8 ms·

I thought from day one that the name «OpenAI» would at best be a slight misnomer, and at worst indicative of a misguided approach. If AGI is close to being achi

by marvin 7y ago

I thought from day one that the name «OpenAI» would at best be a slight misnomer, and at worst indicative of a misguided approach. If AGI is close to being achieved, sharing key details of the approach to any actors at all could trigger a Manhattan Project-type global arms race where safety was compromised and the whole thing became insanely risky for the future of humanity. Glad to see that the team is taking a pragmatic safety-first approach here, as well as towards the near-term economical realities of funding a very expensive project to ensure the fastest possible progress. In the early days of OpenAI, my thoughts were that the project had good intentions, but a misguided focus. The last year has changed that, though. They absolutely seem to be on the right track. Very excited to see their progress over the next years.

nradov 7y ago
Not to worry. No one is anywhere close to achieving true AGI so any safety concerns are a moot issue. It's akin to worrying about an alien invasion.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  > No one is anywhere close to achieving true AGI No one knows how far off true AGI is, just like no one in 1940 (or 1910) knew how far off fission weapons were. EDIT: I quite liked this article from a few years back [0], and the fission weapon prediction example is stolen from there. 0: https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/ https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
  - marvin 7y ago
    The Manhattan Project is a very apt analogy. Even if you believe that AGI is impossible, it should be possible to appreciate that many billions would quickly be invested in its development if somehow a viable pathway to it became clear. Even if just to a few well-connected experts. This is what happened when it became known nuclear weapons were a viable concept. The technology shifted power to such an extreme degree that it was impossible not to invest in it, and the delay from «likely impossible» to «done» happened too fast for most observers to notice.
    - idlewords 7y ago
      The Manhattan project happened when the entire conceptual road map to fission weapons was understood. This is manifestly not the case with AI, which can be charitably described as "add computers until magic".
      - marvin 7y ago
        I didn’t compare OpenAI to the Manhattan Project. I was pointing out that if a small number of people discover a plausible conceptual pathway to AGI, a similar project will happen.
        idlewords 7y ago
        And I'm pointing out that the conceptual breakthroughs that preceded such an engineering sprint happened in the open literature. Wells was writing sci-fi about atomic weapons in 1914. He based it off of a pop-science book written in 1909. We don't have any such understanding, or even a definition, of 'AGI'.
        marvin 7y ago
        Wells’ atomic bombs sci-fi was of the type «there is energy in the atom, and maybe someone will use this in bombs someday». Nowhere close to the physical reality of a weapon, more in the realm of philosophy that strong AI currently is. We have an existence proof of intelligence already, after all. The idea is not based on pure fantasy, even though the practicalities are unknown. Leo Szilard had more plausible philosophical musings in the early thirties, that did not have root in any workable practical idea. The published theoretical breakthroughs you mention didn’t happen until the late thirties. Nuclear fission, the precursor to the idea of an exponential chain reaction, happened only in 1938, 7 years before Trinity.
        laughinghan 7y ago
        The issue with strong AI is not that "practicalities are unknown", any more than the issue with Leonardo da Vinci's daydreams of flying machines were that "practicalities are unknown". He didn't have internal combustion engines, but that's a practicality, other mechanical power sources already existed (Alexander the Great had torsion siege engines). They would never be sufficient for flight, of course, but the principle was understood. But he could never have even begun to build airfoils, because he didn't have even an inkling of proto-aerodynamics. He saw that birds exist, so he drew a machine with wings that flapped. Look at the wings he drew: https://www.leonardodavinci.net/flyingmachine.jsp https://www.leonardodavinci.net/flyingmachine.jsp That's an imitation of birds with no understanding behind it. That's the state of strong AI today: we see that humans exist, so we create imitations of human brains, with no understanding behind them. That lead to machine learning, and after 40 years of research we figured out that if you feed it terabytes of training data, it can actually be "unreasonably effective", which is impressive! How many pictures of giraffes did you have to see before you could instantly recognize them, though? One, probably? Human cognition is clearly qualitatively different. The danger of machine learning is not that it could lead to strong AI. It's that it is already leading to pervasive surveillance and misinformation. (idlewords is pretty critical of OpenAI, but I actually credit OpenAI with taking this quite seriously, unlike MIRI.)
  - umvi 7y ago
    Really? I thought by 1940 physicists generally understood fission and theoretically understood how to build a bomb - they just needed to find enough distilled fissile material (which was hard to do). And indeed, once they had enough U235, they had such a high degree of confidence in the theory, that they built a functioning U235 bomb without ever having previously tested one.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      In 1939, Enrico Fermi expressed 90% confidence [0] that creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with Uranium was impossible. And, if you're working with U238, it basically is! But it turns out that it's possible to separate out U235 in sufficient quantities to use that instead. On the 2nd of December, 1942 he led an experiment at Chicago Pile 1 [1] that initiated the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction. And it was made with Uranium. In fairness to Fermi, nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 [2] and published in early 1939. 0: https://books.google.com/books?id=aSgFMMNQ6G4C&pg=PA813&lpg=PA813&dq=weart+fermi&source=bl&ots=Jy1pBOUL10&sig=c9wK_yLHbXZS_GFIv0K3bgpmE58&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNofKsisnWAhXGlFQKHbOSB1QQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=%22ten%20per%20cent%22&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=aSgFMMNQ6G4C&pg=PA813&lpg=... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#Discovery_of_nuclear_fission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#Discovery_of_n...
