence [0] that creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with Uranium was impossible. And, if you're working with U238, it basically is! But it turns out that it's possible to separate out U235 in sufficient quantities to use that instead. On the 2nd of December, 1942 he led an experiment at Chicago Pile 1 [1] that initiated the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction. And it…
> In 1939, Enrico Fermi expressed 90% confidence [0] that creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with Uranium was impossible. And, if you're working with U238, it basically is! But it turns out that it's possible to separate out U235 in sufficient quantities to use that instead.
You are moving goalposts. You mentioned in the first place "fission weapons" and now you take a quote about "nuclear fission reactor" which is a whole different thing.
Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think there is a lot of evidence that explosive progress could be made quickly. Alphago zero, machine cision, sentiment analysis, machine translation.. voice.. etc etc etc All these things have surged incredibly in less than a decade. It's always a long way off until it isn't.
> I think there is a lot of evidence that explosive progress could be made quickly. Alphago zero, machine cision, sentiment analysis, machine translation.. voice.. etc etc etc
Not at all, these are all one-trick poneys and bring you nowhere close to real AGI which is akin to human intelligence.