6 ms·

>A few months back, the expert consensus was that we were many years away from an AI playing Go at the 9-dan level. These kinds of predictions are almost alway

>A few months back, the expert consensus was that we were many years away from an AI playing Go at the 9-dan level. These kinds of predictions are almost always useless. You can always find people who say it'll take n years before x happens, but no one can predict which approaches will work, and how much improvement they'll confer. > What this underscores, if anything, is the accelerating pace of technological growth, for better or for worse. What? This is a non-sequitur. Continued advancement doesn't mean that it is accelerating, and even if this does represent an unexpected achievement that doesn't mean that future development will maintain that pace. Appreciate it for what it is - an historic achievement for AI & ML - and stop trying to attach broader significance to it.

lefnire 11y ago
You sound like the kinda person who says "AI will never drive," "AI will never play Go." True there's a lot of hype, which ML experts are concerned may lead to another burst & winter. On the flip-side there's a lot of curmudgeonly nay-sayers such as yourself at which ML experts roll their eyes and forge ahead. What I find is both extremes don't understand ML, they're just repeating their peers. ML is big, and it's gonna do big things. Not "only Go", not "take over the world"; somewhere in between.
- cgearhart 11y ago
  I'm actually very optimistic about the state of AI and ML lately. The difference is that I don't anthropomorphize the machines or ascribe human values to their behavior. I absolutely believe AI will drive (and save lives); I have always believed that AI will play Go; I believe that AI will grow to match and surpass humans in many things we assume that only humans can do. Humans aren't perfect, but that doesn't mean that machines who outperform us are perfect either. AlphaGo plays Go. It probably doesn't play Go like a human (because a human probably can't do what it does), but that's OK because it also appears to be better than humans. AlphaGo is interesting not because it has done something impossible, but because it has proven possible a few novel ideas that could find other interesting applications, and adds another notch to the belt of a few other tried and tested techniques.
johnloeber 11y ago
> These kinds of predictions are almost always useless. Let's rephrase. For a long time, the expert consensus regarding Go was that it was extremely difficult to write strongly-performing AI for. From the AlphaGo Paper: Go presents "difficult decision-making tasks; an intractable search space; and an optimal solution so complex it appears infeasible to directly approximate using a policy or value function." For many years, the state-of-the-art Go AI stagnated or grew very slowly, reaching at most the amateur dan level. AlphaGo presents a huge and surprising leap. > Continued advancement doesn't mean that it is accelerating Over constant time increases, AI is tackling problems that appear exponentially more difficult. In particular, see Checkers (early '90s) vs Chess ('97) vs Go ('16). The human advantage has generally been understood to be the breadth of the game tree, nearly equivalent to the complexity of the game. If we let x be the maximum complexity of a task at which AI performs as well as a human, then I would argue that x has been growing at an accelerating pace over the past few decades.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > If we let x be the maximum complexity of a task at which AI performs as well as a human, then I would argue that x has been growing at an accelerating pace over the past few decades. At ONE task, yes. But humans are average at many things but excel at being able to adapt to many different tasks, all the time. Typical AIs (as we know them now) cannot ever hope to replicate that.
  - celticninja 11y ago
    This seems to have been linked to a lot recently but I feel it is relevant to the discussion on technology advances pertaining to AI. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...
- skj 11y ago
  "and an optimal solution so complex it appears infeasible to directly approximate using a policy or value function." To be clear, the above refers to specific concepts in Reinforcement Learning. A policy is a function from state (in Go, where all the stones are) to action (where to place the next stone). I agree that it is unlikely to have an effective policy function. At least one that is calculated efficiently (no tree search)... otherwise its not what a Reinforcement Learning researcher typically calls a policy function. A value function is is a function from state to numerical "goodness", and is more or less one step removed from a policy function: you can choose the action that takes you to the state with the highest value. It has the same representational problems found there.
angstrom 11y ago
These kind of statements are only valuable to me if they are followed by "And these are the challenges that need to be overcome which are being worked on". Otherwise it's a blanket retort. It's like saying "There are lots of X". Ok, name 7. If you get stuck after 2 or 3 you're full of it.
jmathes 11y ago
> Continued advancement doesn't mean that it is accelerating, and even if this does represent an unexpected achievement that doesn't mean that future development will maintain that pace. Advancement faster than predictions does mean accelerating advancement, coupled with the (true) fact that people's predictions tend to assume a constant rate of advancement [citation needed]. Actually, all you'd need to show accelerating advancement is a trend of conservative predictions and the fact that these predictions assume a non-decreasing rate of advancement; if we're predicting accelerating advancement and still underestimating its rate, advancement must still be accelerating. It even seems like this latter case is where we're at, since people who assume an accelerating rate of advancement see to assume that the rate is (loosely) quadratic. However, given that the rate of advancement tends to be based on the current level of advancement (a fair approximation, since so many advancements themselves help with research and development), we should expect it to be exponential. That's what exponential means. However, the reality seems like it might be even faster than exponential. This is what the singularitarians think. When you plot humanity's advancements using whatever definition you like, look at the length of time between them to approximate rate, and then try to fit this rate to a regression, it tends to fit regressions with vertical asymptotes.
kamaal 11y ago
>>You can always find people who say it'll take n years before x happens Interesting, people seem to be saying the same about self driving cars.
ergothus 11y ago
> These kinds of predictions are almost always useless. You can always find people who say it'll take n years before x happens, but no one can predict which approaches will work, and how much improvement they'll confer. True, but it's pretty refreshing to have a prediction about AI being N years from something that is wrong in the OTHER direction. Contrary to your point about 'appreciate it for what it is', there is ONE lesson I hope people take from it: You can't assume AI progression always remains in the future. A general cycle I've seen repeated over and over: * sci-fi/futurists make a bunch of predictions * some subset of those predictions are shown to be plausible * general society ignores those possibilities * an advancement happens with general societal implications * society freaks out Whether it's cloning (ala Dolly the Sheep, where people demonstrated zero understanding of what genetic replication was e.g. a genetic clone isn't "you") or self-driving cars (After decades of laughing at the idea because "who would you sue?", suddenly society is scrambling to adjust because they never wanted to think past treating that question as academic), or everyone having an internet-connected phone in their pocket (see encryption wars...again), or the existence of a bunch of connected computers with a wealth of knowledge available, society has always done little to avoid knee-jerk reactions. Now we have AI (still a long way off from AGI, granted) demonstrating not only can it do things we thought weren't going to happen soon (see: Siri/Echo/Cortana/etc), but breaking a major milestone sooner than most anyone thought. We've been told for a long time that because of typical technology patterns, we should expect that the jump from "wow" to "WOW!" will happen pretty quickly. We've got big thinkers warning of the complications/dangers of AI for a long time. And to date, AI has only been a big joke to society, or the villain of B-grade movies. It'd be nice, if just once, society at least gave SOME thought to the implications a little in advance. I don't know when an AGI will occur - years, decades, centuries - but I'm willing to bet it takes general society by surprise and causes a lot of people to freak out.
sergiosgc 11y ago
> > What this underscores, if anything, is the accelerating pace of technological growth, for better or for worse. > What? This is a non-sequitur. Continued advancement doesn't mean that it is accelerating, and even if this does represent an unexpected achievement that doesn't mean that future development will maintain that pace. It's not a non-sequitur, but there is an implicit assumption you perhaps missed. The assumption is that the human failure to predict this AI advance is caused by an evolution curve with order higher than linear. You see, humans are amazingly good at predicting linear change. We are actually quite good at predicting x² changes (frisbee catching). Higher than that, we are useless. Even at x², we fail in some scenarios (braking distance at unusual speeds, like 250km/h on the autobahn for example). The fact that it will maintain its pace is an unfounded assumption. However, assuming that the pace will slow is as unfounded. All in all, I'd guess it is safest to assume tech will evolve as it has in the last 5000 years. That would be an exponential evolution curve.