      - ekianjo 7y ago
        > In 1939, Enrico Fermi expressed 90% confidence [0] that creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with Uranium was impossible. And, if you're working with U238, it basically is! But it turns out that it's possible to separate out U235 in sufficient quantities to use that instead. You are moving goalposts. You mentioned in the first place "fission weapons" and now you take a quote about "nuclear fission reactor" which is a whole different thing.
        DuskStar 7y ago
        A self-sustaining nuclear reaction is a prerequisite for a fission weapon. (that's what allows the exponential doubling of fission events to occur) A nuclear reactor was also required for the production of Pu-239, which is what 2 of the first 3 bombs were made from.
  - idlewords 7y ago
    This is a flawed analogy. The conceptual basis of nuclear weapons was well understood as soon as it was learned that the atom has a compact nucleus. The energy needed to bind that nucleus together gives a rough idea of the power of a fission weapon. If that energy could be liberated all at once, it would make an explosive orders of magnitude more powerful than anything known. It was hard to predict when or if such a thing could be made, but everyone knew what was under discussion. Compare this to AGI, some vaguely emergent property of a complex computer system that no one can define to anyone else's satisfaction. Attempts to be more precise what AGI is, how it would first manifest itself, and why on earth we should be afraid of it, rapidly devolve into nerd ghost stories.
    - thrax 7y ago
      I think there is a lot of evidence that explosive progress could be made quickly. Alphago zero, machine cision, sentiment analysis, machine translation.. voice.. etc etc etc All these things have surged incredibly in less than a decade. It's always a long way off until it isn't.
      - nradov 7y ago
        Those are all impressive technical achievements to be sure, but they don't constitute evidence of progress toward AGI. If I'm driving my car from Seattle to Honolulu and I make it to San Diego it sure seems like I made a lot of progress?
      - ekianjo 7y ago
        > I think there is a lot of evidence that explosive progress could be made quickly. Alphago zero, machine cision, sentiment analysis, machine translation.. voice.. etc etc etc Not at all, these are all one-trick poneys and bring you nowhere close to real AGI which is akin to human intelligence.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      > This is a flawed analogy. The conceptual basis of nuclear weapons was well understood as soon as it was learned that the atom has a compact nucleus. The energy needed to bind that nucleus together gives a rough idea of the power of a fission weapon. If that energy could be liberated all at once, it would make an explosive orders of magnitude more powerful than anything known. Extrapolating as you seem to be here, when should I expect to see a total conversion reactor show up? I want 100% of the energy in that Uranium, dammit - not the piddly percentages you get from fission! Seriously, I think you overestimate how predictable nuclear weapons were. Fission was discovered in 1938.
- drinane 7y ago
  AGI = Alien invasion
z3t4 7y ago
The atomic bomb was based on science theory. A computer can run many programs and do a great many things, but it will never be able to think by itself.
- throwawaywego 7y ago
  > The atomic bomb was based on science theory. Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too. > A computer ... will never be able to think by itself. Turing wrote an entire paper about this (Computing Machinery and Intelligence), where he rephrases your statement (because he finds it to be meaningless) and devises a test to answer it. He also directly attacks your phrasing of "but it will never": > I believe they are mostly founded on the principle of scientific induction. A man has seen thousands of machines in his lifetime. From what he sees of them he draws a number of general conclusions. They are ugly, each is designed for a very limited purpose, when required for a minutely different purpose they are useless, the variety of behaviour of any one of them is very small, etc., etc. Naturally he concludes that these are necessary properties of machines in general. > A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    > Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too. Can you elaborate which part of sciences you are talking about here?
    - throwawaywego 7y ago
      All sciences that collaborate with the field of AI: Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Systems Theory, Decision Theory, Information Theory, Mathematics, Physics, Biology, ... Any AI curriculum worth its salt includes the many scientific and philosophical views on intelligence. It is not all alchemy, though the field is in a renewal phase (with horribly hyped nomenclature such as "pre-AGI", and the most impressive implementations coming from industry and government, not academia). And eventhough the atom bomb was based on science too, there is this anecdote from Hamming: > Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done—either you have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it was, he said, "It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere." I decided I would check it myself! The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, "The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen—after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels." He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, "What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?" I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you."
hoseja 7y ago
I wouldn't be so sure the Manhattan Project-type global arms race isn't already happening.

by marvin 7y ago

nradov 7y ago

Not to worry. No one is anywhere close to achieving true AGI so any safety concerns are a moot issue. It's akin to worrying about an alien invasion.

