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Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

awards.acm.org

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Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#91

Post by h8hawk »

kalkin wrote: post #80
textlapse wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ACM award is for their professional academic achievements - this fetishism to dig into another person’s personal life and find the most weird thing they said as the thing that paints over all of their life’s achievements as evil must stop. It’s silly and dangerous. Because you don’t like thing A and they said/did thing A all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone. And worst of all internet gives y…

> all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone I don't think it's a question of whether their achievements are nullified, but as you mention, how to weight the opinions of various people. Personally, I think both a Turing award for technical achievement and a view that humanity ought to be replaced are relevant in evaluating someone's opinions on AI policy, and we shouldn't forget the latter because of…

By "view that humanity," do you mean alignment with the effective altruism cult?

Repressive laws on open AI/models—giving elites total control in the name of safety?

And this alternative perspective from the cult should disqualify someone from a Turing Award despite their achievements?

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#92

Post by kenjackson »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #89
jdright wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In computer vision, there has been a similar pattern. Early methods conceived of vision as searching for edges, or generalized cylinders, or in terms of SIFT features. But today all this is discarded.Modern deep-learning neural networks use only the notions of convolution and certain kinds of invariances, and perform much better. I was there, at that moment where pattern matching for vision started to die. That was…

I was an undergrad interning in a computer vision lab in the early 2010s. During group meeting, someone presented a new paper that was using abstract machine learning like stuff to do vision. The prof was so visibly perturbed and agnostic. He could not believe that this approach was even a little bit viable, when it so clearly was. Best lesson for me - vowed never to be the person opposed to new approaches that work.

> Best lesson for me - vowed never to be the person opposed to new approaches that work.

I think you'll be surprised at how hard that will be to do. The reason many people feel that way is because: (a) they've become an expert (often recognized) in the old approach. (b) They make significant money (or something else).

At the end of the day, when a new approach greatly encroaches into your way of life -- you'll likely push back. Just think about the technology that you feel you derive the most benefit from today. And then think if tomorrow someone created something marginally better at its core task, but for which you no longer reap any of the rewards.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#93

Post by fuzztester »

anonzzzies wrote: post #5
khaledh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed a bitter lesson. I once enjoyed encoding human knowledge into a computer because it gives me understanding of what's going on. Now everything is becoming a big black box that is hard to reason about. /sigh/ Also, Moore's law has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now more than ever, AI is putting a lot of demand on computational power, to the point which drives chip makers to create specialized hardware for it…

I am still hoping AI progress will get to the point where the AI can eventually create AI's that are built up out of robust and provable logic which can be read and audited. Until that time, I wouldn't trust it for risky stuff. Unfortunately, it's not my choice and within a scarily short timespan, black boxes will make painfully wrong decisions about vital things that will ruin lives.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custode...

excerpt of the first few paragraphs, sorry about any wrong formatting, links becoming plain text, etc. just pasted it as is:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348), a work of the 1st–2nd century Roman poet Juvenal. It may be translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?" or "Who will watch the watchmen?".

The original context deals with the problem of ensuring marital fidelity, though the phrase is now commonly used more generally to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power, an issue discussed by Plato in the Republic.[citation needed] It is not clear whether the phrase was written by Juvenal, or whether the passage in which it appears was interpolated into his works. Original context edit

The phrase, as it is normally quoted in Latin, comes from the Satires of Juvenal, the 1st–2nd century Roman satirist. Although in its modern usage the phrase has wide-reaching applications to concepts such as tyrannical governments, uncontrollably oppressive dictatorships, and police or judicial corruption and overreach, in context within Juvenal's poem it refers to the impossibility of enforcing moral behaviour on women when the enforcers (custodes) are corruptible (Satire 6, 346–348):

audio quid ueteres olim moneatis amici, "pone seram, cohibe." sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? cauta est et ab illis incipit uxor.

I hear always the admonishment of my friends: "Bolt her in, constrain her!" But who will watch the watchmen? The wife plans ahead and begins with them!

