26 ms·

DeepMind AI is as fast as humans at solving previously unseen tasks

158 points by antondd 4y ago

mshake2 4y ago
Maybe they should make a persuasive demo if they want people to care. ChatGPT isn't so hot right now because boring PR articles were written about its abilities. It's hot because you can try it and see for yourself. Basic showmanship.
- jrvarela56 4y ago
  Google gives me Xerox PARC vibes wrt AI. Got to the insights first, way ahead of everyone else, but OpenAI is productizing faster (like Apple did with Xerox PARC's research).
  - belter 4y ago
    OpenAI and Microsoft will be hit by a big bus called GDPR. "Unveiling the Crucial 5 GDPR Obstacles of ChatGPT That Can’t Be Ignored" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709482
    - tester756 4y ago
      if it wasn't problem for Google, then why would for ChatGPT?
      - fsh 4y ago
        It isn't. No court has ever interpreted the GDPR in the bizarre way suggested in the linked article.
    - wand3r 4y ago
      I have no idea how OpenAI would look at this, and of course there are similar obstacles here re:copilot vs. gpl, but couldn't they just shut off European access. I think AI would be so important that Europe couldnt afford to not have AI. Wonder how this would resolve.
      - GreedClarifies 4y ago
        My guess is that the petty little bureaucratic tyrants in the EU would much rather deprive their subjects of new products than give up any sliver of their power. One could hope that this would cause a rebellion, but recent history suggests that the populace will go along with anything their lords decree.
        olivermuty 4y ago
        Short reply: lol Longer reply: I love the EU so much. One of the few institutions taking big tech to task. I can roam cell operators at no extra cost, ensure that companies cant data mine me without my express permission and other wonderful tech oriented regulation. It is extremely narrow minded to believe that throwing all principle out the window is the only way to «not stifle innovation». «The lords decree», where does one even begin. The biggest fight against bigtech involving amongst others the cloud act that lets the us govt spy on anyone in complete secrecy is literally spearheaded by a common man [0]. This entire post is either satire, and if so I ate it hook line and sinker… or it is some kind of privacy exploitation stockholm syndrome. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems
        WanderPanda 4y ago
        You mix up privacy wrt to the state (which has the monopoly on violence) vs private organisations. Two very different cans of worms. The EU is determined to fight the latter while embracing the former (as its incentives would suggest)
        pjkundert 4y ago
        You don’t fight “big tech” by giving “big brother” all your liberty…
        mstipetic 4y ago
        Nuance - a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound.
    - dkislyuk 4y ago
      The LLM / foundation model industry will happily stay in the United States and ignore the stifling regulation of the EU if necessary. There is so much market share to capture domestically at the moment.
      - croes 4y ago
        In the US it will get sued for copyright violation and similar.
        mensetmanusman 4y ago
        New laws would have to outlaw fair use, that will likely not happen as the only country that ignores such laws will win, especially now that the cat is out of the bag.
        ben_w 4y ago
        They can redefine fair use without removing it entirely. Thing like that happen all the time. Will it be effective? Dunno, but LLMs aren't as easy to duplicate or execute as films are to pirate or watch, and yet copyright law still gets enforced somewhat.
      - missingdays 4y ago
        Don't threaten the EU with good time
      - rawoke083600 4y ago
        Lol you can have Crypto in E.U but not fancy new A.I, same how you can have A.I in USA but not Crypto :)
        __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
        One day, we'll have crypto where "mining" is helping train the AI. It'll be allowed nowhere.
    - wyager 4y ago
      At some point, US companies will get fed up with constantly being harassed by the EU and just give up on the relatively small (as in money, not population) European market entirely. The hostility is simply not worth it. For a sense of scale - the EU has 0 (zero) of the 14 largest companies by market cap. Out of the next 25, only a handful are in the EU.
      - tester756 4y ago
        Go ahead and bet your money on that If your prediction happens, then EU based startups/companies that'll fill the void will booom.
        ianbutler 4y ago
        I like Europe, but a climate for entrepreneurship is not something you have.
        tester756 4y ago
        That's irrelevant imo. If FAANG announced leaving EU, then somebody's stock would go up hard, at least on the beginning.
