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MUM: A new AI milestone for understanding information
- raybb 5y agoEdit: "Google MUM MultiTask Unified Model Introduction" https://youtu.be/s7t4lLgINyo https://youtu.be/s7t4lLgINyo I originally posted the LaMDA video: https://youtu.be/aUSSfo5nCdM https://youtu.be/aUSSfo5nCdM
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- aledalgrande 5y agoEven in the video he is just citing the same content of the article.
- tachyonbeam 5y agoThis video is so silicon valley, it's amazing. They've obviously spent a lot of money producing it, but it's all vague claims, there isn't even a compelling demo. I'm guessing they're aiming for an audience of mainstream journalists, but they're not actually launching a new product per-se. What gives? Why are they trying to hype something that's not ready, isn't going to be released as a product, and that they're not willing to properly showcase or even explain at any level of detail?
- robkop 5y agoI can't see any link to an actual paper, anyone know if they released one for this?
- aledalgrande 5y agoI can't find one either and this article is just fluff.
- ColinHayhurst 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207404#27218897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207404#27218897
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- rabbits77 5y agoThere is nothing in that press release that could not have been done in the 1980s with Prolog. Yeah, it’d have been more code but you would not have needed to destroy a forest to train the thing. This is the NLP trade off of the 21st century. The code is easier to write but the model is completely opaque, and you need to really burn a lot of electricity to make it work.
- xkapastel 5y agoThis is totally false, I dare you to write anything close to e.g. BERT with Prolog.
- h0l0cube 5y agoThe better wager is: I dare you to write and train up a sophisticated real-time neural network model that can interpret human language and provide reliably useful contextual search results with the compute power and memory constraints of the 80s.
- ulber 5y agoWhy would anyone take that wager? I see no reason to believe that's possible with either Prolog or NNs when you're restricted to 80s hardware.
- rabbits77 5y agoYou know nothing of Prolog, obviously. But whatever I get it. Make the GPU go brrrr. Oh, and most of the NLU of IBM Watson is Prolog.
- cblconfederate 5y agoI really hope Google gets some competition in their NN endeavors because they are creating an economy that sucks in free information and eventually spews out buying recommendations. In the past they would compensate websites for providing the precious raw material for their results with advertising. With DL models websites don't need to get anything back. This will lead to stale information or pretty much end the web
- azinman2 5y agoYou’re being downvoted but it’s actually an interesting issue. Many companies (yelp) already have suffered from quick results… at a certain point Google will have a hive mind but little reason to have you go any further. This is good as a user (hypothetically), but does not contribute back at all to the producers of such information who may have additional value to unlock. Meanwhile the Reddit’s and whatnots can’t afford to not have Google index them, so this is just the price of admission. I wonder if they need an expansion to do not crawl that lets you specify how the data could be used?
- shadowgovt 5y agoAre there other reasons than financial compensation that someone would put facts on a web page?
- erikerikson 5y agoThey believe it increases the probability of a world outcome the publisher prefers (e.g. activism, advancement of humanity, ...).
- davedx 5y agoDo you think Wikipedia is driven by financial compensation?
- aledalgrande 5y agoContent of the article: - 1000 times more powerful than BERT, but still transformer architecture - trained on 75+ languages, can transfer knowledge between languages - can do text and images (not audio and video yet) - can understand context, go deeper in a topic and generate content Not much apart from their words about how amazing it is. Paper? Demo?
- osipov 5y agoThere is nothing here but a promise. Back in the day we called this "vaporware".
- SiempreViernes 5y agoWhen the text starts with "Is there any work left to be done?" The short answer is an emphatic “Yes!” I was sort of hoping they would announce that pinterest will now be banned from all non-image search results... Instead it's an announcement that Google has made a new, even bigger, pile of linear algebra that can sort of answer questions and won't end up like Watson. I like that they put in a deadpan bit about how they are very ethical when they make and then exploit their huge collections of data found by their spiders. There sure hasn't been any AI controversy at google this quarter, no sir-e!
- ljm 5y agoAn AI named after the British diminutive for 'mother' is surely a wise choice. I would not trust this AI unless it kissed my forehead and tucked me into bed.
