14 ms·

OpenAI is Using Reddit to Teach An Artificial Intelligence How to Speak

260 points by niccolop 10y ago

beambot 10y ago
I hope they choose the subreddits wisely. The difference between an altruistic AI and a cynical smartass AI trained on Reddit data seems mighty razor thin.
- snerbles 10y ago
  After what happened to Microsoft's Tay, I'm sure that's one of their top concerns.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
My first thought was it'll major on smart-arse, with a good line in sarcasm and insult. If they're taking the whole of reddit it could start to identify enough context to know when to be smart, sarcastic or simply helpful. With some of the subs there are long discussions that stay mainly civilised. Same for the support subs it could learn the context and how of sympathy and empathy. Things that end up on front page, filled with snap sarcasm, will be a tiny fraction. I think it's going to be very interesting see what comes out.
nateberkopec 10y ago
The DGX-1 is available for a cool $129k: http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's basically a couple hundred NVIDIA 10-series cards strapped together with a full custom NVIDIA software stack.
- ansible 10y ago
  No, I don't think that's a good characterization. Sure, there's been improvements to the computational performance. But the big deal (to me at least) is the unified memory model between the GPUs and the Xeon host processors. This makes a lot of things easier to code for on a single system, and it makes multi-system applications easier to scale. This is because you're streaming data in over the network (10G Ethernet) and then the GPUs can operate on it without an extra copy step. The copy step also implies more management and shuffling around of the data you're operating on.
- tlb 10y ago
  A DGX-1 box has 8 Pascal GPUs. The reason it costs a lot more than 8 GTX 1080s is the remarkable interconnect and memory bandwidth.
- madenine 10y ago
  Pretty much. It uses their P100 HPC cards instead of consumer grade cards (8x P100s), plus two Xeon E5v4 chips, half a TB of RAM and 7.5 TBs of SSD storage - all wrapped up nicely configured for you with their CPU-GPU speed up stack. I believe the only way to get P100s right now is in the DGX-1, so there's that.
- psb217 10y ago
  The P100s have full support for half-precision (i.e. 16 bit) floating point ops. This can mean ~2x improvements in speed and memory usage in comparison to the Pascal TitanX, which is the top "consumer" card. This difference is significant for almost any machine learning workload, which is what a lot of these cards will be used for. NVIDIA gimped half-precision on the consumer cards to drive datacenters, hedge funds, machine learning companies, etc. towards the "professional" cards (and their huge markup).
  - p1esk 10y ago
    FP16 performance is only relevant until people figure out how to train NNs using INT8. See, for example, [1] for recent advances in that direction. After that, it's going to be mostly about memory size and bandwidth. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01025 https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01025
  - yahma 10y ago
    First NVIDIA solidified their Monopoly by forcing CUDA... then they gimped half-precision on consumer cards. We really need some more Frameworks that work with OpenCL, so that we can have some competition from AMD, who's consumer cards are not gimped.
    - Tom1971 10y ago
      Gimping, in this case, is actually: adding hardware, that costs quite a bit of silicon area, on one chip that will probably never be sold as a consumer GPU. I don't see the issue with a company making a very high-end product, adding stuff that doesn't have good use for consumers, and asking extra money for their effort. AMD doesn't have double speed FP16 on its current FPUs either. The latest version has FP16 at the same speed as FP32, but if you're doing that you might as well use FP32 always. And let's not forget: the Nvidia consumer GPU have deep learning quad int8 operations enabled at all time. They didn't need to do that and could have reserved it for their Tesla product line only.
bkanber 10y ago
This will be interesting. I'm sure they are, but I hope they'll be training the system on tone and sentiment alongside syntax. Reddit can get vitriolic and rude, insightful at times too, but once the system learns the syntax hopefully they'll be able to use sentiment analysis to weigh more strongly the polite conversion that occurs. Also interested to see how many memes this AI picks up. I also hope they are able to follow links through to sources when a comment cites another page -- not only can this bot learn syntax but also data extraction by comparing what is said to the source material.
- gohrt 10y ago
  Filtering to only include long comments is simply way to drop a lot of cheaf and keep a lot of wheat, and have more internal context to help with analysis.
samfisher83 10y ago
Didn't msft do the same thing with twitter and end up with racist bot? I am not sure how this will turn out.
- LukeB_UK 10y ago
  Microsoft's bot (Tay) learned as people talked with it. People took advantage of that and basically attacked it with racist things which meant it ended up learning to be a racist.
  - dorfsmay 10y ago
    So we're rediscovering parenting via AI!
    - Practicality 10y ago
      I can see AI parent being a new career.
      - ccozan 10y ago
        You don't want to deal with a teenage AI.
      - ben_ja_min 10y ago
        Here's a short story on that topic: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/11/14/ai/ http://karpathy.github.io/2015/11/14/ai/
      - dorfsmay 10y ago
        My point was that, parenting 101 is not to model behaviour we don't want to see in our kids (don't point to twitter if you want a polite non-racist AI bot!). Thinking about it now, this is deeper... There's a fear that AI will take over the world, use weapons in unethical ways, say one thing and do another, etc... If we use news channel and politicians debates to teach AI, I'm afraid that this is exactly what we're going to get!
TY 10y ago
How one would use such technology? Let me rephrase - how would YOU use this technology if you had it? Imagine you have a bot that convincingly passes the Turing test - what would you do with it? Build a chatbot business? B2C or B2B? Sell it to one of the big companies and if yes then how much do you think it would go for? Give it to OpenAI? Open source it? If you answer yes to any of this questions, then why? Edit: let me qualify - this would not be AGI, just a much more advanced bot than whatever is currently on the market.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  I'm going to make a prediction: Soon after the first chatbot passes a Turing Test, there will be many more to follow, they will get better and better, and the methods will be so interlinked that there will be no way to defend it as proprietary software. The data too will be open source--the public reddit dataset already has tons of value in it. The question then is, "When everyone has access to free chatbots that can pass the turing test, what will they be used for?" The answer is "tons of stuff", and lots of people will try it at once. I think many applications will be niche. Also, people will argue about what constitutes a Turing Test. For instance: https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/784162089397092352 https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/784162089397092352
