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So you’re saying.. it comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable within our lifetime? Or even worth contributing to at all even. I think the parent has

So you’re saying.. it comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable within our lifetime? Or even worth contributing to at all even. I think the parent has made their position pretty clear through their employment choices, that’s a level of skin in the game that naysayers don’t really have.

pron 7y ago
Perhaps I haven't been clear. I have no issue with the research OpenAI is performing, nor with anyone's beliefs in AI's imminence or their personal role in bringing it about. However, no one knows whether what they're doing is even on the right path towards AI, and certainly not when it will be achieved, plus the topic has been subject to overoptimism for decades now, so I do take issue with publicly calling what you do "working on AGI" or "pre-AGI" even though you have no idea whether that is what you're doing. Hopes and aspirations are good, but at this stage they fall far short of the level required for such public proclamations. My issue is with the language, not with the work.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  I think you're issue with the language is not shared by most people. In research we rarely know beforehand what research is on the right or wrong path. But we are comfortable with someone saying they are researching something even if they don't know beforehand whether the research will be useful or a wild goose chase. For example most people's first though to hearing "I'm researching ways to treat Alzheimer's" isn't "Only if it passes phase 3 trials!".
  - sgt101 7y ago
    Although, perhaps you would agree that someone saying "my work on Alzheimer's might help your friend" would be behaving in a cruel and unprofessional way unless the treatment was indeed in human trials?
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      I read the article more as "maybe my work will one day be able to cure Alzheimer's and help people like your friend". What in the article gave you the impression they had made a large breakthrough or were close to an AGI?
  - pron 7y ago
    Yeah, in this release they're not saying they're doing research towards AI, or even that they're researching AI. They're saying that they're "building artificial general intelligence" and developing a platform that "will scale to AGI." (emphasis mine) They're also calling what they're actually building "pre-AGI."
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      > We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. This sentence might by itself imply they are farther along than they are, but in the context of the whole article I never got the impression they were close to actually building an AGI. > The most obvious way to cover costs is to build a product, but that would mean changing our focus. Instead, we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them. This read pretty straightforwardly to me. Pre-AGI seems like a shorthand for useful technologies like GPT-2. Reading the article I never got the impression they'd solved AGI, or were even close. The context of the article is a partnership announcement not a breakthrough. I could see how a few people who are very unsophisticated might get a little confused as to how far along they are. But I assumed they were writing for people who had heard of OpenAI which pretty much eliminates anyone this unsophisticated.
      - pron 7y ago
        They don't know what connection, if any, what they're doing has with AGI. For all we know right now, some botanist researching the reproductive system of ferns is as likely to bring about a breakthrough in AI as their research is. To me this feels like peak-Silicon Valley, the moment they've completely lost touch with reality. People may also not be confused if Ben and Jerry's start an ice cream ad with mentions of AGI and the change of human trajectory and Marie Curie, and name it Pre-AGI Rum Raisin, but that doesn't mean the text isn't a beautiful and amusing example of contemporary Silicon Valley self-importance and delusion, and reads like a parody that makes the characters in HBO's Silicon Valley sound grounded and humble. Especially the "pre-AGI" bit, which I'm now stealing and will be using at every opportunity. Maybe it's just me, but I think it is quite hilarious when a company whose actual connection with AGI is that, like many others, they dream about it and wish they could one day invent it, call their work "pre-AGI." Ironic, considering they're writing this pre-apocalypse.
- breck 7y ago
  > the topic has been subject to overoptimism for decades now, But so has every other big idea that went on to become reality, like planes (da Vinci was drawing designs for planes over 400 years before the first working ones). > no one knows whether what they're doing is even on the right path towards AI This is completely wrong. That would be like saying "no one knows if working on a wing is on the right path to flight". Look at the way deep learning works. Look at the way the brain works. They share immense similarities. Some people say "neural nets" aren't like the brain, but that's not true--they are just trying to not over-exaggerate the differences which laymen commonly do. They are very similar.
  - pron 7y ago
    > But so has every other big idea that went on to become reality, like planes (da Vinci was drawing designs for planes over 400 years before the first working ones). And so has every other big idea that didn't become reality, and that was the majority. Again, I have no problem with AI research whatsoever, but the prose was still eyebrow-raising considering the actual state of affairs. > They are very similar. They are not. The main role of NNs is learning, which they still mostly do pretty much with backpropagation gradient-descent (+ heuristics). The brain does not learn with backpropagation.