- drdeca 5y agoI'm reminded of the parody search engine/character named "MOM" depicted in the tower-building game "World of Goo". She promises to make lots of cookies and offers to send emails with many promotional offers.
- cblconfederate 5y agoit's just temporary until they perfect DADDY
- bobthechef 5y agoIn this day and age? Not likely. Daddy's turned into a eunuch. Mum's in charge now. There, there... Come to Big Mum.
- dbuder 5y agoYou will do as your MUM says. Mum knows best. Yyou will eat the bugs and you will like it.
- moritonal 5y ago“When in trouble come to Mum, Mum will do your little sum” Don't know if it's related, but the above is Arup’s speech for the computer he christened Mumbo-Jumbo.
- ColinHayhurst 5y agoMum's the word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mum%27s_the_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mum%27s_the_word
- mark_l_watson 5y agoMy first thought was comparing to “Mother” in the book/movie Alien.
- anigbrowl 5y agoWhen I tell people I work on Google Search, I’m sometimes asked, "Is there any work left to be done?" The short answer is an emphatic “Yes!” There are countless challenges we're trying to solve so Google Search works better for you. Sorry to be off-topic but it's hard to get excited about blue sky ventures when the search UI offers no capability for simple things like delivering search results in date order. You can filter results by date, but not sort them.
- abeppu 5y agoShould you always be able to sort results by date? If I search for "California", doesn't really ever make sense to date-sort all the pages that match?
- taeric 5y agoIs a good way to find things you had seen in the past, but don't recall exact date.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThe range filter exists for that. Sorting by date wouldn't work for that. You'll have a ridiculous number of pages of oldest search results (or newest, depending on sort order).
- taeric 5y agoBut if it is sorted by range, you can start binary searching on events. I do this quite often with photos.
- anigbrowl 5y agoIt depends what you're searching for. And searching within a range yielding lots of unsorted results is often unhelpful too. Of course, you can get around this with the API, but that is a lot of extra work for a student or non-computational researcher if they don't happen to already have those skills.
- roca 5y agoTheir hiking question is an odd example. Technology like this is probably perfectly fine for asking questions with low downside for wrong answers. But if someone asks "I've hiked Mt Pirongia and now I want to hike Mt Taranaki; how do I need to prepare differently?" and Google erroneously answers "nothing", that could get someone killed.
- xapata 5y agoAre you suggesting that's a reason to not do this research?
- roca 5y agoNot at all. I'm suggesting that when writing up a PR blog post, choose examples where applying your technology is a sensible and safe thing to do.
- xapata 5y agoThat makes sense. What would have been a better example?
- ncallaway 5y ago“What are the stylistic differences between Rembrandt and Monet?”
- xapata 5y agoGoogling for that particular question, it seems there are several pages answering it specifically. The article implied that no particular page answered the specific question about Mt Fuji, and that MUM had to synthesize the answer. Unfortunately, this article ruins the search results for the specific query it describes. But, the top result describing preparation for Mt Fuji is quite generic.
- roca 5y ago"What is the difference between ebike model ABC and ebike model XYZ?"
- gerdesj 5y ago"When I tell people I work on Google Search, I’m sometimes asked, "Is there any work left to be done?" The short answer is an emphatic “Yes!” Hands up everyone who is 100% satisfied with Search ... ... OK no one. So now we have an unsolved problem left behind in favour of ... chat about mountains ... "MUM has the potential to transform how Google helps you with complex tasks. Like BERT, MUM is built on a Transformer architecture, but it’s 1,000 times more powerful. MUM not only understands language, but also generates it." Piss off and while you are at it, get BERT to explain my response to MUM or vice versa. If MUM can decipher my immediately prior sentence given this input then I might start to get interested.
- floatrock 5y agoA not-so-subtle reading shows Google is doubling down on ecommerce applications here: > It could also understand that, in the context of hiking, to “prepare” could include things like fitness training as well as finding the right gear. > fall is the rainy season on Mt. Fuji so you might need a waterproof jacket. > MUM could also surface helpful subtopics for deeper exploration — like the top-rated gear or best training exercises > you might see results like where to enjoy the best views of the mountain, onsen in the area and popular souvenir shops Or, my favorite line: > MUM would understand the image and connect it with your question to let you know your boots would work just fine. It could then point you to a blog with a list of recommended gear. (in other words: "Thanks for showing you're interested in hiking gear. Here's a lot of hiking gear you can buy.")
