4 ms·

I feel like this article would be warranted if ML results had stalled and not achieved anything impressive in a few years. But we had AlphaZero recently, and Du

I feel like this article would be warranted if ML results had stalled and not achieved anything impressive in a few years. But we had AlphaZero recently, and Duplex is pretty impressive. There's no indication that cool new stuff isn't forthcoming in the near future. It's entirely possible that the current tradition will prove to not be up to the task of building an AGI by itself, and we'll need to invent new techniques. But in the absence of better ideas, continuing to iterate on ML and neural techniques seems like a good approach.

evrydayhustling 8y ago
Yes. One of the things that drives me nuts about AGI critiques is that nobody is able to define incremental progress towards it, but they will assert confidently that today's increments won't get there. When they make any prescription at all, notes like OP tend to suggest techniques they think might reach farther, instead of proposing goals that might validate advances in those techniques. I think that's the stagnant part of AI philosophy - a hazy dissatisfaction with task-oriented incrementalism that hasn't been able to offer an alternative objective function.
- jonmc12 8y ago
  AI "progress" is nearly always presented in a way that confuses people, and usually includes some amount of fear mongering. I think its a problem between research and PR in general, but its exacerbated by weak theory in deep learning. When Duplex is presented, the researchers do not communicate the domains where the research is reproducible, and where it is not. There is not theory that describes what domains can gain utility. It seems like the obvious outcome of presenting research, without a theory that the audience can understand, is that the research will be misunderstood. Press narratives are required to latch onto this every time there are eyeballs on an AI demo: "Turing Test?", "Ethical Questions?", "Job Loss?", "How advanced is AI?", etc. In terms of a "goal that might validate advance", I think a theory that helps others to understand the limits of the research. When other researchers, beneficiaries of the technology, and the press understand the real scope of the research it reduces the need for critique like OP.
  - evrydayhustling 8y ago
    Totally agreed with this function of critique! It's worth poking a hole in hype and fear around AI, I just don't think comparisons to AGI are a key part of that. A similar article might be: AGI is not the main focus of AI today, and that's ok. In general, both hype and fear around AGI give people a false impression of preparing for AI impact. A truthful narrative about AI progress would focus attention on immediate issues like economic change (good and bad) and systematized bias.
new299 8y ago
Duplex is a demo right? If AlphaZero (which doesn't impact users directly) and Duplex (which isn't released yet) are the best recent examples I can understand why there's negative press appearing.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Duplex's underlying text-to-speech technology research (WaveNet) has produced several papers and is now in public beta. It represents a huge advance in text-to-speech fidelity, using a remarkably straightforward algorithm. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03499.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03499.pdf https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/pdfs/1452.PDF https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/pdfs/14... https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05884.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05884.pdf https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/
  - new299 8y ago
    The first paper is almost 2 years old, and text-to-speech seems to be a relatively small component of Duplex.
- sullyj3 8y ago
  Uh, what? How are users relevant to the question of whether the tech is progressing? Humans at a game with such a high branching factor is a fantastic achievement.
  - new299 8y ago
    Because A.I. has been sold as revolutionizing peoples lives. The second sentence of the article says Sundar Pichai, claimed in an interview that A.I. “is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire.”. But if people don't see any impact in their lives, from a technology that they are told will change everything, then it's not surprising that they'd think little progress has been made.

evrydayhustling 8y ago

Yes. One of the things that drives me nuts about AGI critiques is that nobody is able to define incremental progress towards it, but they will assert confidently that today's increments won't get there. When they make any prescription at all, notes like OP tend to suggest techniques they think might reach farther, instead of proposing goals that might validate advances in those techniques. I think that's the stagnant part of AI philosophy - a hazy dissatisfaction with task-oriented incrementalism that hasn't been able to offer an alternative objective function.

jonmc12 8y ago
AI "progress" is nearly always presented in a way that confuses people, and usually includes some amount of fear mongering. I think its a problem between research and PR in general, but its exacerbated by weak theory in deep learning. When Duplex is presented, the researchers do not communicate the domains where the research is reproducible, and where it is not. There is not theory that describes what domains can gain utility. It seems like the obvious outcome of presenting research, without a theory that the audience can understand, is that the research will be misunderstood. Press narratives are required to latch onto this every time there are eyeballs on an AI demo: "Turing Test?", "Ethical Questions?", "Job Loss?", "How advanced is AI?", etc. In terms of a "goal that might validate advance", I think a theory that helps others to understand the limits of the research. When other researchers, beneficiaries of the technology, and the press understand the real scope of the research it reduces the need for critique like OP.
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  Totally agreed with this function of critique! It's worth poking a hole in hype and fear around AI, I just don't think comparisons to AGI are a key part of that. A similar article might be: AGI is not the main focus of AI today, and that's ok. In general, both hype and fear around AGI give people a false impression of preparing for AI impact. A truthful narrative about AI progress would focus attention on immediate issues like economic change (good and bad) and systematized bias.

new299 8y ago

Duplex is a demo right? If AlphaZero (which doesn't impact users directly) and Duplex (which isn't released yet) are the best recent examples I can understand why there's negative press appearing.

jdietrich 8y ago
Duplex's underlying text-to-speech technology research (WaveNet) has produced several papers and is now in public beta. It represents a huge advance in text-to-speech fidelity, using a remarkably straightforward algorithm. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03499.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03499.pdf https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/pdfs/1452.PDF https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/pdfs/14... https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05884.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05884.pdf https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/
- new299 8y ago
  The first paper is almost 2 years old, and text-to-speech seems to be a relatively small component of Duplex.
sullyj3 8y ago
Uh, what? How are users relevant to the question of whether the tech is progressing? Humans at a game with such a high branching factor is a fantastic achievement.
- new299 8y ago
  Because A.I. has been sold as revolutionizing peoples lives. The second sentence of the article says Sundar Pichai, claimed in an interview that A.I. “is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire.”. But if people don't see any impact in their lives, from a technology that they are told will change everything, then it's not surprising that they'd think little progress has been made.