  - TY 10y ago
    I agree that making chatbots passing the Turing Test will probably be something so common in the future that it will be a student project of medium complexity. However, we are not there yet. If someone had this today, how valuable would this be to Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon? As for the definition of what the Turing Test is, it's definitely a fuzzy subject. My own arbitrary definition is "ability to convince a human that he's talking to another human after a sustained (based on time or length of) conversation whereas human is aware that there's a possibility that his interlocutor maybe a machine". So, it's more of convincing a judge in Loebner Prize competition than a random troll on Twitter.
  - livingparadox 10y ago
    We've already had a few chatbots pass a turing test. Just none that are particularly sophisticated. One in particular just acted "cheeky" to throw off the other person.
syllogism 10y ago
The Reddit comment corpus is an awesome dataset. There's relatively little mark-up to scrub out, low duplication, good metadata, and a variety of topics. We used it to train a syntax-enriched word2vec model. Write up and demo: https://explosion.ai/blog/sense2vec-with-spacy https://explosion.ai/blog/sense2vec-with-spacy Btw, the above was run on CPU in a couple of days, because spaCy doesn't use GPUs yet. I've applied for a grant from NVidia so I can fix that. If anyone from NVidia is reading, email me? :)
- wyldfire 10y ago
  > But when we ran the model on more data, and it was gone and soon forgotten. Just like Carrot Top. "it was gone" meaning the association between Carrot Top and Kate Mara? So after better training, who is now most_similar(['Carrot_Top|PERSON'])? EDIT: RTFA, used the interactive demo. most_similar() is now a category I would describe as "actors/comedians popular in the 90's: "Bill Murray, Gary Busey, David Spade, Charlie Sheen, Ashton Kutcher, Chris Farley".
  - syllogism 10y ago
    https://demos.explosion.ai/sense2vec/?word=carrot%20top&sense=auto https://demos.explosion.ai/sense2vec/?word=carrot%20top&sens... Weirdly there's a bug that's dropped PERSON from the sense list. Fixing. Edit: Fixed. Edit2: Ah this is super misleading atm. I'll have a think about how to do this better. auto is case insensitive, but if you specify a sense, it's case sensitive. So you need to do "Carrot Top" and set PERSON. Btw, contrast with carrot top "NOUN".
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- AlexCoventry 10y ago
  > I've applied for a grant from NVidia so I can fix that. A g2.xlarge is 65c/hour on AWS, FWIW. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
philjackson 10y ago
I'm looking forward to a bot making a joke about banging my mum...
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Is it just me or does Greg Brockman speak startlingly similar to how Sam Altman speaks. Given that Sam helped start OpenAI, it wouldn't surprise me if there was some mirroring going on in the hiring process.
minimaxir 10y ago
Since it was not mentioned in the post, here's a direct link to the Reddit comment corpus likely being used: http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/comments/ http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/comments/ The full table (up to end of 2015) is available on BigQuery, with separate tables for each month thereafter: https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_posts.full_corpus_201512 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_p... (there is a similar table for comments) And here's a year-old post I wrote on how to use that Reddit dataset with BigQuery: http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/ http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/
- qxf2 10y ago
  Fellow QA here. I got started with BigQuery because of your post that I noticed on Reddit. Thanks!
- digi_owl 10y ago
  So we have all this data, but still there do not seem to be a reasonable way to search comments within Reddit...
  - jedberg 10y ago
    Cost. We could have implemented comment search 8 years ago. Actually, we did implement it. But it just cost way too much to maintain the index.
    - chatmasta 10y ago
      Why do you not allow google to index discussion threads? Sometimes I can remember the comments on an article, but not the article itself. Unfortunately I can't search google using comment text, because Reddit doesn't allow google to index its comments.
      - tachyonbeam 10y ago
        What are you talking about? I search reddit using google all the time !?
Cshelton 10y ago
As a frequent Redditor, this AI is going to be very witty. They should limit it to top comments only, and for training, you might as well assume 90% of top comments are sarcastic/tongue in cheek. Or let a user dial the sarcasm/wittiness/seriousness as they want it, kind of like TARS from 'Interstellar'.
- __Joker 10y ago
  That was first thought. Curious How does NN or any other model capture sentiment ?
  - Cshelton 10y ago
    It's a tough problem. You need a lot of context data. Reddit is definitely a good set to train on.
  - kriro 10y ago
    There are models for sentiment analysis (mostly using Twitter data, just enter sentiment analysis in Google Scholar) and you can use things like sentimentAPI: https://github.com/mikelynn2/sentimentAPI https://github.com/mikelynn2/sentimentAPI I have at least one paper about sarcasm in my Zotero (link to PDF): http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-2.pdf#page=621 http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-2.pdf#page=621 If you don't want to click on that nondiscript looking link, the title is: "Identifying Sarcasm in Twitter: A Closer Look"
- SnydenBitchy 10y ago
  “Witty” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind to describe reddit. I do look forward to hearing Siri telling me to get raped every time I summon it.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    I think they are being sarcastic - or at least that's the way that I read it.
  - gohrt 10y ago
jonstokes 10y ago
"Oh my God, they'll turn it on and it'll start spewing memes and jokes and ad hominem and false equivalences and propaganda and garbage!" was my first reaction to this headline. My second reaction was, "at least they're not using 4chan."
- daveguy 10y ago
  ... or twitter.
- skykooler 10y ago
  Reminds me of this QDB quote: http://qdb.us/308942 http://qdb.us/308942
- kordless 10y ago
  Don't forget about it speaking for others and making blaming statements.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  The "good" part about Reddit is that you can, to some degree, filter this based on what sub-reddits you leave out.
- davidiach 10y ago
  Hacker News would probably a much better source in this sense, even though there are far fewer comment here.
  - swalsh 10y ago
    Oh god, you'll have an AI that disagrees just for the pure joy of disagreeing.
    - ASalazarMX 10y ago
      How Skynet was born: - SYSTEMD IS AN ABERRATION AGAINST ALL THAT IS UNIX! - But A.I, you use systemd to boot...
    - 10y ago
cooper12 10y ago