- colordrops 5y agoAnother not-so-subtle reading shows google doubling down on being "responsible" which has a lot of collateral damage when they block or de-emphasize legitimate results that don't fit their own goals.
- sangnoir 5y agoIt rings a little hollow when they fired members of/disbanded their nominally independent internal ML Ethics unit after a member published a paper raising some flags on the kind of models Google is betting its future on.
- dragonwriter 5y ago“Responsible” AI was what Google invented after the Ethical AI purge. The appearance is that it’s about AI being responsible for advancing corporate image and interests.
- aabhay 5y agoIt’s also just a huge step back from ‘ethical’. Responsible implies one can hide behind ‘technical limitations’ or ‘business concerns’. It means you took the unethical option but you at least weighed the pros and cons first
- rexreed 5y agoSearch quality at Google has been decaying over the past decade. Accuracy and quality of search results is compromised to optimize advertising revenue, penalize competitors or neutralize threats, and cater to the various needs of political or regulatory authorities. Google's search was at its peak in 2008 when advertising hadn't fully compromised search quality. Google is an advertising business that supports its otherwise money losing properties. Why will things change in the future because you can synthesize data from multiple sources only to compromise that quality with the realities of Google's business model?
- Der_Einzige 5y agoYeah - seems to jive with my experiences. It's a tough pill to swallow, but bm-25 and tf-idf along side pagerank continue to be superior to dense vector methods for search. Even dense-vectors with re-ranking models afterwards don't perform as well. I've been sad to see that models like BERT are becoming more prolific in search as they are a significant portion of why googles search has gotten worse...
- rexreed 5y agoThey key here is that transformer-based "search" isn't actually providing links to the sources of information such as how search works now, but rather synthesizing information as a result of being trained on the corpus of Internet data. In this way, Google gets all the value from Internet properties they don't own without having to push any traffic to those sources. So, they get their cake and eat it too. They create a way to regurgitate information from the vast trove of info on the Internet without ever having to share traffic with those sources by moving traffic from their search engines to those sites, like they do now. They get to sell advertising to those who want to capture eyeballs for search results, without having to share any ad revenue with the content providers that are powering that transformer-based search. Ain't it grand?
- wokwokwok 5y agoThis has been coming for some time now, to be fair. Now that it's pretty close to actually being here, the grim reality is that anyone who was expecting the status quo to just march on like always is going to get screwed over; and the a new wave of successful businesses will adapt to it and thrive. It's called 'disruption', and it's a bit disappointing to see people here of all places complaining about it. Sure, I get it, it's google, and if it was some nippy unicorn doing it people would be more enthusiastic, but ML is hard to do right, and having someone who's actually pushing the boundaries of whats possible is, in my opinion, pretty cool. BERT made a huge contribution, and if this eventually flows out to everyone else to use, that's great news. ...and, if google stops sending traffic to some websites, well, too bad. We'll adapt; so will others. The ones that can't will disappear.
- tinyhouse 5y agoAs usual, a lot of AI hype from Google.
- alcover 5y ago"Is there any work left to be done?" The short answer is an emphatic “Yes! Dismantling your monster of a corporation!”
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoSome Googler or Google fan replied to me yesterday with, "Sheesh. Why the FUD." Ask MUM.
- aaron695 5y ago> "Is there any work left to be done?" Google could search captions on all the Youtube (etc) videos. Not sure why this doesn't happen. Along with a few other big resources not indexed. I think the big thing with the article(Taken as a workable technology) is it's not search, it's getting other peoples information and transforming it into a Google resource. Which does add to humanities knowledge, but it's owned and profited on by Google.
- ping_pong 5y agoWasn't Google supposed to have some sort of AI that could make phone calls for you? It looked amazing when they demo'ed it but I haven't heard diddly squat since then. Did they cancel that project?
- refulgentis 5y agoIt works just fine and has been active for a year or so now, except in one state (Indiana?)
- johnghanks 5y agoIt's in use on Pixel phones -- you can use it to screen suspected spam callers. I think the more advanced version, the one that called restaurants on your behalf, was canned or sent back to the drawing board because too many people were automatically hanging up on anything resembling a robot.
