Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#541

Post by mantap » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:20 AM UTC

JabavuAdams wrote: post #466

marvin wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes I think the better analogy is Fermat's Last Theorem. It didn't require billions of dollars, it just required one incredibly smart specialist grinding on the problem for years.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#542

Post by p1esk » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:20 AM UTC

breck wrote: post #523

p1esk wrote: post #519

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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.

You don’t think AGI would dramatically speed up cancer research (or any other research)?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#543

Post by sverige » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:42 AM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #306

sverige wrote: post #298

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AGI would dwarf those 7 billion people because it would concentrate tremendous power into the hands of a very few. It's the dream of being one of the few who gets to control and direct that concentrated power that fuels these dreams, which is why it's imperative that they dress it up in the language of benefiting society. The essence of the ethical problem with AI is that there is no person or small group of people w…

I think this is a pretty big misunderstanding of the AGI issue. Nobody is going to control the hyper-intelligent AGI if its goals are not aligned with human goals more generally. That's the nature of something being a lot smarter than you with its own goals.

Wait, is the claim that intelligence alone determines who is in control? I've certainly seen lots of examples where people were controlled by others, even though they were orders of magnitude more intelligent than those who had power.

Are the people who are trying to make AI a reality planning to give away the ability to unplug the machine it will inevitably depend upon, or give it the ability to control nuclear weapons so that it can wipe out humanity before that happens, like a bad movie script? It really does seem that ridiculous to aver that the creators of AI, if it ever comes to be, won't retain ultimate control over what it can do in the physical world.

Whatever its goals end up being, they will be aligned with Microsoft's goals if OpenAI gets there first. That's what the billion dollars is meant to ensure.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#544

Post by sytelus » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:51 AM UTC

est31 wrote: post #501

cosmodisk wrote: post #365

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I often think that if I were a billionaire,I'd rather spend hundreds of millions on some cool R&D projects rather than having some 100 meter boat that one uses a only a few times a year. I could at least walk around in 20 or so years and say "I funded this" rather than pointing at a rusting boat nobody will ever care about.

Paul Allen had both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Institute https://www.cs.washington.edu/building In fact this tradition of rich people founding universities and research is nothing new. Stanford University was founded by a couple who said "The children of California shall be our children" after their child died. Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Technical Scho…

Allen donated about $2 billion to charitable causes [1] when he was alive. This included several whimsical stuff that wasn't research like Experience Music Project and Museum of Science Fiction. Relatively I believe he spent far more on luxuries he liked including world's most expensive yatch(es), fleet of private jets, mensions around the world, private music concerts, few sports teams here and there.

[1] https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Paul-Allen-s-2-Billion-...

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#545

Post by breck » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

p1esk wrote: post #542

breck wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don’t think AGI would dramatically speed up cancer research (or any other research)?

Of course I do, but my back of the envelope guess is there's a 30% shot we can cure cancer in 15 years without AGI, and a 1% shot we can reach AGI in 15 years. I think AGI is cool but I'm much more concerned about helping people with cancer.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#546

Post by sytelus » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:04 AM UTC

applecrazy wrote: post #450

chrshawkes wrote: post #425

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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…

AGI is not something unnatural that could never be attained. If biological systems can somehow attain it, there is no reason other kinds of man-made system cannot attain it.

The first main issue is that of compute capacity. Human brain has equivalent of at least 30 TFLOPS of computing power and this estimate is very likely 2 orders of magnitudes off.

Assume that somehow simulating 1 synapse takes only 1 transistor (gross underestimate). To simulate number of synapses in a single human brain then would need same number of transistors as in 10,000 NVidia V100 GPUs, one of the largest mass produced silicon chip!

The second main issue is of training neurons that are far more complex than our simple arithmetic adders. Back prop doesn't work for such complex neurons.

The 3rd big problem is that of training data. Human child churns through roughly 10 years of training data before reaching puberty. The man-made machine perhaps can take advantage of vast data already available but still there needs to be some structured training regiment.

So current AI efforts in relative comparison of human brain are playing with toy hardware and toy algorithms. It should be surprising that we have gone so far regardless.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#547

Post by ipsum2 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:08 AM UTC

I feel pretty bad for people working in ML/AI at Microsoft Research right now. Microsoft is sending a clear signal that they would pay $1B in outside AI research than spend the same amount internally.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#548

Post by antonvs » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

jorjordandan wrote: post #308

bogidon wrote: post #257

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Pron, I fully support your take here. Most AGI campaigners here clearly think that we must have already figured out a lot about how consciousness works. But is there any evidence to back that up? No, because we _haven't_ created consciousness. The most we've done is manipulate _existing_ consciousness. Sure, we can point to similarities between deep learning and the brain, and these avenues are interesting and, I thi…

Consciousness may not have anything to do with AGI. Besides, we haven't as a species defined consciousness in a consistent and coherent way. It may be an illusion or a word game. AGI may end up being more like evolution, a non-conscious self optimizing process. Everyone is talking about AGI but we can't even define what we mean by any of these terms, so to put limits on how near or far away major discoveries might be…

> It may be an illusion or a word game.

If consciousness is an illusion, what is experiencing the illusion? What makes an experience of consciousness an illusion rather than actual?

(Don't quote Dennett in response, I'm curious to see a straightforward reply to this that makes sense.)

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#549

Post by orbifold » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:21 AM UTC

laughinghan wrote: post #514

DuskStar wrote: post #457

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> 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…

You might not need a definition of consciousness. Right now it looks like you can get quite far with „fill in the blanks“ type losses (gpt-2 and Bert) in the case of Language understanding and Self-Play in the case of Games.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#550

Post by nradov » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:30 AM UTC

JabavuAdams wrote: post #461

I think I can develop GAI for less, in a shorter time-frame. Doubt anyone believes me enough to give me $$$.

Self fund your project and build a prototype. If you can demonstrate even some limited progress the investor community will drown you in funding.