        WanderPanda 4y ago
        And productivity would falter even more without Google and Apple…
        noogle 4y ago
        Why? There are various search engines that perform sufficiently well, all ran by start-up (Neeva, Kagi etc.). Android is a suitable alternative for iOS. The absence of European tech giants might reflect the consolidated nature of software rather than the competence of the EU.
        rowanajmarshall 4y ago
    - MadSudaca 4y ago
      Who knows. Maybe it's GDPR whose getting hit by a bus.
    - _yid9 4y ago
      The great thing about the current-gen LLMs — anybody will be able to run one on the next gen of hardware. We’re within one order of magnitude of the capacity right now on retail hardware. The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived. GDPR, LLM “guard rails”, … — only the plebs will be affected by those.
      - TigeriusKirk 4y ago
        I believe you could run GPT-2 at home now. Remember when OpenAI claimed that was too much power to allow open access to?
        pjkundert 4y ago
        Benevolent overlords patting the filthy masses on the head.
      - nateburke 4y ago
        > The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived. I agree. Use cases such as LLMs-as-backend-of-my-web-stack will move a lot of compute back to the edge of the network, eventually.
  - max51 4y ago
    With AI, most failed products aren't just "late" at the game, they often never release anything at all. Most of the wild claims made by AI companies could be strait up lies and we would never know because no one other than the devs has laid eyes on it directly.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    > OpenAI is productizing faster (like Apple did with Xerox PARC's research) what happens in cases like this is a slightly different dynamic what it seems on the surface. Apple, coming of huge success with the Apple ][ using the anemic but cheap 6502 8 bit to build a low-end (compared to Xerox) mass market (compared to Xerox) product, was well positioned to capitalize/productize the next generation of more capable 16/32 bit chips without changing their business model or distribution channel. It's right place right time, plus "easier to improve from the bottom, than downgrade from the top". This idea was identified in a famous McKinsey study of the British motorcycle industry's loss of market share to low cost Japanese competition in the 1960's and 70's. The post WWII Japanese market developed to serve people who needed transportation but could not afford the leading British brands, not to mention autos. Once Japan had a successful motorcycle industry it was natural for them to export inexpensive bikes to Southeast Asia and South Asia. The British companies (Triumph, BSA, Norton) did not make much profit on the cheap bikes, they made their profit on the powerful luxury models, so they abandoned competing in the cheap sectors. But then another force comes into play: if you manufacture a large number of something (there is always more of the cheap things) you get all sorts of manufacturing advantages. If you figure out a way to use achieve sturdy construction with fewer nuts and bolts, you get to save those nickels over many many bikes which makes it worth your effort to be good at that. If 1 out of 100 of your bikes leaks oil, and you sell a million, you get a lot of complaints, and you fix it. (these are called "learning curve advantages", and they tend to be logarithmic, so by being 10x bigger, you get +something better) But who especially wants to buy sturdy, reliable transport (everybody) and is willing to pay a premium for it (rich people in the form of high margins)? So being the largest (and by definition the best) manufacturer of a product leaves you perfectly positioned to be the best high margin luxury supplier. Xerox was not asleep at the switch, they were just not a high volume low cost manufacturer with a presence in the consumer market, at the time when these learning curve manufacturing/marketing ideas had just been developed so they weren't used to thinking that way. Nor was it a case of the suits not listening to the engineers; the engineering ethos at Xerox was not "can we squeeze this on the smallest chip possible", it was "omg let's leverage Moore's law onto even bigger high end chips, compile into microcode!" I know it's popular to hate on MBAs here, but this is an example of what they learn, and why VC's might like to see an MBA on the team, this is the kind of talk they want to see in the business plan rather than an impossible dream.
- GreedClarifies 4y ago
  Not just showmanship, utility. ChatGPT has utility since “the common person” actually has access. Deepmind loves doing research and getting accolades from a fawning press while never allowing commoners to access their dear technology for fear that the rabble could somehow misuse it. Google, you lost your way.
  - khmii 4y ago
    I just looked it up and it sounds like there is no point in a person wanting to play chess against AlphaZero right now because other engines have surpassed it. I don't know that much about chess though. Here is for AlphaFold. I mean what you are going to do with this? It looks cool but I don't have the background to even contemplate doing anything with this information: https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/entry/L8XZM1 https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/entry/L8XZM1 What is most interesting to me is the sociology of people completely writing off the monstrosity of resources and brain power that is Google. Speaking as if they are stubbornly committed to some outdated technology as opposed to the organization that published Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding.
