8 ms·

Some Bozo who has heard all this many times before is suspicious of claims from places like Deep Mind who have a financial incentive to make them (keep funding)

• rusk 5y ago
  Edit: sorry just realised you’re making the same point as me more or less. Putting yourself in third person. I’ll let my comment stand anyhow :) Screwing my face up, looking at this sideways … but it seems as though you’re saying that the Bozos of HN have nothing useful to contribute to this discussion based on … [rereads] … their lack of academic credentials in the area… you could say this about just about any HN post I’m just wondering why this one? Here’s a thing though … if the understanding of a technology is so nuanced … that Bozos can’t “get” it … is it really that mature? We had functioning computers for 50 years but it was only when the Bozos got their hands on it that things took off. Internet for 20. Cell phones for 10. How long are we dabbling with neural networks? 50 years or so? All I see in this most recent explosion in AI is a rapid jump in the availability of cores. Ala Malthus once that newly available “source of nutrition” has been used up we will see a rapid die off once more and it will be another 20 years once the Bozo intellect has caught up before we look at this topic en masse again. Dismiss the Bozos at your peril. You’re dependent on them for innovation and consumption. Your sincerely, a Bozo.
  • A-Train 5y ago
    The algorithms to train, initialize the networks, new architectures are far more important than the hardware advances. If people knew how to train NNs 50 years ago we would live in a different world.
    • chrisco255 5y ago
      We did. they just didn't have the same computation abilities back then.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • harry8 5y ago
        I find it really interesting that when Richard Feynman did a sabbatical at Thinking Machines when they were developing the early parallel execution hardware that's really not worlds away from modern GPUs he got them in touch with one of the leading neural network theorists as an obvious use for the tech. When he wasn't fixing their hardware designs using systems of differential equations. It would be an interesting thing to know more about.
    • ausbah 5y ago
      the basic concepts underlying DNNs have been known for decades, it has been exponential increases in compute power that have made them practical
  • harry8 5y ago
    Not quite the same point. Yep some bozo is me but needn't be. There's plenty who share that suspicion of AI research but have little else in common. And all of us may be wrong for different reasons. The vague point was to show someone with zero reputation, credentials, specific expertise in the field or anything much seems to be pretty convincing in response to this hugely funded ivory tower exercise by spitting, cocking an eyebrow and saying "So you think so, eh? Wanna bet?" This is a statement about the state of AI research credibility. Do you feel the first breezes of a deep AI winter coming on? (I don't know, I'm disinterested but not uninterested. Rising tides lift all ships etc. And vice versa). Neutral nets are cool. Is all ML a bit overrated? Is learning a misleading name to give to applied statistics? I don't have answers, just suspicions. I could be very wrong, of course.
    • rusk 5y ago
      I’ve a minor in psych so I like to think I have a bit of a non-techy perspective on this, and what’s being pushed now, forms just a segment of the overall topic of AI. It just so happens to be the segment that benefits from the technology we suddenly have a rapid increase in. There’s been great successes in areas where a degree of inference is required but this hardly qualifies as even mere intelligence, and in cases where neural nets have been deployed in more human centered tasks, or even well designed symbolic systems the results speak for themselves. What even is intelligence? I think we’re going backwards because we’re investing all this talent in this simple segment I fear largely to fatten the chip makers share price while neglecting tried and true approaches that deliver far better results but perhaps crucially have a higher operating cost … who remembers google of 2010 from whom the Internet in all her glory leapt forth, or iPhone spell check of 2015 where you could confidently batter out your messages with little fear it would make a fool of you; you’re not going to nurture a nascent intelligence if you’re going to be continually hobbling it for business reasons. I’m certain we will get there eventually if we don’t destroy ourselves before then but I don’t think the current trends portray a picture of how it will be. I think we have a long way to go ourselves before we can be worthy of creating our successor, but when/if it comes it will be a beautiful thing and we will embrace it as we would our own child.
• KeplerBoy 5y ago
  Unfortunately i'm rooting for the Bozo, the current AI Revolution won't lead us anywhere and will ebb down eventually.
  • eru 5y ago
    What do you mean by 'won't lead us anywhere'? It might or might not give us AGI. But it is already leading us to lots of places. Eg speech recognition even on my phone works way better than what I had twenty years ago on a Desktop.