DuskStar 7y ago
> No one is anywhere close to achieving true AGI No one knows how far off true AGI is, just like no one in 1940 (or 1910) knew how far off fission weapons were. EDIT: I quite liked this article from a few years back [0], and the fission weapon prediction example is stolen from there. 0: https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/ https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
- marvin 7y ago
  The Manhattan Project is a very apt analogy. Even if you believe that AGI is impossible, it should be possible to appreciate that many billions would quickly be invested in its development if somehow a viable pathway to it became clear. Even if just to a few well-connected experts. This is what happened when it became known nuclear weapons were a viable concept. The technology shifted power to such an extreme degree that it was impossible not to invest in it, and the delay from «likely impossible» to «done» happened too fast for most observers to notice.
  - idlewords 7y ago
    The Manhattan project happened when the entire conceptual road map to fission weapons was understood. This is manifestly not the case with AI, which can be charitably described as "add computers until magic".
    - marvin 7y ago
      I didn’t compare OpenAI to the Manhattan Project. I was pointing out that if a small number of people discover a plausible conceptual pathway to AGI, a similar project will happen.
      - idlewords 7y ago
        And I'm pointing out that the conceptual breakthroughs that preceded such an engineering sprint happened in the open literature. Wells was writing sci-fi about atomic weapons in 1914. He based it off of a pop-science book written in 1909. We don't have any such understanding, or even a definition, of 'AGI'.
        marvin 7y ago
        Wells’ atomic bombs sci-fi was of the type «there is energy in the atom, and maybe someone will use this in bombs someday». Nowhere close to the physical reality of a weapon, more in the realm of philosophy that strong AI currently is. We have an existence proof of intelligence already, after all. The idea is not based on pure fantasy, even though the practicalities are unknown. Leo Szilard had more plausible philosophical musings in the early thirties, that did not have root in any workable practical idea. The published theoretical breakthroughs you mention didn’t happen until the late thirties. Nuclear fission, the precursor to the idea of an exponential chain reaction, happened only in 1938, 7 years before Trinity.
        laughinghan 7y ago
        The issue with strong AI is not that "practicalities are unknown", any more than the issue with Leonardo da Vinci's daydreams of flying machines were that "practicalities are unknown". He didn't have internal combustion engines, but that's a practicality, other mechanical power sources already existed (Alexander the Great had torsion siege engines). They would never be sufficient for flight, of course, but the principle was understood. But he could never have even begun to build airfoils, because he didn't have even an inkling of proto-aerodynamics. He saw that birds exist, so he drew a machine with wings that flapped. Look at the wings he drew: https://www.leonardodavinci.net/flyingmachine.jsp https://www.leonardodavinci.net/flyingmachine.jsp That's an imitation of birds with no understanding behind it. That's the state of strong AI today: we see that humans exist, so we create imitations of human brains, with no understanding behind them. That lead to machine learning, and after 40 years of research we figured out that if you feed it terabytes of training data, it can actually be "unreasonably effective", which is impressive! How many pictures of giraffes did you have to see before you could instantly recognize them, though? One, probably? Human cognition is clearly qualitatively different. The danger of machine learning is not that it could lead to strong AI. It's that it is already leading to pervasive surveillance and misinformation. (idlewords is pretty critical of OpenAI, but I actually credit OpenAI with taking this quite seriously, unlike MIRI.)
- umvi 7y ago
  Really? I thought by 1940 physicists generally understood fission and theoretically understood how to build a bomb - they just needed to find enough distilled fissile material (which was hard to do). And indeed, once they had enough U235, they had such a high degree of confidence in the theory, that they built a functioning U235 bomb without ever having previously tested one.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    In 1939, Enrico Fermi expressed 90% confidence [0] that creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with Uranium was impossible. And, if you're working with U238, it basically is! But it turns out that it's possible to separate out U235 in sufficient quantities to use that instead. On the 2nd of December, 1942 he led an experiment at Chicago Pile 1 [1] that initiated the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction. And it was made with Uranium. In fairness to Fermi, nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 [2] and published in early 1939. 0: https://books.google.com/books?id=aSgFMMNQ6G4C&pg=PA813&lpg=PA813&dq=weart+fermi&source=bl&ots=Jy1pBOUL10&sig=c9wK_yLHbXZS_GFIv0K3bgpmE58&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNofKsisnWAhXGlFQKHbOSB1QQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=%22ten%20per%20cent%22&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=aSgFMMNQ6G4C&pg=PA813&lpg=... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#Discovery_of_nuclear_fission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#Discovery_of_n...
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      > In 1939, Enrico Fermi expressed 90% confidence [0] that creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with Uranium was impossible. And, if you're working with U238, it basically is! But it turns out that it's possible to separate out U235 in sufficient quantities to use that instead. You are moving goalposts. You mentioned in the first place "fission weapons" and now you take a quote about "nuclear fission reactor" which is a whole different thing.
      - DuskStar 7y ago
        A self-sustaining nuclear reaction is a prerequisite for a fission weapon. (that's what allows the exponential doubling of fission events to occur) A nuclear reactor was also required for the production of Pu-239, which is what 2 of the first 3 bombs were made from.
- idlewords 7y ago
  This is a flawed analogy. The conceptual basis of nuclear weapons was well understood as soon as it was learned that the atom has a compact nucleus. The energy needed to bind that nucleus together gives a rough idea of the power of a fission weapon. If that energy could be liberated all at once, it would make an explosive orders of magnitude more powerful than anything known. It was hard to predict when or if such a thing could be made, but everyone knew what was under discussion. Compare this to AGI, some vaguely emergent property of a complex computer system that no one can define to anyone else's satisfaction. Attempts to be more precise what AGI is, how it would first manifest itself, and why on earth we should be afraid of it, rapidly devolve into nerd ghost stories.
  - thrax 7y ago
    I think there is a lot of evidence that explosive progress could be made quickly. Alphago zero, machine cision, sentiment analysis, machine translation.. voice.. etc etc etc All these things have surged incredibly in less than a decade. It's always a long way off until it isn't.
    - nradov 7y ago
      Those are all impressive technical achievements to be sure, but they don't constitute evidence of progress toward AGI. If I'm driving my car from Seattle to Honolulu and I make it to San Diego it sure seems like I made a lot of progress?
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      > I think there is a lot of evidence that explosive progress could be made quickly. Alphago zero, machine cision, sentiment analysis, machine translation.. voice.. etc etc etc Not at all, these are all one-trick poneys and bring you nowhere close to real AGI which is akin to human intelligence.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    > This is a flawed analogy. The conceptual basis of nuclear weapons was well understood as soon as it was learned that the atom has a compact nucleus. The energy needed to bind that nucleus together gives a rough idea of the power of a fission weapon. If that energy could be liberated all at once, it would make an explosive orders of magnitude more powerful than anything known. Extrapolating as you seem to be here, when should I expect to see a total conversion reactor show up? I want 100% of the energy in that Uranium, dammit - not the piddly percentages you get from fission! Seriously, I think you overestimate how predictable nuclear weapons were. Fission was discovered in 1938.
drinane 7y ago
AGI = Alien invasion

