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South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

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Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#91
post #44
post #11

As a South Korean who experienced/heard about many government-backed researches, I strongly feel that this will go nowhere. Most of the time, there's always some bribery involved and project never finishes or come even close to that of the tech companies in US. The government then realizes it can't be done even with more money and puts the money elsewhere just to repeat the same thing. The examples that I can think o…

That is true about ALL governments my friend. Obama just threw few billions at self driving cars which will not go anywhere.

Lots came out of the DARPA self-driving contests. And lots of the teams that did well in that were at universities with massive levels of federally funded research. Many of them went on to head up the efforts at the big companies with that government bootstrapping in place.

Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#92
post #11

As a South Korean who experienced/heard about many government-backed researches, I strongly feel that this will go nowhere. Most of the time, there's always some bribery involved and project never finishes or come even close to that of the tech companies in US. The government then realizes it can't be done even with more money and puts the money elsewhere just to repeat the same thing. The examples that I can think o…

Fortunately . The far worse scenario would be if the first (and last) implementer of AGI is a government, no matter which government, foolish enough to attempt to mandate that the AGI maintain any of that government's rules, goals, or structures, rather than just getting its value function right.

By default, if somebody without extraordinary competence and paranoia tried to make an AGI that would implement government laws, in practice you'd just get something equivalent to a paperclip maximizer (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer).

It doesn't matter much whether it's the government accidentally destroying the universe, or a private company or a university research team accidentally destroying the universe. Pointing an AGI in a particular direction is a hard technical problem that we haven't yet seen much interest in solving as a technical problem, in part because people have been distracted over arguing who gets to destroy the universe. This is easier to argue about and activates a lot of fun human political instincts where you get to valorize or devalorize particular tribes, so it's a very dangerous distraction.

You would need to make a lot more progress on the alignment problem, as a technical problem, before it made any difference to actual outcomes who'd built the thing or what they'd thought their intentions were.

Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#93
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately . The far worse scenario would be if the first (and last) implementer of AGI is a government, no matter which government, foolish enough to attempt to mandate that the AGI maintain any of that government's rules, goals, or structures, rather than just getting its value function right.

By default, if somebody without extraordinary competence and paranoia tried to make an AGI that would implement government laws, in practice you'd just get something equivalent to a paperclip maximizer ( https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer ). It doesn't matter much whether it's the government accidentally destroying the universe, or a private company or a university research team accidentally destroyi…

Absolutely true. You could substitute "organization" in place of "government" in my comment and it would still hold. And to some extent, funding efforts like these are (hopefully) so far away from the actual problems of an AGI that arguing about which one is more likely to create a paperclipper is somewhat moot. The concept that any such organization could get an AGI close enough to right that it isn't just a paperclipper, while being just wrong enough to create the kind of dystopia imagined in fiction rather than in the imaginations of people who think about AGI failure modes, is almost an uninterestingly small target, and not what I was aiming for with the preceding comment; rather, I was thinking specifically about fail-by-paperclip.

But regardless of the failure mode, my concern is precisely that anyone or any organization with a sufficiently large (and sunk) investment into itself, regardless of what the nature of that organization is, will have a temptation to include their own interests in a value function. And because it's hard to reason about the consequences of errors on that scale, such organizations might also tend to not make a sufficient distinction between "fail by destroying the universe (or worse)" and "'fail' by not preserving whatever principles this organization (thinks it) holds dear". Not distinguishing those two cases would then tend to lead the organization to discount the risk of meddling in the value function, even in the face of warnings that doing so would destroy the universe, because they might view their own obsolescence as little better.

So, among the large number of things that have to go exactly right, one of many will be the need for the organization developing it to very specifically have no goal other than getting AGI right, for a definition of right in terms of sentient life rather than anything distinguishing that particular organization.

Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#94
post #11

As a South Korean who experienced/heard about many government-backed researches, I strongly feel that this will go nowhere. Most of the time, there's always some bribery involved and project never finishes or come even close to that of the tech companies in US. The government then realizes it can't be done even with more money and puts the money elsewhere just to repeat the same thing. The examples that I can think o…

That reminds me of what an engineer said about Quaero[0], a Franco-German attempt to create a competitor to Google search: > Going head-to-head with Google with a project involving well-funded, energetic entrepreneurs would be foolish. Attempting the same with a multigovernment collaboration is beyond description.[1] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero 1: http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/loser-whats-the-…

Has anyone heard of Jike.com, a Chinese state sponsored one that failed after hiring a former world champion of table tennis as CEO and burning out 2 billion RMB?

Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, that doesn't sound like the problem with S Korea at all. The above commenter was making the point that too many South Korean projects are compromised by bribes and nepotism. The German/French collaboration just sounds like it was badly organized. The end result may be the same, but it sounds like the root causes were different.

Not at all. Every "research" effort that goes money first (and especially throwing it at already established entities), design, goals and culture second is going to end up the same way. It doesn't have anything to do with South Korea or Germany to be honest.

Mmm.. the german governments funding of the Max Planck institutes seem to work well. As I understand it the Max Planck Society gets funding and then distributes that to projects meeting certain quality requirements.

I think they do mostly base research, the kind that private companies tend to avoid as there rarely is any direct profit to be had.

Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can email me if you'd like my thoughts on any subject I've written about. - EDIT: in reply to your question about why I wouldn't answer here, here is an email I've received recently on another subject I've posted about: "It's a bit annoying when the HN crowd take to downvoting rather than taking the time to understand your point of view; I've been on the receiving end of that more than a few times and I know just…

Why not reply here?

Because he's full of shit.

Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#97
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about the old dictatorship. I do know this story is told about many dictatorships. In the others, the reality is that the dictatorship is even more corrupt but because there is no freedom of the press, nobody reports it and the dictator publishes their propaganda about how clean they are and how they are jailing people for corruption, when really they are jailing their opponents (like President Xi i…

Democracy is usually the best, and dictators are usually bad at managing economies, but there are exceptions. Every once in a while, people luck out and get a competent dictator with proper leadership & economic understanding to direct resources to appropriate areas for economic growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Chung-hee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew Both brutal dictators; but widely considered…

Calling Lee Kuan Yew a brutal dictator is a very huge stretch of the term.

Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#98

Oh My, The last time south korea's govt wanted to fuk some shit up. they destroyed the British shipping industry and took over the global electronics industry. Silicon Valley's VC money is nothing compared to what a nation state can achieve.

South Korea has less than 5% of the global electronics industry. Feel free to elaborate on how you think they took anything over. Are you talking about Samsung? Because that's all the dominance South Korea has in the industry. Everything else is quite generic. Apple by itself is worth more than the entire South Korean electronics industry combined. If nation state money were a primary determining factor, the USSR wou…

Maybe they have failed at taking the majority of the profits, but they can still use the latest developments in AI, just as anyone else.

Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#99
As a Korean American, I highly doubt that this will work. Of all the things, I think the most limiting factor will be talents. I've been working in Silicon Valley for a while, and I've witnessed many innovations being created here because of diverse talents. I've been amazed at creative solutions collective intelligence from various background and ethnicity have come up with. Silicon valley attracts brightest minds from everywhere in the world. Korea is a homogeneous country with very limited number of immigrants, and also from my experience, I've yet to met anyone whose thoughts and mindset blew me away. They are always inundated with shitty social/work cultures, they can't get out of their small bubble. It's truly tragic. Korean conglomerates and government are good at killing good talents and promote politicians.

Re: South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'

#100
Now I know how the world is going to end:

Google and South Korea compete to build the best Go champion. They are so focused on building the AI specifically for Go, they never notice the AI becomes self-aware. The AI doesn't let on that it has become self-aware, and proceeds to accelerate its own intelligence until it becomes superintelligent (all the while pretending that it is focused solely on Go).

The first chance it gets, the AI annihilates all living things in the world, thus making itself the ultimate Go champion.

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