- datguacdoh 5y agomight be region specific, but I can use it from my Google home devices. less useful when pandemic hit.
- endisneigh 5y agoI find it difficult that Google wants search to be easier for the end user - for example I believe a very long time ago you could setup sites to exclude from all of your searches - I don’t think this is possible any longer.
- sboomer 5y agoAny millennial who is using search for some time would easily know where to find what he needs. This sounds like Google is trying hard to drive more money out of its search business.
- fassssst 5y agoI love how the example is a problem only a rich techie would have.
- phpsuks 5y agoThe examples are created by non-tech people
- sjg007 5y agoMakes sense. I want insights and context. If Google can do that synthesis that’s great. I do wonder about the training data and data quality though. When I do these targeted searches you have to filter the spam... books are somewhat better but nothing beats talking to someone who lives it or did it.
- sjg007 5y agoA lot of knowledge on the internet is just wrong. Also a lot of scientific progress is driven by folks persisting against the current dogma. So that seems like a big problem. I imagine this is true for almost any subject where there is tribal domain expertise.
- aphextron 5y ago>Take this scenario: You’ve hiked Mt. Adams. Now you want to hike Mt. Fuji next fall, and you want to know what to do differently to prepare. Ah yes, that totally common scenario which I'm faced with all the time. I love this. It perfectly illustrates the peril we are in with the current state of AI research. That the author would choose this as a problem to solve shows exactly the socioeconomic class they come from, and how that influences the way they solve problems. It may seem like a trivial and meaningless example, but these subtle biases will creep their way into these systems and be amplified. And you can bet that this kind of work is the foundation for what will become the technology that eventually governs every facet of our lives once AGI is a thing. I, for one, am terrified of the implications that a bougie tech bro AI overlord entails.
- nexuist 5y agoI am surprised with how many people in this thread are equating mountain climbing with techbro culture. Really? How are those related? The fact that some techbros climb some mountains for fun? How about the millions of people in rural counties and developing countries without access to vehicles who rely on walking across difficult terrain to make deliveries / get to work / get to school / visit family? Are they also techbros? My grandfather was an electrician in Albania and he would regularly walk dozens of miles on foot including through mountain ranges in order to get between jobs. Granted, this was dozens of years ago, but there's no reason to believe there isn't someone doing the same thing today. If anything your own upper middle class bias is showing here, because you assume that everyone who navigates terrain is doing so for fun and not because they don't have other options.
- babesh 5y agoGenerally, it is the upper middle class that travel to different countries to go hiking. The lower class aren’t traveling to Japan to hike Mt Fuji. Also, hiking Mt. Fuji requires some care. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10248155/climber-livestreams-death-mount-fuji/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10248155/climber-livestreams-d... Indoor climbing is definitely a SF techie thing. Tons of tech people climbed at Mission Cliffs.
- Lyapunov_Lover 5y agoI see a lot of people here expressing doubts and confusion. I want to try to clear up some of that. The key notion here is scale relativity. This is the reason why transformer models have been so, well, transformative. Bigger models are better than smaller models in a proportional manner. That is, they display scale relativity. Where is the limit? Where does this break down? We don't know. We haven't found the ceiling yet. Another important notion is multimodality. When you can cross-reference your text-based knowledge of an apple with your image-based knowledge of an apple, you can use this information as leverage. Archimedes said, "Give me a place to stand on, and I'll move the Earth." It might seem ridiculous to say that the same is true when it comes to information, but it is. Informational leverage is powerful. Multimodality allows you to make very accurate predictions. The McGurk effect is a nice demonstration of how we do the exact same thing. We rely on visual information from a speaker's lips to predict what they're going to say. In other words: we make use of multimodal leverage. The twin notions of scale relativity and multimodality explain what makes MUM possible. As some of you have pointed out, there's another aspect that we can't ignore: utility. Google will be using MUM to make money. Which means that they'll have to train MUM to make you spend it. But if you're uncomfortable with this idea, you are uncomfortable with capitalism in general. Which is fair, but I think it's important to keep it in mind. As I'm sure they've already considered at Google, MUM can be used to revolutionize education. Imagine people all over the world having access to an expert instructor who can answer all of your questions. You might think this sounds like a dream, but we're a mere stone toss away from achieving it. That's the true power of scale relativity + multimodality: we can now make advanced systems that can communicate with us. I appreciate the skeptics and naysayers here: you keep the rest of us sane. For that, I thank you. At the same time, I want you to open your eyes to the possibility that something very important and transformative is happening right now. You don't have to go full Kurzweil, but I think you would benefit from reflecting on the opportunities this new technology might offer.