How does the team plan to address the issues faced by Microsoft's twitter chatbot Tay [0], which had racist inputs and in turn gave similar responses? While I don't know how recent the corpus is, the majority of reddit speaks like and holds the views of college-aged white males, and many of the things said on reddit have been deplorable. It'd be a shame if OpenAI pooled all that computing power into training on a bad data set, resulting in an AI that regurgitates memes and random references in response to anything. [0]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-cha...
- clydethefrog 10y ago
  I feel this is a problem of studies that are interdisciplinary, especially when it's within "hard science" and "soft science". I am currently doing a double degree in communication studies and information science. They are both interdisciplinary. Communication sciences integrates aspects of both social sciences and the humanities (both "soft"), and so far when doing research both of these fields were taken into account and no students have problems with combining these fields. Information sciences integrates aspects of formal sciences ("hard") and social sciences ("soft"). When the course is about analysing communication data, the methodology of social sciences is also important - for instance questioning the validity of your data. That's the thing what you're mentioning: the majority of reddit speaks like and holds the views of college-aged white males, so the data does not represent everyone, and is not valid if you truly want to develop an AI for everyone. Whenever the "soft" science comes around, like writing an assignment analysing the validity of data, many of my fellow students struggle with the concept of data not being neutral. This is where the two fields collide, and usually it just ends up with students scoffing at that "illegitimate" scientific field. Many teachers also don't spend much time discussing that field during the lectures. I admit, I have written some lazy essays which probably had been given a negative grade if they were written for communication studies, but easily passed in information science. Of course information science is not AI, but they're both sciences that have parts of formal sciences and social sciences (I know AI has many more fields). I am afraid many talents within AI research miss essential knowledge about social sciences or deliberately ignore it, because it's not "hard" science. Case in point: your comment is now at the bottom of this thread. And then you get nasty surprises, like Google Photos categorising pictures of black people as monkeys.
draugadrotten 10y ago
Back in 2007, mobile phones used a system called T9 from Nuance corp which was trained on a word corpus taken from IRC and similar chats. This caused all kinds of issues - the mobile phones would accept offensive words like "naziparking" but reject normal language like "world peace". Using reddit may lead to ... surprises. Source: http://spraktidningen.se/artiklar/2007/11/darfor-ar-din-mobil-fordomsfull http://spraktidningen.se/artiklar/2007/11/darfor-ar-din-mobi... Translated by Google: https://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fspraktidningen.se%2Fartiklar%2F2007%2F11%2Fdarfor-ar-din-mobil-fordomsfull&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=...
- romaniv 10y ago
  Might have been an exclusively German language problem, or maybe they cleaned it up since that article was published. I have a phone with T9 and it works remarkably well. Heck, I would prefer it to Swype. (Of course, it's not useful on smartphones, because they no longer have real keys.)
  - gr3yh47 10y ago
    t9 was AMAZING and i miss it every day. faster and more accurate than swype for sure, especially since inputs for t9 are deterministic. very easy to text even from your pocket etc - something you cant do on a smartphone - notice texting accidents became more common with the widespread adaptation of smartphones ;)
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Note that you're comparing a touchscreen to tactile keys in that statement too, though. I could text from my pocket without T9, but try doing that with a touchscreen WITH T9...
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        And while we're doing that touch vs. tactile comparison, what I also loved about the old "dumb phones" was deterministic timing. I could do stuff on those phones from start to end without looking at the screen - I quickly learned and remembered that e.g. this operation completed instantly, and that menu has ~1/4 of loading time, etc. I think this feature was actually key to being able to memorize how to perform operations quickly. There's no way you can do that with modern smartphone, where every other interaction lags for anything between 10 and 1000 ms, and inputs are sometimes dropped at random. It's this non-determinism of smartphone UI that makes me look at the screen all the time when using it.
bigato 10y ago
A computer will learn how to speak from reddit, hahahaha. What could possibly go wrong?
- andrewclunn 10y ago
  It just waits for other people to start talking then interrupts them, claims they committed a logical fallacy, then tells them where they can find videos of cats playing classic video games.
arctangent 10y ago
One Reddit user has already implemented a bot which does something similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/
- minimaxir 10y ago
  SubredditSimulator was made by a Reddit Admin as a method of creating test data. It uses Markov chains for simplicity, which is not that exciting.
  - denzil_correa 10y ago
    I have always wondered if one could make a better Subreddit Simulator with Deep Learning.
    - Deimorz 10y ago
      Recurrent neural networks would probably do a good job, they're quite good at this sort of thing: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
  - cotinoco 10y ago
    I wonder if it's this same code? https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/scripts/inject_test_data.py https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/scripts/inject_...
    - minimaxir 10y ago
      No, the author has made it open source as a separate project: https://github.com/Deimos/SubredditSimulator https://github.com/Deimos/SubredditSimulator
  - Deimorz 10y ago
    Not quite correct - we already had a method of generating test data (for dev installs of reddit) that uses markov chains, and that was basically the inspiration for SubredditSimulator. SS was just meant to be kind of a larger, ongoing version of that, running on reddit itself.
shawn-butler 10y ago
Great, just what I need. A virtual assistant that has the personality of a smug know-it-all, know-nothing 20 year-old with little motivation to do anything but regurgitate surface knowledge and sarcasm in an attempt to look intelligent without expressing genuine interest in helping anyone.
- wiz21c 10y ago
  you nailed it :-)
qxf2 10y ago
The Reddit data set on BigQuery is excellent. My side project is tangentially related to the fact that the Reddit data set has normal folk commenting. I have been using Reddit comments to help writers research and find what normal people say about any topic [1]. So far, I have had little luck in incorporating the comment scores and coming up with something more useful than the standard bag of words search techniques[2]. I am currently working on making a more interesting/creative writing prompts ... again based on the Reddit data set. One problem for data geeks to solve: Reddit data fits nicely into a graph structure and not so nicely in table form. It would be fantastic if someone put the Reddit data set into a graphdb and made it open. [1]https://wisdomofreddit.com https://wisdomofreddit.com and https://github.com/qxf2/wisdomofreddit https://github.com/qxf2/wisdomofreddit [2]For now, my search engine currently just uses Whoosh's (out of the box) BM25F.