  - alfor 4y ago
    Exactly, they are too afraid of reputation risks. They sit on their golden goose and don’t want anything to happen to it. When people understand how much they know about each one of us (with AI) they will be regulated.
    - la64710 4y ago
      This is absolutely correct
  - rawoke083600 4y ago
    True ! Does anyone know if Blizzard got access or usage from AlphaStar afterwards? For example to improve the current a.i/bot in the game ?
    - Jensson 4y ago
- Kiro 4y ago
  This is exactly right. ChatGPT (and Copilot) didn't blow my mind because people told me about it. It blew my mind when I started messing around with it. Doesn't matter how good things sound in theory. All the things that made me a believer are things I haven't even told anyone. It's too "you need to try it for yourself" for me to even try explaining.
- impulser_ 4y ago
  This is DeepMind, not Google. DeepMind is an AI research lab. They aren't a company. They solely do research. They don't produce products.
  - rudasn 4y ago
    > They don't produce products. That can be said about Google as well, and I think that's what parent meant to express.
- LoveMortuus 4y ago
  Yeah... So many people miss the: "Show don't tell" That's for visual medium, for software it would be more like: "Touch, don't show" Especially with software, pretty much every programmer knows that sky is the limit, and that's why promises mean so little. In a way it's a similar problem to pre-orders. People need to try it to truly understand it and its value. Eg.: That new MMORPG looks amazing, but what's the gameplay like, because at the end of the day gameplay > graphics, if there's nothing to do except just the visuals people will get bored. And people usually forget the boring stuff.
  - theknocker 4y ago
    [dead]
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Organizing the world's information and keeping it inaccessible
- xiphias2 4y ago
  The problem for them isn't coming up with ChatGPT competitor. It's keeping their ads revenue.
- skybrian 4y ago
  Hardly any scientific research has a demo for you to try. The job of researchers is to publish research and their primary audience is other researchers. We can read about it but they aren't marketers and they don't have a product to sell to you.
- amf12 4y ago
  > Maybe they should make a persuasive demo if they want people to care. This is the right response for Google's AI news, but not Deepmind. Building products isn't Deepmind's purpose. They have essentially "demo'd" it by releasing the paper and simulation videos. They don't build any products. This research is absolutely irrelevant for most people right now, but hopefully will be used by other researchers to make progress. It's like saying "Stanford should build products and do demos instead of just releasing papers".
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
  I’d absurd to see basic research criticized by its lack of showmanship, especially when looking at paywalled secondary reporting on it. Hype isn’t the goal. In fact, hype and showmanship are generally counterproductive with research. That’s why a paper with a title “Compound B associated with low concentration of stuff in mice” turns into “Science says coffee will kill you.” Lack of showmanship and circus is a good thing here.
- narrator 4y ago
  I think the Deepmind guys are ahead technologically because of Google's vast talent pool and computing resources, but they are scared of what they are making. The CEO of Deepmind was considering that they should stop publishing research because bad people might use it. If it wasn't for the Open AI guys putting pressure on them, they'd just toy with this stuff forever and never release anything. I wonder what Larry and Sergei think of all this. Has Sergei said anything lately? Larry has been on a remote island in Fiji for years now. It seems with all this exciting geeky AI stuff they should be passionate about the business, but as far as I can tell they aren't very engaged. Edit: Here's a recent article. Apparently, Sergei is back working on things for the first time since 2019. Larry and Sergei also checked in on the AI strategy in December: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-files-request-to-access-lamda-code-9998251.html https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/google-co-found...
lettergram 4y ago
So in a contrived environment where the AI is given the ability to train on its attributes (aka same simulation framework, different layout). It can effectively explore the layout and complete tasks at the human level. Perhaps there’s only a few search algorithms and humans (and now this AI) are optimized to do it as well. One of my shower thoughts are that we’re effectively recreating the wheel with AI. Yes it can be immensely powerful and outperform humans for specific tasks. However, humans are generalized and evolved to interact with the real world independently. I imagine an AI would effectively match a human in this regard someday, but it’s worse as it can’t generate energy from eating some plants or animals (ie naturally occurring solar generated food). The interconnected nature will let AI have an advantage for many tasks, no doubt, but humans are pretty well optimized for the real world. Imo it’ll be hard to beat.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Isn't getting energy from food incredibly inefficient when you look at the entire system though? And while the plants themselves may be 'solar powered', the tractor used to plant them isn't. Neither is the factory where they made the fertilizer etc.
