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Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

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Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#611

Post by iguy »

pron wrote: post #578
tiborsaas wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I linked to modeled organisms, I always feel the HN crowd expects academic level of precision and discussions, but that kills regular discussions I would have at dinner tables with friends, I wish it would be a more casual place. Yes, I meant "behavior of simple organisms" :) Since everything here is loosely defined I feel it's totally pointless to discuss AI, but it's still an intriguing topic. If you look at those…

We can model some aspects of insect behavior. The simulation even looks convincing at first glance (just as simple "AI" looks convincing with a superficial examination of a conversation or text-generation). But we have not been able to fully model the behavior of, say, a bee (which may be enough to solve self-driving cars and then some).

Exactly.

> they tend to follow brownian motion in 3D

Well, their entire neural system exists to make deviations from Brownian motion. That's the whole point of being an animal not a plant. And doing it well is very very subtle.

First steps towards modelling such behavior can be super-interesting science, not a terrible use of time at all. They can capture a lot of truth about how it works. But like self-driving cars, the thing that kills you is usually a weird edge case, not the basic thing.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#612

Post by sgt101 »

logicchains wrote: post #527
sgt101 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Be…

I think that there are a lot of assumptions in that chain. When you or I ask why did we make a decision X we can formulate answers but, for my account, I don't have access to all of the components of my thinking - I cannot articulate what I feel is really going on. I think that randomness in the universe is very hard to account for too - I was impressed by an essay that Scott Aaronson wrote about this : https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/giqtm3.pdf but I have read it several times and I am afraid I don't really understand it.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#613

Post by reeves23423 »

davej wrote: post #553
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.

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.

Is this the response you are referring to Sam Altman being on record https://openai.com/blog/openai-supporters/ ?

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#614

Post by Alas1 »

Veedrac wrote: post #607
Alas1 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>no results to many incredible results What exactly is incredible (relatively) about the current state of things? I don't know how up-to-date you are on research, but how can you be claiming that we had no results previously? This is the kind of ignorance of previous work that we should be avoiding. We had the same kind of results previously, only with lower numbers. I keep trying to explain that increasing the numbe…

> What exactly is incredible (relatively) about the current state of things? Compared to 1999? Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSLJriaOumA Hear https://audio-samples.github.io/#section-4 Read https://grover.allenai.org/ These are not just ‘increasing numbers’. These are fucking witchcraft, and if we didn't live in a world with 5 inch blocks of magical silicon that talk to us and giant tubes of aluminium that fl…

>These are not just ‘increasing numbers’. These are fucking witchcraft, and if we didn't live in a world with 5 inch blocks of magical silicon that talk to us and giant tubes of aluminium that fly in the sky the average person would still have the sense to recognize it.

What about generative models is really AI, other than the fact that they rely on some similar ideas from machine learning that are found in actual AI applications? Yes, maybe to an average person these are witchcraft, but any advanced technology can appear that way---Deep Blue beating Kasparov probably was witchcraft to the uninitiated. This is curve fitting, and the same approaches in 1999 were also trying to fit curves, it's just that we can fit them way better than before right now. Even the exact methods that are used to produce your examples are not fundamentally new, they are just the same old ideas with the same old weaknesses. What we have right now is a huge hammer, and a hammer is surely useful, but not the only thing needed to build AI. Calling these witchcraft is a marketing move that we definitely don't need, creates unnecessary hype, and hides the simplicity and the naivete of the methods used in producing them. If anybody else reads this, these are just increasing numbers, not witchcraft. But as the numbers increase it requires a little more effort and knowledge to debunk them.

I'm not dismissing things for the fun of it, but it pains me to see this community waste so many resources in pursuit of a local minimum due to lack of a better sense of direction. I feel like not much more is to be gained from this conversation, although it was fun, and thank you for responding.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#615

Post by KingFelix »

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!

Greetings! I have some questions!

Since you work for OpenAi, are you looking at actual brain processes at all? I read the article and understand you guys will be a big customer with Azure, I wonder if you guys will be conducting some brain research though. I believe for AGI to happen we need to understand the brain.