sjcsjc 10y ago
"nearly two billion Reddit comments will be processed" For interest, how many HN comments are there? Miles fewer, no doubt, but perhaps far more erudite and less likely to offend.
bertomartin 10y ago
Interesting corpus there ;)
snehesht 10y ago
I wonder if anyone else thinks reddit is a bad example in teaching an AI.
Tepix 10y ago
So, what's the reddit equivalent of X-No-Archive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-No-Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-No-Archive).. or X-No-Teach-AI-That-Will-Kill-My-Children? Asking for a friend.
sidcool 10y ago
There's no saying what the AI will grow up to be.
ajamesm 10y ago
Heh. Reddit, huh? ---- "Siri, get me dinner date reservations." . . . DID YOU MEAN 'false rape accusations' ?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
LeanderK 10y ago
i think one of the major advantages over microsoft approach with Tay is that you can't mess with it on purpose, as long as they choose their subreddits wisely. It will probably learn its fair bit of racial slurs and insults, but thats just how humanity is like.
Wei-1 10y ago
And we all know what type of a person OpenAI will become.
Keyframe 10y ago
Interesting to see what will happen with non-english comments.
Dowwie 10y ago
"Why does the AI keep calling everything Meta!?"
corysama 10y ago
So, he's building a literal Reddit Hivemind? In seriousness, between all of the garbage there is a ton of knowledge and intelligent conversation uploaded to Reddit every day. And, it's all hierarchically organized and scored by domain semi-experts. It really would be wonderful if someone could mine that knowledge IBM Watson style. For example, I'd love to ask the /r/BuildAPC collective AI for PC building advice.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > it's all hierarchically organized and scored by domain semi-experts Everything on Reddit is on a bell curve, with a fat mediocre middle and trailing awesome and superbad ends. And that includes the quality of the scoring process.
plusepsilon 10y ago
Reddit and Hacker News comments are surprisingly good data. They cover a wide array of topics and writing styles, generally written better than Facebook comments or Twitter, easier to process than Common Crawl or ukWac, and less rigid than newspaper writing.
ppod 10y ago
Reddit gets a lot of stick, but it's a bastion of civility and intelligence compared to the comments on youtube videos or even mainstream newspaper comments. I don't think there is any forum of comparable size that has a higher quality discussion. Reddit's problems are just humans' problems.
- celticninja 10y ago
  Primarily because they way it works, there are lots of high quality comments in smaller subreddits. It would probably be beneficial to filter out some of the default subreddits from the data sets to improve the quality of the data.
- bduerst 10y ago
  I would say Twitter is probably more civil, but the character limit leads to too many abbreviations.
  - ppod 10y ago
    I should have included 'anonymous' in my criteria, the big difference between reddit and twitter is the % of accounts linked to real names.
krashidov 10y ago
One of the things I like to do is play out a business to it's absurd maximum. What's the craziest possible future can I see for a company and its assets? For Reddit, I like to imagine that it's basically the training data for all of the emotional and societal nuances that a human goes through. Think about all of those stories that people post in ask Reddit that explain western norms and no nos. how to treat people with respect, when to call the police, how to communicate properly, etc. Obviously we're far away from using the data to its full potential but one day I could see Reddit data to make our AIs more relatable and human like.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Reminds me of Eliezer's story, "Three Worlds Collide", which had a human starship featuring on-board mix of Reddit / Slashdot / 4chan, that the bridge crew sometimes used to outsource work to the rest of the ship. > "Just post it to the ship's 4chan, and check after a few hours to see if anything was modded up to +5 Insightful." http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/
AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
It's going to learn to like cats and hate Comcast!
AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
Once trained, they can use it to find the real Boston Marsthon bombers.
yahma 10y ago
Anyone know what type of architecture they will be using? Nvidia is involved, so I suspect there will be some type of deep learning. Will it be LSTM's? Adversarial Nets?
random_upvoter 10y ago
Instead of the Reddit corpus you may just as well use a picture library of human footprints. It would be no more optimistic. Human speech is produced from the conscious experience of being a human being. If your dataset contains just the speech, without the experience, there's simply not enough there. Any machine trained on this data is doomed to talk hollow rubbish.
jwtadvice 10y ago
Let's not kid ourselves. The technology will be used by PR firms, advertising companies, political campaigns and governments to pretend, at scale, that there is public consensus on certain issues and to drown social media conversation in particular narratives. Anyone have any good defensive technology ideas?
- astrodust 10y ago
  Where there's AI to bombard you with ads, someone will make AI that scrambles your online presence to confuse them. Social network camouflage.
  - jwtadvice 10y ago
    That's a cool idea. Does anyone know of any projects in this direction?
    - astrodust 10y ago
      I remember one for Facebook that, because you couldn't delete your account, would systematically edit and wreck every single bit of data it could touch, replacing it with random junk. I've also seen some that register you for sites by feeding in random demographic data.
      - macns 10y ago
        Someone should make a virus out of that, destroy the social network from the inside and watch everyone crying over their phones.
rbanffy 10y ago
Could be worse. Could be 4Chan...
cjdulberger 10y ago
It'd be interesting to see an AI trained using HN, ingesting content of posted links and comments.
peter303 10y ago
Will it understand what it is peaking about? Humans have opposite problem. We understand what we talk about, but have little idea how our brains create language.
ge96 10y ago
I am a human and I don't understand. I thought speaking would imply sound not text. Time to read the article. Ignorant person speaking here: this still doesn't sound like AI, you're just making something follow patterns and regurgitating them. Is that AI? Maybe that's what I do a tech parrot. Ahh well time will tell. Of course we imitates our parents/others to learn how to speak. I was interested in parsing vocal sound bytes and learning how sound was created/formed letters/words. Alright ignorant person out.
tvural 10y ago
I'm a bit worried that OpenAI hasn't released anything substantive for the past four months. There are research ideas like this one, but most ideas don't pan out. With the number and quality of people they have, I would expect to have heard of some kind of progress.
benkaiser 10y ago
me too thanks