  - ccozan 4y ago
    With a very few exceptions, all the energy on Earth is coming from the Sun, aka "solar power".
  - akira2501 4y ago
    Well.. we are not a dead end for those nutrients, in that we excrete waste that isn't completely stripped of nutrition. This waste, treated properly, can be quite valuable to a variety of ecosystems.
- belter 4y ago
  All valid points. Then the title gets generalized as to "DeepMind AI as fast as humans in tasks not seen before..." missing the point of the constrained environment. This is the type of article that will do wonders for Google stock price, but nothing towards measuring if there is a leap forward on AI.
margorczynski 4y ago
It's behind a paywall, any way to go past it? Also would be great if there was an actual paper or more serious article about it. I see a lot of this type of articles recently and most of them are wrong/hype/etc. and the only valuable part are the links to the sources. EDIT: Found these with Google: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07608 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07608 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U93bUQ1roiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U93bUQ1roiw
- ngrilly 4y ago
  This article publicly available provides a summary: https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/01/24/a-new-transformer-based-reinforcement-learning-agent-called-ada-inhabits-a-rich-3d-world-and-can-rapidly-adapt-to-tasks-it-has-never-seen-before-in-minutes/ https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/01/24/a-new-transformer-ba...
greatpostman 4y ago
Google pumping out PR to get some damage control on chatgpt. No evidence in the public of any of these claims. Show us the models google
- we_never_see_it 4y ago
  [dead]
- nightski 4y ago
  Lecun @ Meta has been doing the same thing on Twitter lol. Re-tweeting all these papers with no actual public information.
  - waboremo 4y ago
    Half of the reason I still have a twitter is for this very reason. Highly intelligent people exhibiting some of the most petty behavior. It's a great reminder, of many things, including how tribal we still are in the worst ways.
- amf12 4y ago
  These are based on published research by Deepmind, which is an AI research lab. They don't build products to "demo" anything to the public. They research and publish peer-reviewed papers. The only thing they can "demo" is the simulation of the model, which they have published as videos on YouTube. Here's the paper if you're curious btw: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07608.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07608.pdf
  - greatpostman 4y ago
    All I hear about is deep mind, when will they release a model I can interact with? That’s the standard chatgpt set
  - jjfoooo45 4y ago
    Plenty of academic research in computer science comes with concrete demos of capabilities
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
antondd 4y ago
Just realised the article is behind a soft paywall. Here’s a LinkedIn post by a Deepmind engineer working on ADa: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ada-ai-adapts-fast-humans-edward-hughes https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ada-ai-adapts-fast-humans-edw...
asim 4y ago
It's funny. The way deepmind is going about it, these AI agents are going to live in a total virtual world in which we then enter and participate. It's not clear that AI will actually immerse itself in the real world. While we find general uses for differently trained models, the whole robots being everywhere thing seems less likely than say a 3D metaverse we participate in using AR glasses so we can see these digital creatures. Could be totally wrong, could argue for the other case, it mostly doesn't matter. I just don't think our interactions with this technology will be physical.
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  It's not gonna happen, Mark. Just drop it.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Not sure the distinction matters given how the two are blurring together. See digital twins etc.
- espadrine 4y ago
  Nah. They need to walk before they can run. In 2016, their system could locate objects in a scene[0]. In 2017, it could answer questions about a scene[1]. In 2018, it could infer how a scene looks from any angle using a couple photos[2]. Now, it can perform inference tasks in a 3D scene. Going to the real world will require more work! But they will be helped by converging existing advances[3]. [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08575.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08575.pdf [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.01427.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.01427.pdf [2]: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/neural-scene-representation-and-rendering https://www.deepmind.com/blog/neural-scene-representation-an... [3]: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/stacking-our-way-to-more-general-robots https://www.deepmind.com/blog/stacking-our-way-to-more-gener...
theknocker 4y ago
[dead]
faeriechangling 4y ago
I don't believe them because they won't release it to the public and let us see for ourselves and that says everything.
habibur 4y ago
The key part : > The AI, called Adaptive Agent or AdA, works in a 3D virtual world where it is asked to solve tasks that involve navigating, planning and manipulating objects. Not in real world.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  If it were a sufficiently realistic simulation it wouldn’t matter. That being said, it most likely isn’t.