lefnire 11y ago

You sound like the kinda person who says "AI will never drive," "AI will never play Go." True there's a lot of hype, which ML experts are concerned may lead to another burst & winter. On the flip-side there's a lot of curmudgeonly nay-sayers such as yourself at which ML experts roll their eyes and forge ahead. What I find is both extremes don't understand ML, they're just repeating their peers. ML is big, and it's gonna do big things. Not "only Go", not "take over the world"; somewhere in between.

cgearhart 11y ago
I'm actually very optimistic about the state of AI and ML lately. The difference is that I don't anthropomorphize the machines or ascribe human values to their behavior. I absolutely believe AI will drive (and save lives); I have always believed that AI will play Go; I believe that AI will grow to match and surpass humans in many things we assume that only humans can do. Humans aren't perfect, but that doesn't mean that machines who outperform us are perfect either. AlphaGo plays Go. It probably doesn't play Go like a human (because a human probably can't do what it does), but that's OK because it also appears to be better than humans. AlphaGo is interesting not because it has done something impossible, but because it has proven possible a few novel ideas that could find other interesting applications, and adds another notch to the belt of a few other tried and tested techniques.

johnloeber 11y ago

> These kinds of predictions are almost always useless. Let's rephrase. For a long time, the expert consensus regarding Go was that it was extremely difficult to write strongly-performing AI for. From the AlphaGo Paper: Go presents "difficult decision-making tasks; an intractable search space; and an optimal solution so complex it appears infeasible to directly approximate using a policy or value function." For many years, the state-of-the-art Go AI stagnated or grew very slowly, reaching at most the amateur dan level. AlphaGo presents a huge and surprising leap. > Continued advancement doesn't mean that it is accelerating Over constant time increases, AI is tackling problems that appear exponentially more difficult. In particular, see Checkers (early '90s) vs Chess ('97) vs Go ('16). The human advantage has generally been understood to be the breadth of the game tree, nearly equivalent to the complexity of the game. If we let x be the maximum complexity of a task at which AI performs as well as a human, then I would argue that x has been growing at an accelerating pace over the past few decades.