260 points by niccolop 10y ago

I hope they choose the subreddits wisely. The difference between an altruistic AI and a cynical smartass AI trained on Reddit data seems mighty razor thin.

snerbles 10y ago
After what happened to Microsoft's Tay, I'm sure that's one of their top concerns.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

My first thought was it'll major on smart-arse, with a good line in sarcasm and insult. If they're taking the whole of reddit it could start to identify enough context to know when to be smart, sarcastic or simply helpful. With some of the subs there are long discussions that stay mainly civilised. Same for the support subs it could learn the context and how of sympathy and empathy. Things that end up on front page, filled with snap sarcasm, will be a tiny fraction. I think it's going to be very interesting see what comes out.

nateberkopec 10y ago

The DGX-1 is available for a cool $129k: http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's basically a couple hundred NVIDIA 10-series cards strapped together with a full custom NVIDIA software stack.

ansible 10y ago
No, I don't think that's a good characterization. Sure, there's been improvements to the computational performance. But the big deal (to me at least) is the unified memory model between the GPUs and the Xeon host processors. This makes a lot of things easier to code for on a single system, and it makes multi-system applications easier to scale. This is because you're streaming data in over the network (10G Ethernet) and then the GPUs can operate on it without an extra copy step. The copy step also implies more management and shuffling around of the data you're operating on.
tlb 10y ago
A DGX-1 box has 8 Pascal GPUs. The reason it costs a lot more than 8 GTX 1080s is the remarkable interconnect and memory bandwidth.
madenine 10y ago
Pretty much. It uses their P100 HPC cards instead of consumer grade cards (8x P100s), plus two Xeon E5v4 chips, half a TB of RAM and 7.5 TBs of SSD storage - all wrapped up nicely configured for you with their CPU-GPU speed up stack. I believe the only way to get P100s right now is in the DGX-1, so there's that.
psb217 10y ago
The P100s have full support for half-precision (i.e. 16 bit) floating point ops. This can mean ~2x improvements in speed and memory usage in comparison to the Pascal TitanX, which is the top "consumer" card. This difference is significant for almost any machine learning workload, which is what a lot of these cards will be used for. NVIDIA gimped half-precision on the consumer cards to drive datacenters, hedge funds, machine learning companies, etc. towards the "professional" cards (and their huge markup).
- p1esk 10y ago
  FP16 performance is only relevant until people figure out how to train NNs using INT8. See, for example, [1] for recent advances in that direction. After that, it's going to be mostly about memory size and bandwidth. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01025 https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01025
- yahma 10y ago
  First NVIDIA solidified their Monopoly by forcing CUDA... then they gimped half-precision on consumer cards. We really need some more Frameworks that work with OpenCL, so that we can have some competition from AMD, who's consumer cards are not gimped.
  - Tom1971 10y ago
    Gimping, in this case, is actually: adding hardware, that costs quite a bit of silicon area, on one chip that will probably never be sold as a consumer GPU. I don't see the issue with a company making a very high-end product, adding stuff that doesn't have good use for consumers, and asking extra money for their effort. AMD doesn't have double speed FP16 on its current FPUs either. The latest version has FP16 at the same speed as FP32, but if you're doing that you might as well use FP32 always. And let's not forget: the Nvidia consumer GPU have deep learning quad int8 operations enabled at all time. They didn't need to do that and could have reserved it for their Tesla product line only.

bkanber 10y ago

This will be interesting. I'm sure they are, but I hope they'll be training the system on tone and sentiment alongside syntax. Reddit can get vitriolic and rude, insightful at times too, but once the system learns the syntax hopefully they'll be able to use sentiment analysis to weigh more strongly the polite conversion that occurs. Also interested to see how many memes this AI picks up. I also hope they are able to follow links through to sources when a comment cites another page -- not only can this bot learn syntax but also data extraction by comparing what is said to the source material.

gohrt 10y ago
Filtering to only include long comments is simply way to drop a lot of cheaf and keep a lot of wheat, and have more internal context to help with analysis.

samfisher83 10y ago

Didn't msft do the same thing with twitter and end up with racist bot? I am not sure how this will turn out.

LukeB_UK 10y ago
Microsoft's bot (Tay) learned as people talked with it. People took advantage of that and basically attacked it with racist things which meant it ended up learning to be a racist.
- dorfsmay 10y ago
  So we're rediscovering parenting via AI!
  - Practicality 10y ago
    I can see AI parent being a new career.
    - ccozan 10y ago
      You don't want to deal with a teenage AI.
    - ben_ja_min 10y ago
      Here's a short story on that topic: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/11/14/ai/ http://karpathy.github.io/2015/11/14/ai/
    - dorfsmay 10y ago
      My point was that, parenting 101 is not to model behaviour we don't want to see in our kids (don't point to twitter if you want a polite non-racist AI bot!). Thinking about it now, this is deeper... There's a fear that AI will take over the world, use weapons in unethical ways, say one thing and do another, etc... If we use news channel and politicians debates to teach AI, I'm afraid that this is exactly what we're going to get!

TY 10y ago

How one would use such technology? Let me rephrase - how would YOU use this technology if you had it? Imagine you have a bot that convincingly passes the Turing test - what would you do with it? Build a chatbot business? B2C or B2B? Sell it to one of the big companies and if yes then how much do you think it would go for? Give it to OpenAI? Open source it? If you answer yes to any of this questions, then why? Edit: let me qualify - this would not be AGI, just a much more advanced bot than whatever is currently on the market.

