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Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

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Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#71

Post by sjeohp »

yters wrote: post #19
frabcus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roger Penrose basically suggests what you say in "The Emperor's New Mind". Roughly, it says that the brain (likely, according to him) uses quantum computation, and so we can't make an AI out of a classical computer. The practical flaw with this argument, of course, is that you could instead make an AI that itself uses quantum computation. I asked Roger Penrose about this at a university philosophy meetup over 20 year…

Well, quantum computation is weaker than a nondeterministic Turing machine, so not the same thing I'm saying. Penrose correctly identifies the mind cannot be a deterministic Turing machine, but his invocation of quantum mechanics does not solve the problem he points out. A DTM can simulate an NTM and hence anything inbetween, so the inbetween of quantum computation does not solve anything. The fundamental problem Pen…

>But, it's also important to note that we don't have to answer the "how" question in order to identify halting oracles as a viable explanation. We often identify new phenomena and anomalies without being able to explain them, so the identification is a first step.

I don't think it constitutes an explanation at all, let alone a viable one, if all it does is beg the same question.

The problem was already identified: "how does human cognition work?" You've renamed it: "how does this supposed halting oracle work?" That might be an interesting framing but it is not a viable explanation of anything until you've proved that such oracles exist or in other words, solved the halting problem.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#72

Post by narag »

joe_the_user wrote: post #55
skybrian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, it seems like natural language translation has been getting quite a bit better with statistical techniques, though? I guess it depends what you mean by "only incremental".

Whenever I attempt to use a translate site to translate more than a paragraph (Facebook or Google), it comes out a garbled mess - doesn't mean some sentences are seemingly clear and meaningful. The big thing is it chokes on idioms, not understanding, not leaving them as is but guessing some clearly wrong meaning. I occasionally find single-sentence posts on Facebook apparently translated astonishingly well, in the se…

Cada vez que intento usar un sitio de traducción para traducir más de un párrafo (Facebook o Google), sale un lío confuso - no significa que algunas oraciones sean aparentemente claras y significativas. Lo importante es que se atraganta con los modismos, no entendiéndolos, no dejándolos como están, sino adivinando algún significado claramente erróneo. Ocasionalmente encuentro que las publicaciones de una sola oración en Facebook aparentemente traducen sorprendentemente bien, en el sentido de que son en inglés y parecen reflejar el significado original. Pero mi francés o español es bastante duro, así que traducir podría haber pasado por alto algo grande, como sé que sucede cuando se trata de textos más largos.

I'm a native and it seems almost good to me. "algunas oraciones no sean", OK. And "duro" should be "rudimentario", also "de qué son" lacks the accent. But the rest is acceptable and it's possible to get a decent translation, only modifying those bits.

http://www.DeepL.com/Translator

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#73

Post by nradov »

nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

Stating something more times doesn't make it true. Everything you've written is pure speculation, and alarmist at that. There's no proof that AGI is even possible, and if it is possible there's no proof that it will end humanity.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#74

Post by kahoon »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #66
kahoon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this fixation on symbolic reasoning. Do any other animals practice this? If the answer is no, then it is probably not the most important milestone to AGI or at least not the one we should be currently aiming for. Right now we can not replicate the cognition of a mouse. Feels like we want to go to Mars before figuring out how to build a rocket.

Seconded. Even if animals do symbolic reasoning, they do it on top of hardware based on continuous physical dynamics, more similar to DNNs... So why not build on that platform? I don't think biological precedent is the only or even most valuable heuristic for deciding where to research intelligence... But I don't see where there is evidence that symbolic reasoning is either necessary or sufficient for AGI, except peo…

> I don't think biological precedent is the only or even most valuable heuristic for deciding where to research intelligence...

Good point, we wouldn't have AlphaZero now if we only relied on biological inspiration. Nature hardly ever performs Monte Carlo Tree Search (though I'm not sure this is entirely true, see slime mold searching for food: https://thumbs.gfycat.com/IdealisticThirdCalf-size_restricte...).

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#75

Post by roenxi »

anonytrary wrote: post #43
roenxi wrote: post #30

The computational power of the hardware is getting really close to what a human brain is capable of (on an exponential scale, anyway). If "nowhere close" means not in the next 5 years then sure. Over the medium term I'm not sure AI researchers are the best people to ask. They are completely dependent on how much power the electrical engineers give them - I doubt there is a deeper understanding what a doubling or quad…

> The computational power of the hardware is getting really close to what a human brain is capable of Why do you say that? AFAIK computing architecture and brain architecture are completely different. How would you even begin to compare their power?

Well, Wikipedia was my source [0] and it links http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain-chip/ as its source.

Google has TPU that are off from the estimated power required to simulate a brain by a factor of 3, so technology is reaching the ballpark. Given that brains were evolved, the part that does symbolic thinking is probably "easy to stumble on" in some practical sense.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders...

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#76

Post by Jach »

brandonmenc wrote: post #49
anonytrary wrote: post #23

Tangential: This title is weird. As if no one but the top minds in AI didn't know this? This isn't big news to anyone who has done even just a modicum of AI research.

> As if no one but the top minds in AI didn't know this? Anecdotal, but nearly all of my programmer friends believe that full-blown AGI is less than a decade away.

Sounds like an opportunity to place some bets and probably win some money. Or maybe they'll back down and widen their intervals -- less than a decade, maybe, but probably longer. Maybe quite a long time too, and maybe after development of some other planet-changing tech.

It's worth thinking about this section of [0] when various AI experts offer predictions:

> Two: History shows that for the general public, and even for scientists not in a key inner circle, and even for scientists in that key circle, it is very often the case that key technological developments still seem decades away, five years before they show up.

> In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.

> In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for this I neglected to keep the citation.

> And of course if you’re not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now a thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were esteemed intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more slowly back then.

[0] https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#78

Post by AgentME »

nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

There are non-doomsday possibilities for AGI. Imagine a super-intelligent AI that was built from the start to value humanity and our way of life, and from there it chooses to protect us and enable us all to do what we want more. (Of course, this could go in dystopian directions, but even those are better than extinction.) A super-intelligent AI that is built to value humans could decide to "uplift" humans' intelligence to be able to keep up with it in places that humans desire to keep up with it.

If we can figure out decision theory and how our values work, then when we figure out AI, we can hopefully build it to be aligned with our values from the start, instead of blindly hoping it happens to play nice with us instead of brushing us off like ants.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#79

Post by dwiel »

anonytrary wrote: post #23

Tangential: This title is weird. As if no one but the top minds in AI didn't know this? This isn't big news to anyone who has done even just a modicum of AI research.

When I was at ICLR a couple years ago, a group of 10 or so researchers from deepmind took a poll of themselves at breakfast and found the general consensus was that AGI was between 5-10 years away.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#80

Post by dwiel »

Jach wrote: post #76
brandonmenc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As if no one but the top minds in AI didn't know this? Anecdotal, but nearly all of my programmer friends believe that full-blown AGI is less than a decade away.

Sounds like an opportunity to place some bets and probably win some money. Or maybe they'll back down and widen their intervals -- less than a decade, maybe , but probably longer. Maybe quite a long time too, and maybe after development of some other planet-changing tech. It's worth thinking about this section of [0] when various AI experts offer predictions: > Two: History shows that for the general public, and even…

If there is AGI all bets are off so to speak, what's a few dollars worth then? If there isn't AGI the money still has value. Doesn't sound like a rational bet, even if you think the odds of AGI soon are high.
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