    - breck 7y ago
      > And so has every other big idea that didn't become reality, and that was the majority. This is a really good point. Would be a fascinating read if someone were to collect all those examples and explore that a bit.
      - jacques_chester 7y ago
        The most famous is the Philosopher's Stone: a substance that can convert base metals into gold. But in itself, that was not the point. It would also transform the owner or user -- it was a hermetic symbol, a mechanical means to "pierce the veil" and to see the deep mystical and magical truths, the Real Reality. It was immanent, a thing in the world, that enabled the transcendent, to go beyond, above, outside of the world. Its discovery would have been the single most important moment in the history of the world, the moment in which humans had a reliable road to divinity. Hmm. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But out of alchemy came modern chemistry, and also some parts of the scientific method. After all, as some smart people worked out, you could systematically try all the permutations of materials that your reading had suggested as possibilities. That meant measuring, weighing, mixing properly, keeping detailed notes. Fundamental lab work is the unglamorous slab of concrete beneath the shining houses of the physical sciences. There were waves of hysteria and hype, but after each, something useful would be left behind, minus the sheen of unlimited dreams. Hmm. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? These days it is possible for a device to transmute base metals into gold. But the operators have not, so far as I can deduce, ascended to any higher planes of existence. They have eschewed the ethereal and remained reliably corporeal.
- Jach 7y ago
  Do you hate all marketing or just around AI in particular? Would you bat an eye at MS investing $1B into a project + ads about say a new GPU architecture promising how "games will never be the same" because the new hardware (or even Cloud Integration) lets developers efficiently try and satisfy the rendering equation with ray tracing? FWIW I thought you were clear, but there are only so many middlebrow dismissals one can make towards AI or AGI efforts and I think I've seen them all plus the low-value threads they generate. (I've made some too, and suspect we might get brain emulations before AGI, but I try to avoid the impulse and in any case it doesn't stop me from hoping (and minor contributing) for the research on the article's load-bearing word "beneficial" to precede any realistic efforts of building the actual thing. At least the OpenAI guys aren't entirely ignorant of the importance of the "beneficial" problem.)
  - pron 7y ago
    I don't hate this copy at all; I absolutely love it! I think it is a beautiful specimen of the early-21st c. Silicon Valley ethos, and it made me laugh. Pre-AGI is my new meme, and that means something coming from a pre-Nobel Prize laureate. What I'm interested in is how many dismissals of AI, most end up justified, can the field take before considering toning down the prose a bit, especially considering that the dismissals are a result of setting unrealistic expectations in the first place.
MegaButts 7y ago
There are plenty of people who worked on AI (as graduate students, as ML researchers at hot startups for self-driving cars, as pure researchers or supporting engineers at Google or Facebook, and many other places), and then left because once they saw how limited the research was they lost hope it was going to happen before they died. Also while I fully understand and appreciate the necessity of OpenAI abandoning the 'open' part, it says a lot about who is going to benefit from this technology when you have investors who want to make money. It's just ironically poetic in this instance.
- alluro2 7y ago
  I honestly don't see any possibility of truly "wide-spread benefits for humanity" if AGI is achieved anytime soon. Current state of humanity when it comes to how we treat each other and anything akin to species-level awareness and collaboration is only barely better in recent history than the dark ages. If a group of people gets access to an AGI, I think it will very quickly result in a bit wider group than that having their lives prolonged, no disease, no lack of resources and practically infinite wealth, and everyone eventually being either rid off, or allowed to live in far-away slums and left to die off.
craigsmansion 7y ago
> I think the parent has made their position pretty clear through their employment choices, Their employer has just received a 1 billion dollar cash investment to futz around with computers. I don't think the employment choice is some sort of personal sacrifice here. The level of skin here is a cushy guaranteed job for years to come until the next AI-winter hits, likely set into motion by such very claims of "AGI" being near or feasible. "AGI" is good marketing for getting money to research real AI, ostensibly on the path to "AGI", but if one drives it too far, one might up retarding the whole field as the hype winds down (again).
- alluro2 7y ago
  Agreed. By the way, does anyone want to try my new VR tech? It will change everything forever!
- chillacy 7y ago
  That's true but at the same time I'm not trying to be in AI because it's such a specialist role which may or may not be a fad which the employment market overfills with new grads with a new degree in "ML", bricking salaries. But I think the internet will be here for awhile.

