5 ms·

Despite all the negativity in replies, I try to remain optimistic that this investment in AGI-related research is going to be a net positive. Congrats to the t

Despite all the negativity in replies, I try to remain optimistic that this investment in AGI-related research is going to be a net positive. Congrats to the team, and break a leg!

gdb 7y ago
Thank you!
- applecrazy 7y ago
  The research that OpenAI’s doing is groundbreaking and the results are often beyond state-of-the-art. I aim to work in one of your research teams sometime!
  - chrshawkes 7y ago
    Watch the Kool-Aid intake and you'll be just fine. Dreams are great and an absolute necessity for success but create your own. Don't buy into everything you hear, especially Elon Musk talking about Artificial General Intelligence.
    - applecrazy 7y ago
      Oh, I'm well aware of the hype around AGI. My personal view is that AGI is kind of an asymptotic goal, something we'll get kind of close to but never actually reach. Nevertheless, I would like to work on more pragmatic goals, like improving the current state-of-the-art language models and text generation networks. I'm actually starting by reimplementing Seq2Seq as described by Quoc Le et al.[1] for text summarization[2] (this code is extremely messy but it'll get better soon). It's been interesting to learn about word embeddings, RNNs and LSTMs, and data processing within the field of Natural Language Processing. Any tips on how to get up to speed within this field would be helpful, as I'm trying to get into research labs doing similar work at my university. [1]: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learn... [2]: https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/ https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/
      - inflatableDodo 7y ago
        >My personal view is that AGI is kind of an asymptotic goal, something we'll get kind of close to but never actually reach. Personally, I think it is only a matter of time. Though I suspect that we will probably 'cheat' our way there first with the wetware from cultured neurons that various groups are developing, before we manage to create it in completely synthetic hardware. Also, it might just be the wetware that leads us to the required insights. This is very problematic territory however. I think we are very likely to utterly torture some of the conscious entities created along this path.
      - sytelus 7y ago
        AGI is not something unnatural that could never be attained. If biological systems can somehow attain it, there is no reason other kinds of man-made system cannot attain it. The first main issue is that of compute capacity. Human brain has equivalent of at least 30 TFLOPS of computing power and this estimate is very likely 2 orders of magnitudes off. Assume that somehow simulating 1 synapse takes only 1 transistor (gross underestimate). To simulate number of synapses in a single human brain then would need same number of transistors as in 10,000 NVidia V100 GPUs, one of the largest mass produced silicon chip! The second main issue is of training neurons that are far more complex than our simple arithmetic adders. Back prop doesn't work for such complex neurons. The 3rd big problem is that of training data. Human child churns through roughly 10 years of training data before reaching puberty. The man-made machine perhaps can take advantage of vast data already available but still there needs to be some structured training regiment. So current AI efforts in relative comparison of human brain are playing with toy hardware and toy algorithms. It should be surprising that we have gone so far regardless.
    - randomsearch 7y ago
      What has Musk got to do with this?
- monk_e_boy 7y ago
  Have you thought about using AI instead of parts of the government? There must be a lot of bits that can be automated. Do you think that an AI led government could remove the left/right divide that there is at the moment? If everyone just filled in a huge form that told the AI what was important to them, this could be used to drive policy.
  - ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
    Filling in a from about what is important is just a proxy for voting. I don't think an AI would help the Left/Right divide in this way because certain news outlets would still have the same incentives to manipulate what people desire in a more extreme directions.
yvdriess 7y ago
Indeed. Going by past leaps in science and technology, we will probably see something really cool and useful come out of thisn something that isn't AGI. I'm fine with getting a superbike even if the funding was for an impossible FTL drive.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
I agree. We've not gone back to having well funded research facilities like this one since Bell Labs. Those were amazing days where we saw a lot of amazing breakthroughs. I wish companies like Microsoft and the rest would invest in external research institutes more.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  I often think that if I were a billionaire,I'd rather spend hundreds of millions on some cool R&D projects rather than having some 100 meter boat that one uses a only a few times a year. I could at least walk around in 20 or so years and say "I funded this" rather than pointing at a rusting boat nobody will ever care about.
  - chrshawkes 7y ago
    In many cases people will be more interested in your boat rather than a bunch of startups nobody's ever heard of.
    - newsbinator 7y ago
      ... unless one of those startups cures a/some cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's or ALS or something. If I were a billionaire, that's exclusively where I'd be putting my money, selfishly.
    - keypusher 7y ago
      That’s a strange sentiment for thread on OpenAI, considering it is one of many startups founded a guy who decided to take the millions from his sale of PayPal and do cool R&D projects like spaceships, electric cars, solar power, AI, and brain-machine interfaces. Good thing Elon Musk didn’t buy a boat I guess.
  - est31 7y ago
    Paul Allen had both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Institute https://www.cs.washington.edu/building https://www.cs.washington.edu/building In fact this tradition of rich people founding universities and research is nothing new. Stanford University was founded by a couple who said "The children of California shall be our children" after their child died. Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Technical Schools, and John Harvard donated money and his library to a college founded two years earlier.
tamrix 7y ago
A couple weeks ago. Google announced it will be researching AI in China. HN had more positive comments regarding that announcement.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  The Internet is a strange place..