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    Do they need legs to be realistic?
mawadev 4y ago
I personally don't believe a single thing about chatgpt and any ai that pops up around it. To me it's the same as google search - instead of truly enriching our lives, it simply made us dependent and then more lazy to the point where we rather search instead of thinking for a brief moment. Now that google became unusable, ai is supposed to step in or what... I hope the volumes of worthless content it generates destroy the internet as we know it, so we can finally move on to better things and start building communities again.
- chillfox 4y ago
  Communities never went away, they are all over the place. I guess you got too lazy to seek them out?
- d0mine 4y ago
  Google search is still immensely helpful for a lot of tasks. ChatGPT even today performs some tasks well e.g., extracting the intent from a natural language query, or generating text that on the surface looks human. It is often inaccurate on most tasks but it can I believe become better on some tasks to have a great economic effect. Most most likely we won't get AGI though, and that's great because AGI that is not restricted by the human scalp is an existential threat. I'm not talking jobs, It is about surviving as a species.
- revskill 4y ago
  Skeptials keep being skeptial. It's not good for all use cases, but it's your problem to find good use case for it. It's the same as: all juniors can write code. Only senior can write code that's clean, simple to understand. Mind you, talking to ChatGPT is easier to talking to real human. Because most of the time, it understands your intent very well.
  - qwertox 4y ago
    > Mind you, talking to ChatGPT is easier to talking to real human. Because most of the time, it understands your intent very well. Also it has an unlimited patience as well as unlimited time to dedicate exclusively to you. You can ask the same question from different point of views and it puts the same effort into each answer every time, even taking into consideration what it already told you and build upon that. How parents start to get annoyed when kids ask "Why?" in a recursive loop to every answer you give them, or a teacher or coworker would have to tell you "I don't have any more time for this", this technology can really answer your question. Ok, at this time the answers still contain too many mistakes, but once they start being correct more often than the ones from humans, something really powerful will happen to the society. Imagine kids being able to ask any question and getting the answer immediately, them getting used to it, how fast they will be able to learn. Also be able to learn to ask the right questions.
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
Here’s the original article that this is reporting on: https://sites.google.com/view/adaptive-agent/ https://sites.google.com/view/adaptive-agent/
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
If some software/AI is able to do something, I expect it to be as fast or faster than a human because you can basically always throw more computing power at the problem. The important questions are (1) can the computer do it in the first place and (2) at what financial cost?
- duncan-donuts 4y ago
  What they’re addressing here is the first of your important questions. The answer to that question used to be, “well yes if it was trained to” and they’re saying, “probably even though it doesn’t know anything about that”
V__ 4y ago
> solve tasks that involve navigating, planning and manipulating objects. Without some real examples, this is just PR talk. I could just as well say that "the Stockfish AI" is able to solve previously unseen tasks on a virtual board, moving pieces around, thinking ahead to navigate around and outsmart any human and non-human opponent. Doesn't say much.
- turingfeel 4y ago
  What are the previously unseen tasks (the most important aspect of the above AI) involved the Chess engine Stockfish playing Chess?
  - Jensson 4y ago
    It hasn't seen every board position, it still plays well in positions it hasn't seen.
panda88888 4y ago
Looks like currently the agents interact in the simulated world only. Would be interesting when combined with robots from Boston Dynamics or similar and see how it learns to adapt and operate under real world environment and constraints.
tehsauce 4y ago
Here's a video summary of the research: https://youtu.be/U93bUQ1roiw https://youtu.be/U93bUQ1roiw
- banashark 4y ago
  This is a great walk-through for an outsider's perspective into the structure of the agents.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
I think DeepMind is really good at solving “spherical cow” problems. They can model a very simplified model of a small aspect of the real world and solve it brilliantly. However, there is a big question of how much the results are actually transferable to the real world.
bigape911 4y ago
Depending on the problem, I expect it to be much much faster especially foor physics and math problems.
bigape911 4y ago
It's sad to see the great minds at Google fail to capitalize on their tech

158 points by antondd 4y ago

Maybe they should make a persuasive demo if they want people to care. ChatGPT isn't so hot right now because boring PR articles were written about its abilities. It's hot because you can try it and see for yourself. Basic showmanship.

