The Great A.I. Awakening

The use of Hemingway as an example is unfortunate. Something less literary would be a better example maybe?:

Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude.

One of those is pretty stilted and not much better than lot of machine translations. The uncanny valley of being good enough but not optimal is probably something that's going to plague AI for a long time.

Google’s decision to reorganize itself around A.I. was the first major manifestation of what has become an industrywide machine-learning delirium. Over the past four years, six companies in particular — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and the Chinese firm Baidu — have touched off an arms race for A.I. talent, particularly within universities. Corporate promises of resources and freedom have thinned out top academic departments. It has become widely known in Silicon Valley that Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, personally oversees, with phone calls and video-chat blandishments, his company’s overtures to the most desirable graduate students. Starting salaries of seven figures are not unheard-of. Attendance at the field’s most important academic conference has nearly quadrupled. What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence.

That's...worrying. Given all of these companies lack of respect for privacy and consumers, it should trouble us that one of them may end up with such a world-changing innovation. Throw enough money into one place, stick a bunch of PhDs in a building, and eventually you'll get something. It's just numbers. Bodies + money. What's inspiring about that?

Does the prospect of Mark Zuckerberg having control over AI for the next five decades trouble you? Even more remarkable is he'd do it on the back of having made a marginally better social networking site in PHP in 2004 and spreading it via the best social network in the world - Ivy League universities. And now those same universities are being raided for talent by these companies...

Is this how we should be picking winners? The distinct lack of diversity and their past stances and actions are troubling. This seems to be mostly a hype piece without any regard for practical effects.

If these same companies can't anticipate or mitigate the impact of issues like fake news until after an election, what makes you think they understand the consequences and impact of something much more complex? And even if they do anticipate it, how do they hold back the pressures of shareholders?

A lot of AI is about vector space these days.

https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/1234...

"That interim also saw dedicated attempts on the part of Google’s competitors to catch up. (As Le told me about his close collaboration with Tomas Mikolov, he kept repeating Mikolov’s name over and over, in an incantatory way that sounded poignant."

"Just as the chip-design process was nearly complete, Le and two colleagues finally demonstrated that neural networks might be configured to handle the structure of language. He drew upon an idea, called “word embeddings,” that had been around for more than 10 years. When you summarize images, you can divine a picture of what each stage of the summary looks like — an edge, a circle, etc. When you summarize language in a similar way, you essentially produce multidimensional maps of the distances, based on common usage, between one word and every single other word in the language. The machine is not “analyzing” the data the way that we might, with linguistic rules that identify some of them as nouns and others as verbs. Instead, it is shifting and twisting and warping the words around in the map. In two dimensions, you cannot make this map useful. You want, for example, “cat” to be in the rough vicinity of “dog,” but you also want “cat” to be near “tail” and near “supercilious” and near “meme,” because you want to try to capture all of the different relationships — both strong and weak — that the word “cat” has to other words. It can be related to all these other words simultaneously only if it is related to each of them in a different dimension. You can’t easily make a 160,000-dimensional map, but it turns out you can represent a language pretty well in a mere thousand or so dimensions — in other words, a universe in which each word is designated by a list of a thousand numbers. Le gave me a good-natured hard time for my continual requests for a mental picture of these maps. “Gideon,” he would say, with the blunt regular demurral of Bartleby, “I do not generally like trying to visualize thousand-dimensional vectors in three-dimensional space.”

> Starting salaries of seven figures are not unheard-of

Seven figures? For grad students?

Sundar seems very confused here. The idea that we should invent AGI to make "personal digital assistants" is like Hogwarts students inventing time machines so they can take two classes at once. I mean, yes, it would technically enable you to do that, but it doesn't matter because at that point you have way, way bigger problems. If a fleet of alien spaceships arrived in the sky over Manhattan tomorrow, our first reaction would not be "oh, now the aliens can be our personal digital assistants!" (or, for that matter, "they might take our jobs!"). Yet the invention of general AI would be even more powerful than that. It would be like enabling any programmer in the world to summon a personal fleet of alien spaceships, on command, from a planet of their choosing anywhere in the universe. "Digital assistants" would be the absolute last thing anyone had on their mind.

It's pretty remarkable is it?

We've got all kind of past fiction which plays on these concerns, more recently Ex Machina and Westworld.

But here people are making the same bold pronouncements...so certain we know or can control technology which hasn't even been invented yet.