Despite all the negativity in replies, I try to remain optimistic that this investment in AGI-related research is going to be a net positive. Congrats to the team, and break a leg!

gdb 7y ago

Thank you!

applecrazy 7y ago
The research that OpenAI’s doing is groundbreaking and the results are often beyond state-of-the-art. I aim to work in one of your research teams sometime!
- chrshawkes 7y ago
  Watch the Kool-Aid intake and you'll be just fine. Dreams are great and an absolute necessity for success but create your own. Don't buy into everything you hear, especially Elon Musk talking about Artificial General Intelligence.
  - applecrazy 7y ago
    Oh, I'm well aware of the hype around AGI. My personal view is that AGI is kind of an asymptotic goal, something we'll get kind of close to but never actually reach. Nevertheless, I would like to work on more pragmatic goals, like improving the current state-of-the-art language models and text generation networks. I'm actually starting by reimplementing Seq2Seq as described by Quoc Le et al.[1] for text summarization[2] (this code is extremely messy but it'll get better soon). It's been interesting to learn about word embeddings, RNNs and LSTMs, and data processing within the field of Natural Language Processing. Any tips on how to get up to speed within this field would be helpful, as I'm trying to get into research labs doing similar work at my university. [1]: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learn... [2]: https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/ https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/
    - inflatableDodo 7y ago
      >My personal view is that AGI is kind of an asymptotic goal, something we'll get kind of close to but never actually reach. Personally, I think it is only a matter of time. Though I suspect that we will probably 'cheat' our way there first with the wetware from cultured neurons that various groups are developing, before we manage to create it in completely synthetic hardware. Also, it might just be the wetware that leads us to the required insights. This is very problematic territory however. I think we are very likely to utterly torture some of the conscious entities created along this path.
    - sytelus 7y ago
      AGI is not something unnatural that could never be attained. If biological systems can somehow attain it, there is no reason other kinds of man-made system cannot attain it. The first main issue is that of compute capacity. Human brain has equivalent of at least 30 TFLOPS of computing power and this estimate is very likely 2 orders of magnitudes off. Assume that somehow simulating 1 synapse takes only 1 transistor (gross underestimate). To simulate number of synapses in a single human brain then would need same number of transistors as in 10,000 NVidia V100 GPUs, one of the largest mass produced silicon chip! The second main issue is of training neurons that are far more complex than our simple arithmetic adders. Back prop doesn't work for such complex neurons. The 3rd big problem is that of training data. Human child churns through roughly 10 years of training data before reaching puberty. The man-made machine perhaps can take advantage of vast data already available but still there needs to be some structured training regiment. So current AI efforts in relative comparison of human brain are playing with toy hardware and toy algorithms. It should be surprising that we have gone so far regardless.
  - randomsearch 7y ago
    What has Musk got to do with this?
monk_e_boy 7y ago
Have you thought about using AI instead of parts of the government? There must be a lot of bits that can be automated. Do you think that an AI led government could remove the left/right divide that there is at the moment? If everyone just filled in a huge form that told the AI what was important to them, this could be used to drive policy.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
  Filling in a from about what is important is just a proxy for voting. I don't think an AI would help the Left/Right divide in this way because certain news outlets would still have the same incentives to manipulate what people desire in a more extreme directions.

yvdriess 7y ago

Indeed. Going by past leaps in science and technology, we will probably see something really cool and useful come out of thisn something that isn't AGI. I'm fine with getting a superbike even if the funding was for an impossible FTL drive.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

I agree. We've not gone back to having well funded research facilities like this one since Bell Labs. Those were amazing days where we saw a lot of amazing breakthroughs. I wish companies like Microsoft and the rest would invest in external research institutes more.

cosmodisk 7y ago
I often think that if I were a billionaire,I'd rather spend hundreds of millions on some cool R&D projects rather than having some 100 meter boat that one uses a only a few times a year. I could at least walk around in 20 or so years and say "I funded this" rather than pointing at a rusting boat nobody will ever care about.
- chrshawkes 7y ago
  In many cases people will be more interested in your boat rather than a bunch of startups nobody's ever heard of.
  - newsbinator 7y ago
    ... unless one of those startups cures a/some cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's or ALS or something. If I were a billionaire, that's exclusively where I'd be putting my money, selfishly.
  - keypusher 7y ago
    That’s a strange sentiment for thread on OpenAI, considering it is one of many startups founded a guy who decided to take the millions from his sale of PayPal and do cool R&D projects like spaceships, electric cars, solar power, AI, and brain-machine interfaces. Good thing Elon Musk didn’t buy a boat I guess.
- est31 7y ago
  Paul Allen had both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Institute https://www.cs.washington.edu/building https://www.cs.washington.edu/building In fact this tradition of rich people founding universities and research is nothing new. Stanford University was founded by a couple who said "The children of California shall be our children" after their child died. Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Technical Schools, and John Harvard donated money and his library to a college founded two years earlier.

tamrix 7y ago

A couple weeks ago. Google announced it will be researching AI in China. HN had more positive comments regarding that announcement.

m-p-3 7y ago
The Internet is a strange place..