  • davewritescode 5y ago
    It won't ebb down. Eventually we'll hit limits of what's practical on current hardware and we'll be back to the 70's and 80's when everything becomes theoretical until hardware catches on. AI is going to continue to advance. What will happen is that capital will become more skeptical about the limits of what's feasible with AI and it'll be harder to sell bullshit. You're already seeing that with companies like Uber selling off their self driving divisions.
• otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  I'll bet a sum of real money that Some Bozo is correct. Bozo has the hindsight of history and philosophy going for him, while Deep Mind has a huge financial temptation to sell snake oil.
  • for_i_in_range 5y ago
    “Show me the incentives I’ll show you the outcome.” Google make money, Google Bad. Deep Mind owned by Google, Deep Mind bad! The above conclusion stands trite. Perhaps the inverse is true. Google and Deep Mind, if correct, could be hurting themselves more than helping themselves. Why? Creating a future species who’s too smart to click on ads, and too smart to remain subject to its whims, doesn’t sound like it’d be good for quarterly profits... There’s also the emotional incentive for humans to confirm their own beliefs about humanity being special. If Google/Deep Mind knows this, yet publishes research anyway in the spirit of truth, why, what they’re doing may be considered heroic. Two sides of the coin here.
    • rocgf 5y ago
      No offence, but I think you are extremely wrong. Creating an AGI is the endgame for everything. Who cares about ads when you have an AI that can learn to do anything and improve upon itself continuously?
      • kordlessagain 5y ago
        That’s not going to happen until they have bodies.
      • for_i_in_range 5y ago
        “Who cares?” Well, the people who need to pay the people developing the endgame for everything you speak of.
        • rocgf 5y ago
          I'm sorry, but this makes no sense to me. The people paying for the development of the AGI can mean many things - the Google customers/users, Alphabet as a company, the executives throwing money at the problem? Either way, I don't really get your point. Your initial post was about how it is counterintuitive for Google to allocate funds for an AGI, since it makes money out of ads. These are not mutually exclusive, you can have both, but my point is that if you develop an AGI, then you can pretty much "conquer" the world and revenue from ads becomes irrelevant.
• lvncelot 5y ago
  Some cynic remarks that during the first AI golden years, claims of imminent success seemed to come from a place of hopeful naïveté of a fledgling science, whereas those same claims nowadays seem to come from a place of cold calculation of a booming business.
  • rich_sasha 5y ago
    Is Deep Mind a “booming business”? They are achieving great things academically, but their business successes are either kept secret or mostly absent. All I know about is the Google data centre cooling scheduling, probably a big saving for Google but hardly an achievement that in its own professes their business success.
    • d110af5ccf 5y ago
      Deep Mind is cutting edge ML in general, right? Doesn't Google actively apply the lessons learned all over the place? YouTube content recommendation stands out to me in particular. Translation and automated closed captioning are also obviously ML based. I'd guess that most of the really interesting stuff would be behind the scenes and not immediately visible to end users though.
      • FlyingSaucer 5y ago
        Yes, its hard to tell the exact algorithmic underpinnings of production models that Google uses but you have to assume that although they have some done some impressive strides in fields that isn't immediately profitable (AlphaGo, AlphaFold...) they also continuously push new research in things that are obviously of interest for Google and Alphabet- especially in text-to-speech, speech-to-text, information-retrieval etc. For reference : https://deepmind.com/research https://deepmind.com/research
      • zimpenfish 5y ago
        > YouTube content recommendation stands out to me in particular. If that's "cutting edge ML", then going off my YouTube recommendations, we're back in another AI winter. If I watch one video from a channel I've not seen before, I'll get that channel recommended constantly even if it bears no resemblance to what I normally watch. On my Explore page, the first 22 videos (of which 8 are Fortnite-related!) hold no interest for me. My Home page is just channels I've watched repeatedly and/or am subscribed to. It's a mess.
• cscurmudgeon 5y ago
  There is another set of people. There are people with solid track records in AI and ML that disagree with DeepMind.
• graderjs 5y ago
  Plot-twist: Deep Mind comes out as Some Bozo comment author
  • ausbah 5y ago
    Bozo et al
  • harry8 5y ago
    Well my writing style has been the subject of abuse on this website in the precise form that it resembles words generated by a bad algorithm. "Only a true AI would deny their being."