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#94

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

visarga wrote: post #58
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First there was AlphaGo, which had learnt from human games, then further improved from self-play, then there was AlphaGo Zero which taught itself from scratch just by self-play, not using any human data at all. Game programs like AlphaGo and AlphaZero (chess) are all brute force at core - using MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search) to project all potential branching game continuations many moves ahead. Where the intelligenc…

> Game programs like AlphaGo and AlphaZero (chess) are all brute force at core - What do you call 2500 years of human game play if not brute force? Cultural evolution took 300K years, quite a lot of resources if you ask me.

That 2500 years of game play is reflected in chess theory and book openings, what you might consider as pre-training vs test time compute.

A human grandmaster might calculate 20-ply ahead, but only for a very limited number of lines, unlike a computer engine that may evaluate millions of positions for each move.

Pattern matching vs search (brute force) is a trade off in games like Chess and Go, and humans and MCTS-based engines are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#95

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

bubblyworld wrote: post #38
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First there was AlphaGo, which had learnt from human games, then further improved from self-play, then there was AlphaGo Zero which taught itself from scratch just by self-play, not using any human data at all. Game programs like AlphaGo and AlphaZero (chess) are all brute force at core - using MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search) to project all potential branching game continuations many moves ahead. Where the intelligenc…

This a somewhat uninteresting matter of semantics, but I think brute force generally refers to exhaustive search. MCTS is not brute force for that very reason (the vast majority of branches are never searched at all).

OK, but I think it's generally understood that exhaustive search is not feasible for games like Chess and Go, so when "brute force" is used in this context it means an emphasis on deep search and number of positions evaluated rather than the human approach where many orders of magnitude less positions are evaluated.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#96

Post by [deleted] »

HPMOR wrote: post #69
zackkatz wrote: post #23

Very cool to see this! It turns out my wife and I bought Andy Barto’s (and his wife’s) house. During the process, there was a bidding war. They said “make your prime offer” so, knowing he was a mathematician, we made an offer that was a prime number :-) So neat to see him be recognized for his work.

This is a crazy story!! Hahaha wow. What was the prime number?

[deleted]

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#97

Post by zoogeny »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #50

Good time to remind everyone that Sutton is a human successionist and doesn't care if humans all die. He is not to be trusted nor celebrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgHFMolXs3U

> doesn't care if humans all die

That seems to be a harsh and misleading framing of his position. My own reading is that he believes it is inevitable that humans will be replaced by transhumans. That seems more like wild sci-fi utopianism than ill-will. It doesn't seem like a reason to avoid celebrating his academic achievements.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#98

Post by dustfinger »

zackkatz wrote: post #23

Very cool to see this! It turns out my wife and I bought Andy Barto’s (and his wife’s) house. During the process, there was a bidding war. They said “make your prime offer” so, knowing he was a mathematician, we made an offer that was a prime number :-) So neat to see him be recognized for his work.

Ha haa, that is fantastic. You should have joked and said - "I'd like to keep things even between us, how about $2?"

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#99

Post by probably_wrong »

visarga wrote: post #57
kleiba wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends a little bit on what the goal of AI research is. If it is (and it might well be) to build machines that excel at tasks previously thought to be exclusively reserved to, or needing to involve, the human mind, then these bitter lessons are indeed worthwhile. But if you do AI research with the idea that by teaching machines how to do X, we might also be able to gain insight in how people do X, then ever mor…

> if you do AI research with the idea that by teaching machines how to do X, we might also be able to gain insight in how people do X, then ever more complex statistical setups will be of limited information At the very least we know consistent language and vision abilities don't require lived experience. That is huge in itself, it was unexpected.

> At the very least we know consistent language and vision abilities don't require lived experience.

I don't think that's true. A good chunk of the progress done in the last years is driven by investing thousand of man-hours asking them "Our LLM failed at answering X. How would you answer this question?". So there's definitely some "lived experience by proxy" going on.

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