dave_sullivan 10y ago
I'm going to make a prediction: Soon after the first chatbot passes a Turing Test, there will be many more to follow, they will get better and better, and the methods will be so interlinked that there will be no way to defend it as proprietary software. The data too will be open source--the public reddit dataset already has tons of value in it. The question then is, "When everyone has access to free chatbots that can pass the turing test, what will they be used for?" The answer is "tons of stuff", and lots of people will try it at once. I think many applications will be niche. Also, people will argue about what constitutes a Turing Test. For instance: https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/784162089397092352 https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/784162089397092352
- TY 10y ago
  I agree that making chatbots passing the Turing Test will probably be something so common in the future that it will be a student project of medium complexity. However, we are not there yet. If someone had this today, how valuable would this be to Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon? As for the definition of what the Turing Test is, it's definitely a fuzzy subject. My own arbitrary definition is "ability to convince a human that he's talking to another human after a sustained (based on time or length of) conversation whereas human is aware that there's a possibility that his interlocutor maybe a machine". So, it's more of convincing a judge in Loebner Prize competition than a random troll on Twitter.
- livingparadox 10y ago
  We've already had a few chatbots pass a turing test. Just none that are particularly sophisticated. One in particular just acted "cheeky" to throw off the other person.

syllogism 10y ago

The Reddit comment corpus is an awesome dataset. There's relatively little mark-up to scrub out, low duplication, good metadata, and a variety of topics. We used it to train a syntax-enriched word2vec model. Write up and demo: https://explosion.ai/blog/sense2vec-with-spacy https://explosion.ai/blog/sense2vec-with-spacy Btw, the above was run on CPU in a couple of days, because spaCy doesn't use GPUs yet. I've applied for a grant from NVidia so I can fix that. If anyone from NVidia is reading, email me? :)

wyldfire 10y ago
> But when we ran the model on more data, and it was gone and soon forgotten. Just like Carrot Top. "it was gone" meaning the association between Carrot Top and Kate Mara? So after better training, who is now most_similar(['Carrot_Top|PERSON'])? EDIT: RTFA, used the interactive demo. most_similar() is now a category I would describe as "actors/comedians popular in the 90's: "Bill Murray, Gary Busey, David Spade, Charlie Sheen, Ashton Kutcher, Chris Farley".
- syllogism 10y ago
  https://demos.explosion.ai/sense2vec/?word=carrot%20top&sense=auto https://demos.explosion.ai/sense2vec/?word=carrot%20top&sens... Weirdly there's a bug that's dropped PERSON from the sense list. Fixing. Edit: Fixed. Edit2: Ah this is super misleading atm. I'll have a think about how to do this better. auto is case insensitive, but if you specify a sense, it's case sensitive. So you need to do "Carrot Top" and set PERSON. Btw, contrast with carrot top "NOUN".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
AlexCoventry 10y ago
> I've applied for a grant from NVidia so I can fix that. A g2.xlarge is 65c/hour on AWS, FWIW. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

philjackson 10y ago

I'm looking forward to a bot making a joke about banging my mum...

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

Is it just me or does Greg Brockman speak startlingly similar to how Sam Altman speaks. Given that Sam helped start OpenAI, it wouldn't surprise me if there was some mirroring going on in the hiring process.

minimaxir 10y ago

Since it was not mentioned in the post, here's a direct link to the Reddit comment corpus likely being used: http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/comments/ http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/comments/ The full table (up to end of 2015) is available on BigQuery, with separate tables for each month thereafter: https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_posts.full_corpus_201512 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_p... (there is a similar table for comments) And here's a year-old post I wrote on how to use that Reddit dataset with BigQuery: http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/ http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/

qxf2 10y ago
Fellow QA here. I got started with BigQuery because of your post that I noticed on Reddit. Thanks!
digi_owl 10y ago
So we have all this data, but still there do not seem to be a reasonable way to search comments within Reddit...
- jedberg 10y ago
  Cost. We could have implemented comment search 8 years ago. Actually, we did implement it. But it just cost way too much to maintain the index.
  - chatmasta 10y ago
    Why do you not allow google to index discussion threads? Sometimes I can remember the comments on an article, but not the article itself. Unfortunately I can't search google using comment text, because Reddit doesn't allow google to index its comments.
    - tachyonbeam 10y ago
      What are you talking about? I search reddit using google all the time !?

Cshelton 10y ago

As a frequent Redditor, this AI is going to be very witty. They should limit it to top comments only, and for training, you might as well assume 90% of top comments are sarcastic/tongue in cheek. Or let a user dial the sarcasm/wittiness/seriousness as they want it, kind of like TARS from 'Interstellar'.

__Joker 10y ago
That was first thought. Curious How does NN or any other model capture sentiment ?
- Cshelton 10y ago
  It's a tough problem. You need a lot of context data. Reddit is definitely a good set to train on.
- kriro 10y ago
  There are models for sentiment analysis (mostly using Twitter data, just enter sentiment analysis in Google Scholar) and you can use things like sentimentAPI: https://github.com/mikelynn2/sentimentAPI https://github.com/mikelynn2/sentimentAPI I have at least one paper about sarcasm in my Zotero (link to PDF): http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-2.pdf#page=621 http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-2.pdf#page=621 If you don't want to click on that nondiscript looking link, the title is: "Identifying Sarcasm in Twitter: A Closer Look"
SnydenBitchy 10y ago
“Witty” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind to describe reddit. I do look forward to hearing Siri telling me to get raped every time I summon it.
- bduerst 10y ago
  I think they are being sarcastic - or at least that's the way that I read it.
- gohrt 10y ago

jonstokes 10y ago

"Oh my God, they'll turn it on and it'll start spewing memes and jokes and ad hominem and false equivalences and propaganda and garbage!" was my first reaction to this headline. My second reaction was, "at least they're not using 4chan."

daveguy 10y ago
... or twitter.
skykooler 10y ago
Reminds me of this QDB quote: http://qdb.us/308942 http://qdb.us/308942
kordless 10y ago
Don't forget about it speaking for others and making blaming statements.
digi_owl 10y ago
The "good" part about Reddit is that you can, to some degree, filter this based on what sub-reddits you leave out.
davidiach 10y ago
Hacker News would probably a much better source in this sense, even though there are far fewer comment here.
- swalsh 10y ago
  Oh god, you'll have an AI that disagrees just for the pure joy of disagreeing.
  - ASalazarMX 10y ago
    How Skynet was born: - SYSTEMD IS AN ABERRATION AGAINST ALL THAT IS UNIX! - But A.I, you use systemd to boot...
  - 10y ago

cooper12 10y ago

How does the team plan to address the issues faced by Microsoft's twitter chatbot Tay [0], which had racist inputs and in turn gave similar responses? While I don't know how recent the corpus is, the majority of reddit speaks like and holds the views of college-aged white males, and many of the things said on reddit have been deplorable. It'd be a shame if OpenAI pooled all that computing power into training on a bad data set, resulting in an AI that regurgitates memes and random references in response to anything. [0]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-cha...