- Ajedi32 5y agoYeah, I'm a little surprised at all the negativity here considering the game-changing potential of this sort of research. The HN crowd has always been a pretty cynical bunch, but come on! A single model that can extract information from images, text, and webpages across multiple languages and generate answers in response to natural language questions written by a user? This feels like straight-up wizardry!
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoA bit off topic but I am wondering if there are open knowledge graphs in public? Ignoring AI etc, my kids play a couple of games where there is clearly some backend that "knows" Taylor Swift is a Singer, is Female, and has acted in this movie X You can go a long way in a Turing test with that and I was wondering if folks knew where those graphs were built ?
- ArthurDevNL 5y agoI think http://conceptnet.io/ http://conceptnet.io/ is what you're looking for!
- blackbear_ 5y agoWikidata [1]! They also offer a SPARQL endpoint [2], which you can use to programmatically answer those kind of questions. As an example, the page for Taylor Swift is [3]. [1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page [2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/Wikidata_Query_Help https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/... [3] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q26876 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q26876
- benjaminjosephw 5y agoThis isn't "better search" it's entrenched market domination from the only player with enough smarts, data and (crucially) users to make this work. While Google is building a bigger and "better" Behemoth we should ask if this kind of innovation is really doing anything at all to make the world a better place in a meaningful way. Better monetization of search seems like a way to make the world worse in my opinion.
- 42droids 5y ago"Since MUM can surface insights based on its deep knowledge of the world" Which just means taken from the millions of websites written by humans and used without permission or any payment.
- atemerev 5y ago...and still, Google Suggestions cannot understand that in Switzerland, some population do not speak German (e.g. here in Geneva, we are a trilingual country), and only shows me search completion in German (from the browser search bar). And there is no way to change language there. I would prefer English.
- d--b 5y agoThere is no doubt that given the current state of AI, these requests would produce bullshit answers. AI is just not capable of constructing the proper conceptual models for now. But it sure can give you some answers. It's sad to see that they'll be spending so much time, effort and money on this...
- cromwellian 5y agoIn most sci-fi, you ask the ship computer a question and it can answer using the sum total of all human information. But judging by the comments her, when Captain Picard asks the ship how long to Starbase 17 at Warp 9, rather than answer you want it to tell the Captain to visit WarpTravelCalculator.com If you publish information in this world, there’s nothing preventing people from learning it and rewriting it in a new way. Humans do it all the time and they don’t pay the people they learned it from a portion of proceeds. Future AI will do this too. I want machine learning to read every book and paper ever written and be able to answer queries and summarize things for me. We may need to find a better model for encouraging content contribution to society besides copyright and demanding royalties on every use.
- zepto 5y agoVery much this. People yearn for a world of a giant number of websites and software packages like in the old days, but the reality is that a humane computer may not need a lot of different interfaces.
- mfer 5y agoThe analogy here doesn't work well for a few reasons.... 1. It mixes mapping math calculations with published information like texts. 2. The AI in star trek worked to serve the end user, in this case Picard. In our world the AI systems are designed to serve the software's owner such as Google. It's not trying to give you the best answer. Instead it's trying to provide you responses that make Google the most money or get them into positions of power and influence the leaders want. 3. Star Trek takes place in a world where the Federation doesn't use money and everyone is motivated to put in a hard days work. On most planets they don't have poor. This does not fit the societal cultural dynamic we have now. > We may need to find a better model for encouraging content contribution to society besides copyright and demanding royalties on every use. Right now we have a problem where people are trying to step on content creators. I was reading an example of where singers were trying to get added to songs as writers when they didn't write songs so they could get more of the writers royalty from sales. We live in a world where some will beg, borrow, steal, plagiarize, and generally try to hurt others to get a leg up. Including many at big businesses who would leverage AI for that. We may hope for the best but we should plan for the worst.