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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#511

Post by laughinghan »

DuskStar wrote: post #422
umvi wrote: post #414

Earlier 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…

> 90% confidence [0] that creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with Uranium was impossible

But the fact that Fermi was doing such a calculation in the first place proves that we knew in principle how a fission weapon could work, even if we didn't know "how far off [they] were". As soon as we figured out the moon was just a rock 240,000 miles away, we knew in principle we could go there, even if we didn't know how far off that would be.

By contrast, we don't know what consciousness or intelligence even is. A child could define what walking on the moon is, and Fermi was able to define a self-sustaining nuclear reaction as soon as he learned what nuclear reactions were. What even is the definition of consciousness?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#512

Post by gdb »

H8crilA wrote: post #505

Why is it called an investment? Is OpenAI a corporation that plans to pay out dividends? I thought it's more of a non-profit. This deal looks more like a donation of cloud compute resources. Still a great idea (moves ML research closer to their platform, eating more of Google's lunch), but it's not an investment in OpenAI.

The investment is in OpenAI LP: https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/!

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#513

Post by throwawaywego »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #273
pron wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But so has every other big idea that went on to become reality, like planes (da Vinci was drawing designs for planes over 400 years before the first working ones). And so has every other big idea that didn't become reality, and that was the majority. Again, I have no problem with AI research whatsoever, but the prose was still eyebrow-raising considering the actual state of affairs. > They are very similar. They ar…

Do you have a reference on the brain not learning with backpropagation? I'd like to learn more.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04156

> Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning

> Neuroscientists have long criticised deep learning algorithms as incompatible with current knowledge of neurobiology. We explore more biologically plausible versions of deep representation learning, focusing here mostly on unsupervised learning but developing a learning mechanism that could account for supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. The starting point is that the basic learning rule believed to govern synaptic weight updates (Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity) arises out of a simple update rule that makes a lot of sense from a machine learning point of view and can be interpreted as gradient descent on some objective function so long as the neuronal dynamics push firing rates towards better values of the objective function (be it supervised, unsupervised, or reward-driven). The second main idea is that this corresponds to a form of the variational EM algorithm, i.e., with approximate rather than exact posteriors, implemented by neural dynamics. Another contribution of this paper is that the gradients required for updating the hidden states in the above variational interpretation can be estimated using an approximation that only requires propagating activations forward and backward, with pairs of layers learning to form a denoising auto-encoder. Finally, we extend the theory about the probabilistic interpretation of auto-encoders to justify improved sampling schemes based on the generative interpretation of denoising auto-encoders, and we validate all these ideas on generative learning tasks.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#514

Post by laughinghan »

DuskStar wrote: post #457
idlewords wrote: post #440

Earlier 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…

> 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. Extrapolating as you seem to be here, w…

If you read your own Wikipedia link, you'd see that Rutherford's gold foil experiments were started in 1908, his nuclear model of the atom was proposed in 1911—we even split the atom in 1932! (1938 is when we discovered that splitting heavier atoms could release energy rather than consume it.)

We haven't even had the AGI equivalent of the Rutherford model of the atom yet: what's the definition of consciousness? What is even the definition of intelligence?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#516

Post by codingslave »

robomartin wrote: post #139

I could be wrong on this. I think the AI/AGI problem isn’t so much about money and more about not having discovered the unique insight that will make it happen. In other words, someone in a garage might be far more likely to find how to trigger the proverbial inflection point. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t always produce solutions. It can sure accelerate a project down the path it is on...but, if the path is wr…

I dont think this is true at all. I think that NLP models, especially the state of the art ones (in the coming years), will cost a few million to train. Massive volumes of data sucked up by a model.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#517

Post by dmix »

jv22222 wrote: post #499
iamcreasy wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a bit off topic here, I was wondering if you could shade some light on why Elon Musk parted away from OpenAI. On Twitter he said he disagreed on what OpenAI wanted to do. Could you please tell me more on that? It seems what OpenAI is doing is pretty great.

This might help answer that: - https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Elon-Musk-quit-OpenAI-Is-he-af... - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-17/elon-musk...

Seems like an entirely reasonable choice. He’s actively commercializing AI and doesn’t want any impression of conflict of interest. Especially as now OpenAI has some clear commercialization plans directly with Microsoft.

From the article:

> The most obvious way to cover costs is to build a product, but that would mean changing our focus. Instead, we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them.

Talent will be the hardest challenge for OpenAI in order to reach their goals.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#518

Post by samstave »

gdb wrote: post #140
tosh wrote: 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!

Gosh, its going to be so interesting to see a fabric of AI exist over the next decades across various cloud infra...

Will they fight?

Azure AI layers and say private company AIs like FBs (Ono Sendai), GCP, AWS, etc... where these AIs start learning how to protect themselves from attack....

Obv it super trivial for API mods to the FW/Access rules in all these systems... so it will be trvial for them to start shutting down access (we have had this for decades, but it will be interesting to see it at scale.)

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