I work with Cerebral Organoids, Consciousness studies, physics (quantum),

Love to share / connect, we are currently launching the Cerebral Organoids into space today! SpaceX rocket, 6pm EST, there are some thunderstorms so we're hoping there aren't any further delays. DM me?

https://www.spacex.com/webcast

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#616

Post by richardwhiuk »

houzertuch wrote: post #593
richardwhiuk wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in that sounds easy. If there are N governments in the world, and they all agree to not regulate to not create general AI, then it's strongly in all of their interests to betray the others, create general AI, and capture the economic growth. Even if general AI is impossible, it's in their interests to develop huge computing capacity, because that's demonstrably economically useful. You are hypothesizing that'…

Like I have said countless times, it’s easy compared to what we get in return. It’s easy to understand in principle. It doesn’t require sophisticated mathematics. So you think that we should let all countries have whatever weapons they want under your logic. They will develop nukes and chemical weapons regardless of any international agreement that is established, so why even try? The obvious answer is to advance our…

Nuclear weapons provably kill people. AGI doesn't. Be careful about your hyperbole.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#619

Post by KingFelix »

KingFelix wrote: post #615
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!

Greetings! I have some questions! Since you work for OpenAi, are you looking at actual brain processes at all? I read the article and understand you guys will be a big customer with Azure, I wonder if you guys will be conducting some brain research though. I believe for AGI to happen we need to understand the brain. I work with Cerebral Organoids, Consciousness studies, physics (quantum), Love to share / connect, we…

Space launch has been moved to tomorrow 6pm EST;

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#620

Post by Veedrac »

Alas1 wrote: post #614
Veedrac wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly is incredible (relatively) about the current state of things? Compared to 1999? Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSLJriaOumA Hear https://audio-samples.github.io/#section-4 Read https://grover.allenai.org/ These are not just ‘increasing numbers’. These are fucking witchcraft, and if we didn't live in a world with 5 inch blocks of magical silicon that talk to us and giant tubes of aluminium that fl…

>These are not just ‘increasing numbers’. These are fucking witchcraft, and if we didn't live in a world with 5 inch blocks of magical silicon that talk to us and giant tubes of aluminium that fly in the sky the average person would still have the sense to recognize it. What about generative models is really AI, other than the fact that they rely on some similar ideas from machine learning that are found in actual AI…

I appreciate you're trying to wind it down so I'll try to get to the point, but there's a lot to unpack here.

I'm not evaluating these models on whether they are AGI, I am evaluating them on what they tell us about AGI in the future. They show that even tiny models, some 10000x to 1000000x times smaller than what I think are the comparable measures in the human brain, trained with incredibly simple single-pass methods, manage to extract semirobust and semantically meaningful structure from raw data, are able to operate on this data in semisophisticated ways, and do so vastly better than their size-comparable biological controls. I'm not looking for the human, I'm looking for small scale proofs of concepts of the principles we have good reasons to expect are required for AGI.

The curve fitting meme[1] has gotten popular recently, but it's no more accurate than calling Firefox ‘just symbols on the head of a tape’. Yes, at some level these systems reduce to hugely-dimensional mathematical curves, but the intuitions this brings are pretty much all wrong. I believe this meme has gained popularity due to adversarial examples, but those are typically misinterpreted[2]. If you can take a system trained to predict English text, prime it (not train it) with translations, and get nontrivial quality French-English translations, dismissing it as ‘just’ curve fitting is ‘just’ the noncentral fallacy.

Fundamental to this risk evaluation is the ‘simplicity and the naivete of the methods used in producing them’. That simple systems, at tiny scales, with only inexact analogies to the brain, based on research younger than the people working on it, is solving major blockers in what good heuristics predict AGI needs is a major indicator about the non-implausibility of AGI. AGI skeptics have their own heuristics instead, with reasons those heuristics should be hard, but when you calibrate with the only existence proof we have of AGI development—human evolution—, those heuristics are clearly and overtly bad heuristics that would have failed to trigger. Thus we should ignore them.

[1] Similar comments on ‘the same approaches in 1999’, another meme only true at the barest of surface levels. Scale up 1999 models and you get poor results.

[2] See http://gradientscience.org/adv/. I don't agree with everything they say, since I think the issue relates more to the NN's structure encoding the wrong priors, but that's an aside.

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