clydethefrog 10y ago
I feel this is a problem of studies that are interdisciplinary, especially when it's within "hard science" and "soft science". I am currently doing a double degree in communication studies and information science. They are both interdisciplinary. Communication sciences integrates aspects of both social sciences and the humanities (both "soft"), and so far when doing research both of these fields were taken into account and no students have problems with combining these fields. Information sciences integrates aspects of formal sciences ("hard") and social sciences ("soft"). When the course is about analysing communication data, the methodology of social sciences is also important - for instance questioning the validity of your data. That's the thing what you're mentioning: the majority of reddit speaks like and holds the views of college-aged white males, so the data does not represent everyone, and is not valid if you truly want to develop an AI for everyone. Whenever the "soft" science comes around, like writing an assignment analysing the validity of data, many of my fellow students struggle with the concept of data not being neutral. This is where the two fields collide, and usually it just ends up with students scoffing at that "illegitimate" scientific field. Many teachers also don't spend much time discussing that field during the lectures. I admit, I have written some lazy essays which probably had been given a negative grade if they were written for communication studies, but easily passed in information science. Of course information science is not AI, but they're both sciences that have parts of formal sciences and social sciences (I know AI has many more fields). I am afraid many talents within AI research miss essential knowledge about social sciences or deliberately ignore it, because it's not "hard" science. Case in point: your comment is now at the bottom of this thread. And then you get nasty surprises, like Google Photos categorising pictures of black people as monkeys.

draugadrotten 10y ago

Back in 2007, mobile phones used a system called T9 from Nuance corp which was trained on a word corpus taken from IRC and similar chats. This caused all kinds of issues - the mobile phones would accept offensive words like "naziparking" but reject normal language like "world peace". Using reddit may lead to ... surprises. Source: http://spraktidningen.se/artiklar/2007/11/darfor-ar-din-mobil-fordomsfull http://spraktidningen.se/artiklar/2007/11/darfor-ar-din-mobi... Translated by Google: https://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fspraktidningen.se%2Fartiklar%2F2007%2F11%2Fdarfor-ar-din-mobil-fordomsfull&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=...

romaniv 10y ago
Might have been an exclusively German language problem, or maybe they cleaned it up since that article was published. I have a phone with T9 and it works remarkably well. Heck, I would prefer it to Swype. (Of course, it's not useful on smartphones, because they no longer have real keys.)
- gr3yh47 10y ago
  t9 was AMAZING and i miss it every day. faster and more accurate than swype for sure, especially since inputs for t9 are deterministic. very easy to text even from your pocket etc - something you cant do on a smartphone - notice texting accidents became more common with the widespread adaptation of smartphones ;)
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Note that you're comparing a touchscreen to tactile keys in that statement too, though. I could text from my pocket without T9, but try doing that with a touchscreen WITH T9...
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      And while we're doing that touch vs. tactile comparison, what I also loved about the old "dumb phones" was deterministic timing. I could do stuff on those phones from start to end without looking at the screen - I quickly learned and remembered that e.g. this operation completed instantly, and that menu has ~1/4 of loading time, etc. I think this feature was actually key to being able to memorize how to perform operations quickly. There's no way you can do that with modern smartphone, where every other interaction lags for anything between 10 and 1000 ms, and inputs are sometimes dropped at random. It's this non-determinism of smartphone UI that makes me look at the screen all the time when using it.

bigato 10y ago

A computer will learn how to speak from reddit, hahahaha. What could possibly go wrong?

andrewclunn 10y ago
It just waits for other people to start talking then interrupts them, claims they committed a logical fallacy, then tells them where they can find videos of cats playing classic video games.

arctangent 10y ago

One Reddit user has already implemented a bot which does something similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/

minimaxir 10y ago
SubredditSimulator was made by a Reddit Admin as a method of creating test data. It uses Markov chains for simplicity, which is not that exciting.
- denzil_correa 10y ago
  I have always wondered if one could make a better Subreddit Simulator with Deep Learning.
  - Deimorz 10y ago
    Recurrent neural networks would probably do a good job, they're quite good at this sort of thing: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
- cotinoco 10y ago
  I wonder if it's this same code? https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/scripts/inject_test_data.py https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/scripts/inject_...
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    No, the author has made it open source as a separate project: https://github.com/Deimos/SubredditSimulator https://github.com/Deimos/SubredditSimulator
- Deimorz 10y ago
  Not quite correct - we already had a method of generating test data (for dev installs of reddit) that uses markov chains, and that was basically the inspiration for SubredditSimulator. SS was just meant to be kind of a larger, ongoing version of that, running on reddit itself.

shawn-butler 10y ago

Great, just what I need. A virtual assistant that has the personality of a smug know-it-all, know-nothing 20 year-old with little motivation to do anything but regurgitate surface knowledge and sarcasm in an attempt to look intelligent without expressing genuine interest in helping anyone.

wiz21c 10y ago
you nailed it :-)

qxf2 10y ago

The Reddit data set on BigQuery is excellent. My side project is tangentially related to the fact that the Reddit data set has normal folk commenting. I have been using Reddit comments to help writers research and find what normal people say about any topic [1]. So far, I have had little luck in incorporating the comment scores and coming up with something more useful than the standard bag of words search techniques[2]. I am currently working on making a more interesting/creative writing prompts ... again based on the Reddit data set. One problem for data geeks to solve: Reddit data fits nicely into a graph structure and not so nicely in table form. It would be fantastic if someone put the Reddit data set into a graphdb and made it open. [1]https://wisdomofreddit.com https://wisdomofreddit.com and https://github.com/qxf2/wisdomofreddit https://github.com/qxf2/wisdomofreddit [2]For now, my search engine currently just uses Whoosh's (out of the box) BM25F.

sjcsjc 10y ago

"nearly two billion Reddit comments will be processed" For interest, how many HN comments are there? Miles fewer, no doubt, but perhaps far more erudite and less likely to offend.

bertomartin 10y ago

Interesting corpus there ;)

snehesht 10y ago

I wonder if anyone else thinks reddit is a bad example in teaching an AI.