jrvarela56 4y ago
Google gives me Xerox PARC vibes wrt AI. Got to the insights first, way ahead of everyone else, but OpenAI is productizing faster (like Apple did with Xerox PARC's research).
- belter 4y ago
  OpenAI and Microsoft will be hit by a big bus called GDPR. "Unveiling the Crucial 5 GDPR Obstacles of ChatGPT That Can’t Be Ignored" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709482
  - tester756 4y ago
    if it wasn't problem for Google, then why would for ChatGPT?
    - fsh 4y ago
      It isn't. No court has ever interpreted the GDPR in the bizarre way suggested in the linked article.
  - wand3r 4y ago
    I have no idea how OpenAI would look at this, and of course there are similar obstacles here re:copilot vs. gpl, but couldn't they just shut off European access. I think AI would be so important that Europe couldnt afford to not have AI. Wonder how this would resolve.
    - GreedClarifies 4y ago
      My guess is that the petty little bureaucratic tyrants in the EU would much rather deprive their subjects of new products than give up any sliver of their power. One could hope that this would cause a rebellion, but recent history suggests that the populace will go along with anything their lords decree.
      - olivermuty 4y ago
        Short reply: lol Longer reply: I love the EU so much. One of the few institutions taking big tech to task. I can roam cell operators at no extra cost, ensure that companies cant data mine me without my express permission and other wonderful tech oriented regulation. It is extremely narrow minded to believe that throwing all principle out the window is the only way to «not stifle innovation». «The lords decree», where does one even begin. The biggest fight against bigtech involving amongst others the cloud act that lets the us govt spy on anyone in complete secrecy is literally spearheaded by a common man [0]. This entire post is either satire, and if so I ate it hook line and sinker… or it is some kind of privacy exploitation stockholm syndrome. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems
        WanderPanda 4y ago
        You mix up privacy wrt to the state (which has the monopoly on violence) vs private organisations. Two very different cans of worms. The EU is determined to fight the latter while embracing the former (as its incentives would suggest)
        pjkundert 4y ago
        You don’t fight “big tech” by giving “big brother” all your liberty…
        mstipetic 4y ago
        Nuance - a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound.
  - dkislyuk 4y ago
    The LLM / foundation model industry will happily stay in the United States and ignore the stifling regulation of the EU if necessary. There is so much market share to capture domestically at the moment.
    - croes 4y ago
      In the US it will get sued for copyright violation and similar.
      - mensetmanusman 4y ago
        New laws would have to outlaw fair use, that will likely not happen as the only country that ignores such laws will win, especially now that the cat is out of the bag.
        ben_w 4y ago
        They can redefine fair use without removing it entirely. Thing like that happen all the time. Will it be effective? Dunno, but LLMs aren't as easy to duplicate or execute as films are to pirate or watch, and yet copyright law still gets enforced somewhat.
    - missingdays 4y ago
      Don't threaten the EU with good time
    - rawoke083600 4y ago
      Lol you can have Crypto in E.U but not fancy new A.I, same how you can have A.I in USA but not Crypto :)
      - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
        One day, we'll have crypto where "mining" is helping train the AI. It'll be allowed nowhere.
  - wyager 4y ago
    At some point, US companies will get fed up with constantly being harassed by the EU and just give up on the relatively small (as in money, not population) European market entirely. The hostility is simply not worth it. For a sense of scale - the EU has 0 (zero) of the 14 largest companies by market cap. Out of the next 25, only a handful are in the EU.
    - tester756 4y ago
      Go ahead and bet your money on that If your prediction happens, then EU based startups/companies that'll fill the void will booom.
      - ianbutler 4y ago
        I like Europe, but a climate for entrepreneurship is not something you have.
        tester756 4y ago
        That's irrelevant imo. If FAANG announced leaving EU, then somebody's stock would go up hard, at least on the beginning.
        WanderPanda 4y ago
        And productivity would falter even more without Google and Apple…
        noogle 4y ago
        Why? There are various search engines that perform sufficiently well, all ran by start-up (Neeva, Kagi etc.). Android is a suitable alternative for iOS. The absence of European tech giants might reflect the consolidated nature of software rather than the competence of the EU.
        rowanajmarshall 4y ago
  - MadSudaca 4y ago
    Who knows. Maybe it's GDPR whose getting hit by a bus.
