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

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#551

Post by chillacy » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:45 AM UTC

craigsmansion wrote: post #343

chillacy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying.. it comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable within our lifetime? Or even worth contributing to at all even. I think the parent has made their position pretty clear through their employment choices, that’s a level of skin in the game that naysayers don’t really have.

> I think the parent has made their position pretty clear through their employment choices, Their employer has just received a 1 billion dollar cash investment to futz around with computers. I don't think the employment choice is some sort of personal sacrifice here. The level of skin here is a cushy guaranteed job for years to come until the next AI-winter hits, likely set into motion by such very claims of "AGI" be…

That's true but at the same time I'm not trying to be in AI because it's such a specialist role which may or may not be a fad which the employment market overfills with new grads with a new degree in "ML", bricking salaries. But I think the internet will be here for awhile.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#552

Post by kirillzubovsky » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:45 AM UTC

Azure has a supercomputer emulator, and even if OpenAI doesn't get a full $1B in cash but gets to use it as credits on the emulator, that could be huge.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#553

Post by davej » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 4:46 AM UTC

iamcreasy wrote: post #492

gdb wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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!

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.

Sam Altman is on record saying that they asked him to leave because he recruited talent from OpenAI for his other companies. Sam seemed quite philosophical about it though and was complimentary to Musk otherwise. It doesn't sound like there was a ton of bad blood there.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#554

Post by stevens32 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:15 AM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #448

dkersten wrote: post #82

> We think its impact should be to give everyone economic freedom to pursue what they find most fulfilling, creating new opportunities for all of our lives that are unimaginable today. The cynic in me thinks this will never happen, that instead it will make a small subset of the population super rich, while the rest are put to work somewhere to make them even more money. Microsoft will ultimately want a return on the…

Well, the super rich getting richer is the status quo, so I kind of feel like nothing much changes if this never happens. Now, riding that happy PR wave and failing to deliver would be lame, but perhaps they really believe this. I think it will depend entirely on how much really gets open sourced in the end. I want to believe they’ll really do it.

Open sourcing still may not level the playing field if it turns out it requires corporate (or state) level resources to operate

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#555

Post by sytelus » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:18 AM UTC

Jach wrote: post #387

intrasight wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space is big and time is long. You may have been thrown by a typo in my comment. Was "I've do doubt" but meant "I've no doubt"

That's precisely why I don't believe there is any interesting intelligent life out there, at least in our neck of the woods (the Milky Way). Mostly the time aspect. The galaxy is big, but not so big that it would take more than 200 million years to send a von-neumann probe to every star. The galaxy itself is only slightly younger than the universe, over 10 billion years. In all that time not a single intelligence has…

The problem is that evolution up to human stage requires 1B years. Let's break this 1B years in thousand 1M year blocks. Assume that probability that all life terminates at each 1M year block is 1% due to events like super volcanos, astroid hits, solar flairs, ice ages, magnetic pole reversals etc. This leaves chance of only 0.004% that life will continue to exist after 1B years on a planet that was already viable. If probability of life serviving after each 1M year block was 90% instead of 99% then completing full 1B year would be astonishingly small 10^-44%. Current estimate in milyway galaxy is 20 billion Earth-like planets. However if probability for completing full evolution cycle was so small than intelligent human-like life indeed would be extra-ordinarily rare.

Another thing to think about: Any sufficiently advanced life form would eventually do long term space travel and face with the fact that life is super rare. This will lead to them seeding life with their own genetic material to other planets. This will eventually lead to millions of planets full of life in span of few million years. However this hasn't appeared to have happened indicating that we might be the one who do this.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#556

Post by gonehome » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:26 AM UTC

sverige wrote: post #543

gonehome wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 weap…

I don’t think humans are orders of magnitude apart.

The difference between the world’s smartest human and its dumbest human is tiny relative to the possible spectrum of intelligence.

Do you see the smartest chimps tricking or controlling humans?

If you wanted to trick a chimp to do something you wanted it to do, do you think it could stop you? And we’re probably a lot closer to chimp intelligence than an AGI would be to us.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#557

Post by doctorstupid » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:32 AM UTC

What's this "Pre-AGI" arrogance? Why are they so certain that it "will scale to AGI"? Is it an attempt at branding, or have they forgotten that AI is a global effort?

And do people really want to be "actualized" by "Microsoft and OpenAI’s shared value of empowering everyone"?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#558

Post by bingingiton » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 6:32 AM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #19

Hopefully this is good news for Bing.

It certainly is. Eventually Bing will automatically infer that it is not a good enough search engine and will destroy itself.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#559

Post by randomsearch » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:00 AM UTC

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!

Will this be $1 billion in cash, or in Azure credits?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#560

Post by randomsearch » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:02 AM UTC

chrshawkes wrote: post #425

applecrazy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The research that OpenAI’s doing is groundbreaking and the results are often beyond state-of-the-art. I aim to work in one of your research teams sometime!

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.

What has Musk got to do with this?