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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#521

Post by DuskStar »

laughinghan wrote: post #511
DuskStar wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

None of this really counters the core point - that we don't know how long it will be before we have AGI. Is there some way to define consciousness that will be discovered in the future that makes the problem possible?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#522

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jacques_chester wrote: post #437
EForEndeavour wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ).

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

That could be... interesting. It could be in the form of beef bullion, so you really could put in a spoonful.

But I wonder if bacon would be better...

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#523

Post by breck »

p1esk wrote: post #519
breck wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to get to AGI.

If you know how to get there why don’t you build it?

1) Indeed we are doing a few of the things on the checklist to build AGI.

2) Our focus is on helping improve medical and clinical science and cancer tooling first.

3) If we needed AGI to cure cancer, perhaps we'd be working directly on AGI. If anyone thinks this is the case, please let me know, as at the moment I don't think it is.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#524

Post by rq1 »

carapace wrote: post #481

Given their stated mission: > OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. I'm struck by the homogeneity the OpenAI team. https://openai.com/content/images/2019/07/openai-team-offsit... It seems to be mostly white people and a few Asians, without a single black or Hispanic person.

And who the hell do they think they are to know what’s better for the humanity?

Their arrogance is dangerous indeed.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#525

Post by inflatableDodo »

applecrazy wrote: post #450
chrshawkes wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch the Kool-Aid intake and you'll be just fine. Dreams are great and an absolute necessity for success but create your own. Don't buy into everything you hear, especially Elon Musk talking about Artificial General Intelligence.

Oh, I'm well aware of the hype around AGI. My personal view is that AGI is kind of an asymptotic goal, something we'll get kind of close to but never actually reach. Nevertheless, I would like to work on more pragmatic goals, like improving the current state-of-the-art language models and text generation networks. I'm actually starting by reimplementing Seq2Seq as described by Quoc Le et al.[1] for text summarization…

>My personal view is that AGI is kind of an asymptotic goal, something we'll get kind of close to but never actually reach.

Personally, I think it is only a matter of time. Though I suspect that we will probably 'cheat' our way there first with the wetware from cultured neurons that various groups are developing, before we manage to create it in completely synthetic hardware. Also, it might just be the wetware that leads us to the required insights. This is very problematic territory however. I think we are very likely to utterly torture some of the conscious entities created along this path.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#526

Post by MetalGuru »

throwawaywego wrote: post #406
z3t4 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The atomic bomb was based on science theory. Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too. > A computer ... will never be able to think by itself. Turing wrote an entire paper about this (Computing Machinery and Intelligence), where he rephrases your statement (because he finds it to be meaningless) and devises a test to answer it. He also directly attacks your phrasing of "but it will never": > I…

> A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks.

This seems like a cop out. Sure, if you do your calculations wrong, it doesn’t behave as you expect. But it’s still doing exactly what you wrote it to do. The surprise is in realizing your expectations were wrong, not that the machine decided to behave differently.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#527

Post by logicchains »

sgt101 wrote: post #336
logicchains wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any sense in which Godel's incompleteness theorem implied that Artificial General Intelligence was impossible would also imply that General Intelligence is impossible; the human brain isn't immune to the laws of logic. The human brain is just a very complex, possibly quantum, computer. Short of believing in some kind of supernatural human soul, there's no reason to expect a sufficiently complex computer couldn't matc…

I think that there are other mechanisms apart from computation; the question is - are they operant in our universe? The implication of the answer being "no" is that we are automaton, free will does not exist (it isn't even an illusion, you are as much a puppet thinking about it as you are trying to change your fate. Well, moving on from there we can dismantle all of the morality and humanity of our lives and not chan…

>The implication of the answer being "no" is that we are automaton, free will does not exist (it isn't even an illusion, you are as much a puppet thinking about it as you are trying to change your fate.

This is implied by logic anyway. Why do we make decision X at time T? Because of who we are at time T. Why are we that person at time T? Because of decisions made at time T-1. Why did we make those decision at T-1? Because of who we were then, which was the restult of decisions made at T-2. If we continue this process, we reach T-only-a-baby, when we were incapable of conscious decision making. So causally all our actions can be traced back to something we can't control. Unless, some of our decisions were entirely the result of chance, but in this case we still don't have free will, we just have actions that are random instead of predetermined.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#528

Post by laughinghan »

DuskStar wrote: post #521
laughinghan wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

None of this really counters the core point - that we don't know how long it will be before we have AGI. Is there some way to define consciousness that will be discovered in the future that makes the problem possible?

Your core point (and that of the MIRI article you linked to) is not just "we don't know". It's that the chance of being imminent and catastrophic is worth taking seriously.

I am of course not saying you're wrong that "we don't know". We obviously don't know. It's possible, just like it's possible that we could discover cheap free energy (fusion?) tomorrow and then be in a post-scarcity utopia. But that's worth taking about as seriously as the possibility that we'll discover AGI tomorrow and be in a Terminator dystopia, or also a post-scarcity utopia.

More importantly, it's a distraction from the very real, well-past-imminent problems that existing dumb AI has, such as the surveillance economy and misinformation. OpenAI, to their credit, does a good job of taking these existing problems quite seriously. They draw a strong contrast to MIRI's AI alarmism.

Have you ever read idlewords? Best writing I know of on this subject: https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#529

Post by cma »

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.

I think they decided to go ahead and not be a charity in addition to not being open.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#530

Post by throwawaywego »

MetalGuru wrote: post #526
throwawaywego wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The atomic bomb was based on science theory. Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too. > A computer ... will never be able to think by itself. Turing wrote an entire paper about this (Computing Machinery and Intelligence), where he rephrases your statement (because he finds it to be meaningless) and devises a test to answer it. He also directly attacks your phrasing of "but it will never": > I…

> A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks. This seems like…

I think any AI researcher has a tale where an algorithm they wrote genuinely took them by surprise. Not due to wrong calculations, but by introducing randomness, heaps of data, and game bounderaries where the AI is free to fill in the blanks.

A good example of this is "move 37" from AlphaGo. This move surprised everyone, including the creators, who were not skilled enough in Go to hardcode it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT-UZkiOLv8

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