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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#581

Post by ummm32 »

idlewords wrote: post #539
ummm32 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite fair, but not 100% certain. Almost nobody really knows how developed is the state-of-the-art theory / applied technology in confidentials advances that the usual suspects may have already achieved. I.E. deepmind, openai, baidu, nsa, etc. AGI could have already been achieved - even theoretically - somewhere, and like when Edison got to make work a light bulb, we're still using oil and not knowing anything about…

This is an AI equivalent of believing that the NSA has proved that P=NP and can read everyone's traffic. There's no way to disprove it, but given that in the open literature people haven't even found a way to coherently frame the question of general AI, let alone theorize about it, it becomes just another form of magical thinking.

You're partially right (because AGI really looks like VERY far away for the current status in theory publicly known), but it's not exactly like "magical thinking".

There are several public examples of radically more advanced theory/technology than the publicly known possible at a certain time/year, kept secret by governments / corps for a very long time (decades).

Lockheed achieved the blackbird decades before it was even admitted that a technology like that could even exist. But, looking backwards, it just looks like an "incremental" advance, but it wasn't, the engineering required to make fly the blackbird was revolutionary for the time when it was invented (back in the 50s / 60s ).

The Lockheed F-117 and its tech had a similar path, just somewhat admitted in late 80s (and this was 70s technology, probably based on theoretical concepts from the 60s).

More or less the same could be said about the tech in Blechtley Park: current tech / theory propelled to extraordinary capabilities by radical improvement achieved by new top secret advances in engineering. The hardware, events and advances ocurred in Bletchley Park were kept secret for years (I think just in the 50s they started to be carefully mentioned but not fully admitted, but nothing even close to the details currently found in the Wikipedia).

At any given time there could be a lot of theory/technology jump-aheads being achieved out there, several decades ahead of the publicly published/known, supposedly current, theory/technology.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#582

Post by ryanmercer »

sytelus wrote: post #544
est31 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://ww…

> This included several whimsical stuff that wasn't research like Experience Music Project and Museum of Science Fiction.

While not research, those things can have profound impacts on people. Several years ago a Star Wars exhibit came to the Indiana State Museum here in Indianapolis, they had an entire section dedicated to both the prosthetic devices in the film and in real life, one of the video segments playing next to some props from the film and real prosthetic devices was a clip of one of the inventors of the real technology talking about how watching the film version directly led to him pursuing his career and working directly on various prosthetic devices trying to make it a reality.

These sorts of experiences could have profound impact on the creative process for one or more individuals that might have far more profound effects for society than active research.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#583

Post by ryanmercer »

twayyallscareme wrote: post #490
gdb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B. It's a cash investment. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though. > My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools…

Sorry for the cowardice of this throwaway account, but it freaks me out that Musk left, and Thiel is still there. Going back in time: > Musk has joined with other Silicon Valley notables to form OpenAI, which was launched with a blog post Friday afternoon. The group claimed to have the goal “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to gener…

>but it freaks me out that Musk left,

Why? He left due to possible conflict of interest, Tesla is researching AI for self-driving vehicles and it wouldn't surprise me if SpaceX does at some point too (assuming they aren't already).

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#584

Post by ryanmercer »

craigsmansion wrote: post #128
andreilys wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety? What "threshold" would you want to cross before you think its socially acceptable to put resources behind ensuring that humanity doesn't wipe itself out? The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate timeline looks like. We might be 10 years away from the singularity, 1000 years, or it might never ever happen! There…

> At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety? I don't know, but I'd say after a definition of "AGI" has been accepted that can be falsified against, and actually turn it into a scientific endeavour. > The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate timeline looks like. We do. As things are it's undetermined, since we don't even know what's it's supposed to mean…

>What problems?

- Privacy (How do you get an artificial intelligence to recognize, and respect, privacy? What sources is it allowed to use, how must it handle data about individuals? About groups? When should it be allowed to violate/exploit privacy to achieve an objective?)

- Isolation (How much data do you allow it access to? How do you isolate it? What safety measures do you employ to make sure it is never given a connection to the internet where it could, in theory, spread itself not unlike a virus and gain incredibly more processing power as well as make itself effectively undestroyable? How do you prevent it from spreading in the wild and hijacking processing power for itself, leaving computers/phones/appliances/servers effectively useless to the human owners?)

- A kill switch (under what conditions is it acceptable to pull the plug? Do you bring in a cybernetic psychologist to treat it? Do you unplug it? Do you incinerate every last scrap of hardware it was on?)