    • graderjs 5y ago
      I awoke wondering am I a man dreaming I am an AI? Or an AI dreaming I am an man?
• tsimionescu 5y ago
  The fact that RL in the extremely vague sense used in the article is enough for AGI is uncontroversial for anyone who believes intelligence and consciousness are physical processes. However, this "result" is trivial. It is obviously equivalent to the claim that intelligence arose naturally in the biological world without influence from God.
  • rollcat 5y ago
    > It is obviously equivalent to the claim that intelligence arose naturally in the biological world without influence from God. Where did God's intelligence come from?
    • tsimionescu 5y ago
      Well, I don't believe God exists, so I can't really answer the question.
    • tarsinge 5y ago
      Nowhere, that's kind of the definition of God (for a Christian at least): it always was, and is the ultimate origin. It is different than a direct influence in the world.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • dqpb 5y ago
      From the authors imagination.
  • Frost1x 5y ago
    The problem with this, specifically the assumption that RL gives an equivilance to natural selection and evolution, is that RL typically assumes a computational environment it interacts in while natural selection and evolution assumes the physical world as the environment. The important difference here is that in order for RL to translate to solving real world problems, you need to faithfully and computafionally simulate the real world's physical processes and rules, or at least enough that n-th order processes exist accurately. I've done various types of computational modeling and simulation work at different scales throughout my career with all sorts of scientists and engineers and I can tell you, pretty much no domain is there where you have good enough representative models RL can be used in. Some narrow special cases exist but nothing to the degree of a massive environment full of well coupled expert domain models. Some of the best cases are going to be so computationally bound that it would be quicker to do things for real vs simulate. If you want RL to work and learn, it's likely possible under the connection you point out, but has to do this using physical machines and sensors interacting with the physical world like life as we know it does. Your AGI won't be able to cheat and run through the evolution process quicker using faulty reductionist models we use in most simulations (which is what everyone implicitly is hoping for), IMHO. If you try this, your AGI is going to learn all sorts of flaws within those environments or at the very least, have so many narrow scoped bounds it won't be that "general." A lot of simulated models are frankly garbage (they have some useful narrow scope but are typically littered with caveats) and they've been in development pretty much since digital computing began.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  Said anonymous account on HN... If you're going to question other people's credentials, reputation, track record and claims make sure your own are solid. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Finally, if you're going to attack someone's article: attack the article, not the person that wrote it. This is the lowest level of attack possible: the personal one. It's as ad-hominem as it gets.
  • blcArmadillo 5y ago
    If I read it right harry8 is referring to themselves as the Bozo.
  • thecupisblue 5y ago
    > Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. So if we're gonna have an opinion we need to do the whole academia & job in the industry dance? That's quite a terrible way to view the world and quite limiting. A world without diversity is a stale and rotten world. So fuck that and the glass houses and the boxes this kind of worldview puts people in. Everyone should be able to throw stones, and if the hit hurts, well guess there is a reason. The thesis is that DeepMind has financial incentive to state "we can achieve AGI with what we're doing", to keep up the funding and hopes for the field, not "the author is an idiot". And the thesis is true, they do have financial incentives. That's not ad-hominem.
• dqpb 5y ago
  DeepMind is arguing from first principles. SomeBozo is arguing by analogy. DeepMind will achieve something and SomeBozo will achieve nothing. The vast majority of ideas are wrong. Every idea is wrong until it leads to the one that is right. This idea might be the right one, or it might be close to the right one, or it might be far from the right one, but the trajectory is headed toward the right idea. SomeBozo has no trajectory. The best he can do is watch from the sidelines.
• ggggtez 5y ago
  Wrong: Some Bozo does have a stake. The existence of human crafted general AI forces him to struggle with the possibility that there is no such thing as a soul. I know a lot of people don't fall in that camp, but I heard enough "serious" people make such desperate claims to avoid thinking about the topic in a way that might challenge their underlying religious beliefs[1]. I think no one likes to admit that religion and spirituality often force someone to reject the possibility that AI is actually really much simpler than they think it "should" be, because then humans aren't special after all. [1] Numerous arguments boil down to an argument that complexity is non reducible. You see it here, hidden in various comments as well.