ekianjo 11y ago
> If we let x be the maximum complexity of a task at which AI performs as well as a human, then I would argue that x has been growing at an accelerating pace over the past few decades. At ONE task, yes. But humans are average at many things but excel at being able to adapt to many different tasks, all the time. Typical AIs (as we know them now) cannot ever hope to replicate that.
- celticninja 11y ago
  This seems to have been linked to a lot recently but I feel it is relevant to the discussion on technology advances pertaining to AI. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...
skj 11y ago
"and an optimal solution so complex it appears infeasible to directly approximate using a policy or value function." To be clear, the above refers to specific concepts in Reinforcement Learning. A policy is a function from state (in Go, where all the stones are) to action (where to place the next stone). I agree that it is unlikely to have an effective policy function. At least one that is calculated efficiently (no tree search)... otherwise its not what a Reinforcement Learning researcher typically calls a policy function. A value function is is a function from state to numerical "goodness", and is more or less one step removed from a policy function: you can choose the action that takes you to the state with the highest value. It has the same representational problems found there.

angstrom 11y ago

These kind of statements are only valuable to me if they are followed by "And these are the challenges that need to be overcome which are being worked on". Otherwise it's a blanket retort. It's like saying "There are lots of X". Ok, name 7. If you get stuck after 2 or 3 you're full of it.

jmathes 11y ago

> Continued advancement doesn't mean that it is accelerating, and even if this does represent an unexpected achievement that doesn't mean that future development will maintain that pace. Advancement faster than predictions does mean accelerating advancement, coupled with the (true) fact that people's predictions tend to assume a constant rate of advancement [citation needed]. Actually, all you'd need to show accelerating advancement is a trend of conservative predictions and the fact that these predictions assume a non-decreasing rate of advancement; if we're predicting accelerating advancement and still underestimating its rate, advancement must still be accelerating. It even seems like this latter case is where we're at, since people who assume an accelerating rate of advancement see to assume that the rate is (loosely) quadratic. However, given that the rate of advancement tends to be based on the current level of advancement (a fair approximation, since so many advancements themselves help with research and development), we should expect it to be exponential. That's what exponential means. However, the reality seems like it might be even faster than exponential. This is what the singularitarians think. When you plot humanity's advancements using whatever definition you like, look at the length of time between them to approximate rate, and then try to fit this rate to a regression, it tends to fit regressions with vertical asymptotes.

kamaal 11y ago

>>You can always find people who say it'll take n years before x happens Interesting, people seem to be saying the same about self driving cars.

ergothus 11y ago

> These kinds of predictions are almost always useless. You can always find people who say it'll take n years before x happens, but no one can predict which approaches will work, and how much improvement they'll confer. True, but it's pretty refreshing to have a prediction about AI being N years from something that is wrong in the OTHER direction. Contrary to your point about 'appreciate it for what it is', there is ONE lesson I hope people take from it: You can't assume AI progression always remains in the future. A general cycle I've seen repeated over and over: * sci-fi/futurists make a bunch of predictions * some subset of those predictions are shown to be plausible * general society ignores those possibilities * an advancement happens with general societal implications * society freaks out Whether it's cloning (ala Dolly the Sheep, where people demonstrated zero understanding of what genetic replication was e.g. a genetic clone isn't "you") or self-driving cars (After decades of laughing at the idea because "who would you sue?", suddenly society is scrambling to adjust because they never wanted to think past treating that question as academic), or everyone having an internet-connected phone in their pocket (see encryption wars...again), or the existence of a bunch of connected computers with a wealth of knowledge available, society has always done little to avoid knee-jerk reactions. Now we have AI (still a long way off from AGI, granted) demonstrating not only can it do things we thought weren't going to happen soon (see: Siri/Echo/Cortana/etc), but breaking a major milestone sooner than most anyone thought. We've been told for a long time that because of typical technology patterns, we should expect that the jump from "wow" to "WOW!" will happen pretty quickly. We've got big thinkers warning of the complications/dangers of AI for a long time. And to date, AI has only been a big joke to society, or the villain of B-grade movies. It'd be nice, if just once, society at least gave SOME thought to the implications a little in advance. I don't know when an AGI will occur - years, decades, centuries - but I'm willing to bet it takes general society by surprise and causes a lot of people to freak out.

sergiosgc 11y ago

> > What this underscores, if anything, is the accelerating pace of technological growth, for better or for worse. > What? This is a non-sequitur. Continued advancement doesn't mean that it is accelerating, and even if this does represent an unexpected achievement that doesn't mean that future development will maintain that pace. It's not a non-sequitur, but there is an implicit assumption you perhaps missed. The assumption is that the human failure to predict this AI advance is caused by an evolution curve with order higher than linear. You see, humans are amazingly good at predicting linear change. We are actually quite good at predicting x² changes (frisbee catching). Higher than that, we are useless. Even at x², we fail in some scenarios (braking distance at unusual speeds, like 250km/h on the autobahn for example). The fact that it will maintain its pace is an unfounded assumption. However, assuming that the pace will slow is as unfounded. All in all, I'd guess it is safest to assume tech will evolve as it has in the last 5000 years. That would be an exponential evolution curve.