pron 7y ago

Perhaps I haven't been clear. I have no issue with the research OpenAI is performing, nor with anyone's beliefs in AI's imminence or their personal role in bringing it about. However, no one knows whether what they're doing is even on the right path towards AI, and certainly not when it will be achieved, plus the topic has been subject to overoptimism for decades now, so I do take issue with publicly calling what you do "working on AGI" or "pre-AGI" even though you have no idea whether that is what you're doing. Hopes and aspirations are good, but at this stage they fall far short of the level required for such public proclamations. My issue is with the language, not with the work.

JamesBarney 7y ago
I think you're issue with the language is not shared by most people. In research we rarely know beforehand what research is on the right or wrong path. But we are comfortable with someone saying they are researching something even if they don't know beforehand whether the research will be useful or a wild goose chase. For example most people's first though to hearing "I'm researching ways to treat Alzheimer's" isn't "Only if it passes phase 3 trials!".
- sgt101 7y ago
  Although, perhaps you would agree that someone saying "my work on Alzheimer's might help your friend" would be behaving in a cruel and unprofessional way unless the treatment was indeed in human trials?
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    I read the article more as "maybe my work will one day be able to cure Alzheimer's and help people like your friend". What in the article gave you the impression they had made a large breakthrough or were close to an AGI?
- pron 7y ago
  Yeah, in this release they're not saying they're doing research towards AI, or even that they're researching AI. They're saying that they're "building artificial general intelligence" and developing a platform that "will scale to AGI." (emphasis mine) They're also calling what they're actually building "pre-AGI."
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    > We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. This sentence might by itself imply they are farther along than they are, but in the context of the whole article I never got the impression they were close to actually building an AGI. > The most obvious way to cover costs is to build a product, but that would mean changing our focus. Instead, we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them. This read pretty straightforwardly to me. Pre-AGI seems like a shorthand for useful technologies like GPT-2. Reading the article I never got the impression they'd solved AGI, or were even close. The context of the article is a partnership announcement not a breakthrough. I could see how a few people who are very unsophisticated might get a little confused as to how far along they are. But I assumed they were writing for people who had heard of OpenAI which pretty much eliminates anyone this unsophisticated.
    - pron 7y ago
      They don't know what connection, if any, what they're doing has with AGI. For all we know right now, some botanist researching the reproductive system of ferns is as likely to bring about a breakthrough in AI as their research is. To me this feels like peak-Silicon Valley, the moment they've completely lost touch with reality. People may also not be confused if Ben and Jerry's start an ice cream ad with mentions of AGI and the change of human trajectory and Marie Curie, and name it Pre-AGI Rum Raisin, but that doesn't mean the text isn't a beautiful and amusing example of contemporary Silicon Valley self-importance and delusion, and reads like a parody that makes the characters in HBO's Silicon Valley sound grounded and humble. Especially the "pre-AGI" bit, which I'm now stealing and will be using at every opportunity. Maybe it's just me, but I think it is quite hilarious when a company whose actual connection with AGI is that, like many others, they dream about it and wish they could one day invent it, call their work "pre-AGI." Ironic, considering they're writing this pre-apocalypse.
breck 7y ago
> the topic has been subject to overoptimism for decades now, But so has every other big idea that went on to become reality, like planes (da Vinci was drawing designs for planes over 400 years before the first working ones). > no one knows whether what they're doing is even on the right path towards AI This is completely wrong. That would be like saying "no one knows if working on a wing is on the right path to flight". Look at the way deep learning works. Look at the way the brain works. They share immense similarities. Some people say "neural nets" aren't like the brain, but that's not true--they are just trying to not over-exaggerate the differences which laymen commonly do. They are very similar.
- pron 7y ago
  > But so has every other big idea that went on to become reality, like planes (da Vinci was drawing designs for planes over 400 years before the first working ones). And so has every other big idea that didn't become reality, and that was the majority. Again, I have no problem with AI research whatsoever, but the prose was still eyebrow-raising considering the actual state of affairs. > They are very similar. They are not. The main role of NNs is learning, which they still mostly do pretty much with backpropagation gradient-descent (+ heuristics). The brain does not learn with backpropagation.
  - breck 7y ago
    > And so has every other big idea that didn't become reality, and that was the majority. This is a really good point. Would be a fascinating read if someone were to collect all those examples and explore that a bit.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      The most famous is the Philosopher's Stone: a substance that can convert base metals into gold. But in itself, that was not the point. It would also transform the owner or user -- it was a hermetic symbol, a mechanical means to "pierce the veil" and to see the deep mystical and magical truths, the Real Reality. It was immanent, a thing in the world, that enabled the transcendent, to go beyond, above, outside of the world. Its discovery would have been the single most important moment in the history of the world, the moment in which humans had a reliable road to divinity. Hmm. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But out of alchemy came modern chemistry, and also some parts of the scientific method. After all, as some smart people worked out, you could systematically try all the permutations of materials that your reading had suggested as possibilities. That meant measuring, weighing, mixing properly, keeping detailed notes. Fundamental lab work is the unglamorous slab of concrete beneath the shining houses of the physical sciences. There were waves of hysteria and hype, but after each, something useful would be left behind, minus the sheen of unlimited dreams. Hmm. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? These days it is possible for a device to transmute base metals into gold. But the operators have not, so far as I can deduce, ascended to any higher planes of existence. They have eschewed the ethereal and remained reliably corporeal.
Jach 7y ago
Do you hate all marketing or just around AI in particular? Would you bat an eye at MS investing $1B into a project + ads about say a new GPU architecture promising how "games will never be the same" because the new hardware (or even Cloud Integration) lets developers efficiently try and satisfy the rendering equation with ray tracing? FWIW I thought you were clear, but there are only so many middlebrow dismissals one can make towards AI or AGI efforts and I think I've seen them all plus the low-value threads they generate. (I've made some too, and suspect we might get brain emulations before AGI, but I try to avoid the impulse and in any case it doesn't stop me from hoping (and minor contributing) for the research on the article's load-bearing word "beneficial" to precede any realistic efforts of building the actual thing. At least the OpenAI guys aren't entirely ignorant of the importance of the "beneficial" problem.)
- pron 7y ago
  I don't hate this copy at all; I absolutely love it! I think it is a beautiful specimen of the early-21st c. Silicon Valley ethos, and it made me laugh. Pre-AGI is my new meme, and that means something coming from a pre-Nobel Prize laureate. What I'm interested in is how many dismissals of AI, most end up justified, can the field take before considering toning down the prose a bit, especially considering that the dismissals are a result of setting unrealistic expectations in the first place.