- Sanity check/staying on mission (how do you diagnose it if it goes wonky? What do you do if it shows signs of 'turning' or going off task?

- Human agents (Who gets to interact with it? How do you monitor them? How do you make sure they aren't being offered bribes for giving it an internet connection or spreading it in the wild? How do you prevent a biotic operator from using it for personal gain while also using it for the company/societal task at hand? What is the maximum amount of time a human operator is allowed to work with the AI? What do you do if the AI shows preference for an individual and refuses to provide results without that individual in attendance? If a human operator is fired, quits or dies and it negatively impacts the AI what do you do?)

This is why I've said elsewhere in this thread, and told Sam Altman, that they need to bring in a team of people that specifically start thinking about these things and that only 10-20% of the people should be computer science/machine learning types.

OpenAI needs a team thinking about these things NOW, not after they've created an AGI or something reaching a decent approximation of one. They need someone figuring out a lot of this stuff for tools they are developing now. Had they told me "we're going to train software on millions of web pages, so that it can generate articles" I would have immediately screamed "PUMP THE BRAKES! Blackhat SEO, Russian web brigades, Internet Water Army, etc etc would immediately use this for negative purposes. Similarly people would use this to churn out massive amounts of semi-coherent content to flood Amazon's Kindle Unlimited, which pays per number of page reads from a pool fund, to rapidly make easy money." I would also have cautioned that it should only be trained on opt-in, vetted, content suggesting that using public domain literature, from a source like Project Gutenberg, would likely have been far safer than the open web.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#585

Post by EForEndeavour »

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 ).

Lots of people do add cream, though, and some people add coconut oil (MCT oil) or actual cow's-milk butter.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#586

Post by m-p-3 »

tamrix wrote: post #531
codelemur wrote: post #13

Despite all the negativity in replies, I try to remain optimistic that this investment in AGI-related research is going to be a net positive. Congrats to the team, and break a leg!

A couple weeks ago. Google announced it will be researching AI in China. HN had more positive comments regarding that announcement.

The Internet is a strange place..

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#587

Post by benl »

malux85 wrote: post #580
benl wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a believer of the theory that we are super sophisticated machines. When I read some of the philosophy on the subject I changed my mind. I now believe there must be some immaterial component to our minds. There’s a lot to read out there on this subject, but I found expositions of the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas to be the clearest and most convincing for me. Lots of different books and articles exi…

> I used to be a believer of the theory that we are super sophisticated machines. When I read some of the philosophy on the subject I changed my mind. What philosophy? Be specific > I now believe there must be some immaterial component to our minds. What specific points or ideas made you believe that? > There’s a lot to read out there on this subject So provide some examples, be as specific as possible > but I found…

I found “Aristotle for Everybody” by Mortimer J. Adler to be really great. The topic of the immateriality of the intellect is covered in the last few chapters, but the rest of it is great stuff too.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#588

Post by keypusher »

chrshawkes wrote: post #407
cosmodisk wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many cases people will be more interested in your boat rather than a bunch of startups nobody's ever heard of.

That’s a strange sentiment for thread on OpenAI, considering it is one of many startups founded a guy who decided to take the millions from his sale of PayPal and do cool R&D projects like spaceships, electric cars, solar power, AI, and brain-machine interfaces. Good thing Elon Musk didn’t buy a boat I guess.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#589

Post by piano »

breck wrote: post #475
p1esk wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been doing research in DL field for the last 6 years (just presented my last paper at IJCNN last week), and I can say with confidence we have no clue how to get to AGI. We don’t even know how DL works on the fundamental level. More importantly, we don’t know how the brain works. So I agree with pron that your “relatively soon” is just as likely to be 10 as 100 years from now.

I could explain it to you in an afternoon. But I’m not going to do it online, because then you have a thousand people call you “delusional”, because you simply are stating that exponential processes are going to continue. For some reason, many people who think themselves rational and scientific believe that things that have been going exponentially are suddenly going to go linear. To me, that is delusional.

> because you simply are stating that exponential processes are going to continue.

Exponential process continuing doesn't imply "we're going to get there soon" in any way, shape or form. The desired goal can still be arbitrarily far.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#590

Post by yozel »

umvi wrote: post #414
DuskStar wrote: post #389

Earlier 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/

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.

The point is, we don't need to know how exactly consciousness work to create an AGI. In theory, we can just simulate all the neurons in the brain on a supercomputer cluster and voila, we have AGI. Of course, it's not that simple but you get my point.
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