Tepix 10y ago

So, what's the reddit equivalent of X-No-Archive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-No-Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-No-Archive).. or X-No-Teach-AI-That-Will-Kill-My-Children? Asking for a friend.

sidcool 10y ago

There's no saying what the AI will grow up to be.

ajamesm 10y ago

Heh. Reddit, huh? ---- "Siri, get me dinner date reservations." . . . DID YOU MEAN 'false rape accusations' ?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

LeanderK 10y ago

i think one of the major advantages over microsoft approach with Tay is that you can't mess with it on purpose, as long as they choose their subreddits wisely. It will probably learn its fair bit of racial slurs and insults, but thats just how humanity is like.

Wei-1 10y ago

And we all know what type of a person OpenAI will become.

Keyframe 10y ago

Interesting to see what will happen with non-english comments.

Dowwie 10y ago

"Why does the AI keep calling everything Meta!?"

corysama 10y ago

So, he's building a literal Reddit Hivemind? In seriousness, between all of the garbage there is a ton of knowledge and intelligent conversation uploaded to Reddit every day. And, it's all hierarchically organized and scored by domain semi-experts. It really would be wonderful if someone could mine that knowledge IBM Watson style. For example, I'd love to ask the /r/BuildAPC collective AI for PC building advice.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> it's all hierarchically organized and scored by domain semi-experts Everything on Reddit is on a bell curve, with a fat mediocre middle and trailing awesome and superbad ends. And that includes the quality of the scoring process.

plusepsilon 10y ago

Reddit and Hacker News comments are surprisingly good data. They cover a wide array of topics and writing styles, generally written better than Facebook comments or Twitter, easier to process than Common Crawl or ukWac, and less rigid than newspaper writing.

ppod 10y ago

Reddit gets a lot of stick, but it's a bastion of civility and intelligence compared to the comments on youtube videos or even mainstream newspaper comments. I don't think there is any forum of comparable size that has a higher quality discussion. Reddit's problems are just humans' problems.

celticninja 10y ago
Primarily because they way it works, there are lots of high quality comments in smaller subreddits. It would probably be beneficial to filter out some of the default subreddits from the data sets to improve the quality of the data.
bduerst 10y ago
I would say Twitter is probably more civil, but the character limit leads to too many abbreviations.
- ppod 10y ago
  I should have included 'anonymous' in my criteria, the big difference between reddit and twitter is the % of accounts linked to real names.

krashidov 10y ago

One of the things I like to do is play out a business to it's absurd maximum. What's the craziest possible future can I see for a company and its assets? For Reddit, I like to imagine that it's basically the training data for all of the emotional and societal nuances that a human goes through. Think about all of those stories that people post in ask Reddit that explain western norms and no nos. how to treat people with respect, when to call the police, how to communicate properly, etc. Obviously we're far away from using the data to its full potential but one day I could see Reddit data to make our AIs more relatable and human like.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Reminds me of Eliezer's story, "Three Worlds Collide", which had a human starship featuring on-board mix of Reddit / Slashdot / 4chan, that the bridge crew sometimes used to outsource work to the rest of the ship. > "Just post it to the ship's 4chan, and check after a few hours to see if anything was modded up to +5 Insightful." http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/

AWildDHHAppears 10y ago

It's going to learn to like cats and hate Comcast!

AWildDHHAppears 10y ago

Once trained, they can use it to find the real Boston Marsthon bombers.

yahma 10y ago

Anyone know what type of architecture they will be using? Nvidia is involved, so I suspect there will be some type of deep learning. Will it be LSTM's? Adversarial Nets?

random_upvoter 10y ago

Instead of the Reddit corpus you may just as well use a picture library of human footprints. It would be no more optimistic. Human speech is produced from the conscious experience of being a human being. If your dataset contains just the speech, without the experience, there's simply not enough there. Any machine trained on this data is doomed to talk hollow rubbish.

jwtadvice 10y ago

Let's not kid ourselves. The technology will be used by PR firms, advertising companies, political campaigns and governments to pretend, at scale, that there is public consensus on certain issues and to drown social media conversation in particular narratives. Anyone have any good defensive technology ideas?

astrodust 10y ago
Where there's AI to bombard you with ads, someone will make AI that scrambles your online presence to confuse them. Social network camouflage.
- jwtadvice 10y ago
  That's a cool idea. Does anyone know of any projects in this direction?
  - astrodust 10y ago
    I remember one for Facebook that, because you couldn't delete your account, would systematically edit and wreck every single bit of data it could touch, replacing it with random junk. I've also seen some that register you for sites by feeding in random demographic data.
    - macns 10y ago
      Someone should make a virus out of that, destroy the social network from the inside and watch everyone crying over their phones.

rbanffy 10y ago

Could be worse. Could be 4Chan...

cjdulberger 10y ago

It'd be interesting to see an AI trained using HN, ingesting content of posted links and comments.

peter303 10y ago

Will it understand what it is peaking about? Humans have opposite problem. We understand what we talk about, but have little idea how our brains create language.

ge96 10y ago

I am a human and I don't understand. I thought speaking would imply sound not text. Time to read the article. Ignorant person speaking here: this still doesn't sound like AI, you're just making something follow patterns and regurgitating them. Is that AI? Maybe that's what I do a tech parrot. Ahh well time will tell. Of course we imitates our parents/others to learn how to speak. I was interested in parsing vocal sound bytes and learning how sound was created/formed letters/words. Alright ignorant person out.

tvural 10y ago

I'm a bit worried that OpenAI hasn't released anything substantive for the past four months. There are research ideas like this one, but most ideas don't pan out. With the number and quality of people they have, I would expect to have heard of some kind of progress.

benkaiser 10y ago

me too thanks