MegaButts 7y ago

There are plenty of people who worked on AI (as graduate students, as ML researchers at hot startups for self-driving cars, as pure researchers or supporting engineers at Google or Facebook, and many other places), and then left because once they saw how limited the research was they lost hope it was going to happen before they died. Also while I fully understand and appreciate the necessity of OpenAI abandoning the 'open' part, it says a lot about who is going to benefit from this technology when you have investors who want to make money. It's just ironically poetic in this instance.

alluro2 7y ago
I honestly don't see any possibility of truly "wide-spread benefits for humanity" if AGI is achieved anytime soon. Current state of humanity when it comes to how we treat each other and anything akin to species-level awareness and collaboration is only barely better in recent history than the dark ages. If a group of people gets access to an AGI, I think it will very quickly result in a bit wider group than that having their lives prolonged, no disease, no lack of resources and practically infinite wealth, and everyone eventually being either rid off, or allowed to live in far-away slums and left to die off.

craigsmansion 7y ago

> I think the parent has made their position pretty clear through their employment choices, Their employer has just received a 1 billion dollar cash investment to futz around with computers. I don't think the employment choice is some sort of personal sacrifice here. The level of skin here is a cushy guaranteed job for years to come until the next AI-winter hits, likely set into motion by such very claims of "AGI" being near or feasible. "AGI" is good marketing for getting money to research real AI, ostensibly on the path to "AGI", but if one drives it too far, one might up retarding the whole field as the hype winds down (again).

alluro2 7y ago
Agreed. By the way, does anyone want to try my new VR tech? It will change everything forever!
chillacy 7y ago
That's true but at the same time I'm not trying to be in AI because it's such a specialist role which may or may not be a fad which the employment market overfills with new grads with a new degree in "ML", bricking salaries. But I think the internet will be here for awhile.