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Introducing OpenAI

openai.com

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Re: Introducing OpenAI

#71

Post by johann28 »

hacker_9 wrote: post #34
detaro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any "fear-mongering" in this announcement?

The creation of what is essentially an ethics committee for a technology that doesn't even exist yet? With people such as Elon Musk on board who have publicly said 'AI is our biggest existential threat' ? Additionally the second paragraph: We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely. This infers they think AI wil…

Sutskever, Schulman, Karpathy and Kingma are experts in machine learning.

And yes, AI will definitely be used for all sorts of purposes including hostile means. Just like anything else, really. Financial manipulation, spying, intelligent military devices, cracking infrastructure security, etc.

These are realistic concerns, we shouldn't fall for the Skynet red herring. We can have problems with ethical AI use, even if it's not a self-aware super-human superintelligence.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#72

Post by samstave »

This is a serious question:

Should there be an update/amendment/qualification to the laws of robotics regarding using AI for something like ubiquitous mass surveillance?

Clearly the amount of human activity online/electronically will only ever increase. At what point are we going to address how AI may be used/may not be used in this regard?

What about when, say, OpenAI accomplishes some great feat of AI -- and this feat falls to the wrong hands "robotistan" or some such future 'evil' empire that uses AI just as 1984 to track and control all citizenry, shouldnt we add a law of robotics that the AI should AT LEAST be required to be self aware enough to know that it is the tool of oppression?

Shouldn't the term "injure" be very very well defined such that an AI can hold true to law #1?

Who is the thought leader in this regard? Anyone?

EDIT: Well, Gee -- Looks like the above is one of the Open Goals of OpenAI:

https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinato...

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#73

Post by dang »

samstave wrote: post #57
dang wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relationships of large organizations can be surprisingly complex; consider Apple and Samsung. YC isn't large, of course, but Infosys is. The information content of the OpenAI funding announcement for immigration questions is probably zero. (No special knowledge behind this comment, just a general observation.) Edit: Please don't break the HN guidelines by complaining about downvoting. Downvotes to your comment up…

Off topic: But I have always wondered why we have a threashold to hit before we can downvote comments - but why can we never downvote posts? Or is the karma threshold just really high to have that function?

By posts do you mean stories, i.e. the kind of submission that appears on the front page? If so, HN doesn't have downvotes for those. The flagging mechanism is arguably something similar though.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#74

Post by jonknee »

hacker_9 wrote: post #69
jonknee wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were born with millions of years of training and still couldn't care for yourself without many years of personalized training.

There is a reason for this: it makes us able to adapt to _any_ environment on earth. We learn everything from our parents/guardians who have learnt all the 'right' ways of doing things. Look around, are we not the dominant species?

From our point of view we're the most dominate, but from other points of view you could easily argue that bacteria are the most dominate. There are a lot more of them and they will almost certainly outlive us.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#76

Post by rendezvouscp »

baconner wrote: post #38

"We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills..." I realize that today machine learning really is purely a tool, but the idea that ai will and should always be that doesn't sit quite right with me. Ml tech absent of consciousnesses remains a tool and an incredibly useful one, but in the long term you have to ask the question - at what point does an ai transition from a tool to a slave. Seems some ti…

Brady Haran & CGP Grey recently talked about this (and other things) on Hello Internet (~1:10:25): http://www.hellointernet.fm/podcast/52

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#77

Post by nicklo »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #68

Sounds great. I was hoping for OpenCog to be a good open source AI framework but is is difficult to work with (good team; I have worked with several of them in the past, no criticism intended). I look forward to seeing how OpenAI uses outside contributions, provides easy to use software and documentation, etc.

OpenAI seems to be taking a different approach from OpenCog. OpenCog aimed build a monolithic framework for many existing AI and machine learning techniques. This has been done many times before.

OpenAI is more about exploring new research areas and pushing the cutting edge, while publishing papers and sharing code along the while. Both are admirable goals, but what OpenAI is aiming for has never been attempted before.

Very excited to see what comes of it!

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#78

Post by T-A »

sethbannon wrote: post #11

I can't think of another field of research that's simultaneously brought the potential to solve all the world's problems and the potential to end life as we know it. Very appreciative to see so many great minds working on ensuring AI heralds in more of the former, and none of the latter.

Synthetic biology?

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#79

Post by argonaut »

I find it a bit disappointing that despite originally stating that YC Research would target underfunded/underserved areas of research, they've decided to fund and dive into one of the most-hyped, well-funded areas of research: deep learning, an area of research where companies are hiring like crazy and even universities are hiring faculty like crazy. I'm reasonably sure all the research scientists had multiple job offers, and most could get faculty offers as well.

Instead of funding areas of research where grad students legitimately struggle to find faculty or even industry research positions in their field, YC Research decided to join the same arms race that companies like Toyota are joining.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#80

Post by TelmoMenezes »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #50
baconner wrote: post #38

"We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills..." I realize that today machine learning really is purely a tool, but the idea that ai will and should always be that doesn't sit quite right with me. Ml tech absent of consciousnesses remains a tool and an incredibly useful one, but in the long term you have to ask the question - at what point does an ai transition from a tool to a slave. Seems some ti…

The idea is not that we should build and (try to) suppress a sentient AI; that would be a bad idea for numerous reasons. However, we don't necessarily need to build a sentient AI in the first place; we can build a process that has reasoning capabilities far above human without actually having agency of its own.

> we don't necessarily need to build a sentient AI

How do you know if an AI is sentient or not? We don't even know what sentience is. For all we know, maybe the computation of a Mandelbrot set is conscious.

> capabilities far above human without actually having agency of its own

What does this mean? Doesn't a chess-playing algorithm have agency of its own? What about a self-driving car? People say: "oh, but ultimately they are only doing what they were programmed to do". Sure, but so are we. It's just that our programming is done in a much less straightforward way.

Consciousness and free-will are open problems. Theories about these things are not even wrong, because people can't seem to agree on a definition. Personally, I suspect that "free will" is meaningless* and that consciousness is qualitatively beyond our current level of understanding of realty.

* I suspect that this meaningless concept was introduced to solve the conundrum: "if god is good why does he allow for bad things to happen?". And the answer they came up with was "so that we can have free will". But think about it, what does that even mean?

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