z3t4 7y ago

The atomic bomb was based on science theory. A computer can run many programs and do a great many things, but it will never be able to think by itself.

throwawaywego 7y ago
> The atomic bomb was based on science theory. Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too. > A computer ... will never be able to think by itself. Turing wrote an entire paper about this (Computing Machinery and Intelligence), where he rephrases your statement (because he finds it to be meaningless) and devises a test to answer it. He also directly attacks your phrasing of "but it will never": > I believe they are mostly founded on the principle of scientific induction. A man has seen thousands of machines in his lifetime. From what he sees of them he draws a number of general conclusions. They are ugly, each is designed for a very limited purpose, when required for a minutely different purpose they are useless, the variety of behaviour of any one of them is very small, etc., etc. Naturally he concludes that these are necessary properties of machines in general. > A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too. Can you elaborate which part of sciences you are talking about here?
  - throwawaywego 7y ago
    All sciences that collaborate with the field of AI: Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Systems Theory, Decision Theory, Information Theory, Mathematics, Physics, Biology, ... Any AI curriculum worth its salt includes the many scientific and philosophical views on intelligence. It is not all alchemy, though the field is in a renewal phase (with horribly hyped nomenclature such as "pre-AGI", and the most impressive implementations coming from industry and government, not academia). And eventhough the atom bomb was based on science too, there is this anecdote from Hamming: > Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done—either you have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it was, he said, "It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere." I decided I would check it myself! The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, "The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen—after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels." He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, "What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?" I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you."

hoseja 7y ago

I wouldn't be so sure the Manhattan Project-type global arms race isn't already happening.