  - _yid9 4y ago
    The great thing about the current-gen LLMs — anybody will be able to run one on the next gen of hardware. We’re within one order of magnitude of the capacity right now on retail hardware. The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived. GDPR, LLM “guard rails”, … — only the plebs will be affected by those.
    - TigeriusKirk 4y ago
      I believe you could run GPT-2 at home now. Remember when OpenAI claimed that was too much power to allow open access to?
      - pjkundert 4y ago
        Benevolent overlords patting the filthy masses on the head.
    - nateburke 4y ago
      > The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived. I agree. Use cases such as LLMs-as-backend-of-my-web-stack will move a lot of compute back to the edge of the network, eventually.
- max51 4y ago
  With AI, most failed products aren't just "late" at the game, they often never release anything at all. Most of the wild claims made by AI companies could be strait up lies and we would never know because no one other than the devs has laid eyes on it directly.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > OpenAI is productizing faster (like Apple did with Xerox PARC's research) what happens in cases like this is a slightly different dynamic what it seems on the surface. Apple, coming of huge success with the Apple ][ using the anemic but cheap 6502 8 bit to build a low-end (compared to Xerox) mass market (compared to Xerox) product, was well positioned to capitalize/productize the next generation of more capable 16/32 bit chips without changing their business model or distribution channel. It's right place right time, plus "easier to improve from the bottom, than downgrade from the top". This idea was identified in a famous McKinsey study of the British motorcycle industry's loss of market share to low cost Japanese competition in the 1960's and 70's. The post WWII Japanese market developed to serve people who needed transportation but could not afford the leading British brands, not to mention autos. Once Japan had a successful motorcycle industry it was natural for them to export inexpensive bikes to Southeast Asia and South Asia. The British companies (Triumph, BSA, Norton) did not make much profit on the cheap bikes, they made their profit on the powerful luxury models, so they abandoned competing in the cheap sectors. But then another force comes into play: if you manufacture a large number of something (there is always more of the cheap things) you get all sorts of manufacturing advantages. If you figure out a way to use achieve sturdy construction with fewer nuts and bolts, you get to save those nickels over many many bikes which makes it worth your effort to be good at that. If 1 out of 100 of your bikes leaks oil, and you sell a million, you get a lot of complaints, and you fix it. (these are called "learning curve advantages", and they tend to be logarithmic, so by being 10x bigger, you get +something better) But who especially wants to buy sturdy, reliable transport (everybody) and is willing to pay a premium for it (rich people in the form of high margins)? So being the largest (and by definition the best) manufacturer of a product leaves you perfectly positioned to be the best high margin luxury supplier. Xerox was not asleep at the switch, they were just not a high volume low cost manufacturer with a presence in the consumer market, at the time when these learning curve manufacturing/marketing ideas had just been developed so they weren't used to thinking that way. Nor was it a case of the suits not listening to the engineers; the engineering ethos at Xerox was not "can we squeeze this on the smallest chip possible", it was "omg let's leverage Moore's law onto even bigger high end chips, compile into microcode!" I know it's popular to hate on MBAs here, but this is an example of what they learn, and why VC's might like to see an MBA on the team, this is the kind of talk they want to see in the business plan rather than an impossible dream.
GreedClarifies 4y ago
Not just showmanship, utility. ChatGPT has utility since “the common person” actually has access. Deepmind loves doing research and getting accolades from a fawning press while never allowing commoners to access their dear technology for fear that the rabble could somehow misuse it. Google, you lost your way.
- khmii 4y ago
  I just looked it up and it sounds like there is no point in a person wanting to play chess against AlphaZero right now because other engines have surpassed it. I don't know that much about chess though. Here is for AlphaFold. I mean what you are going to do with this? It looks cool but I don't have the background to even contemplate doing anything with this information: https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/entry/L8XZM1 https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/entry/L8XZM1 What is most interesting to me is the sociology of people completely writing off the monstrosity of resources and brain power that is Google. Speaking as if they are stubbornly committed to some outdated technology as opposed to the organization that published Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding.
- alfor 4y ago
  Exactly, they are too afraid of reputation risks. They sit on their golden goose and don’t want anything to happen to it. When people understand how much they know about each one of us (with AI) they will be regulated.
  - la64710 4y ago
    This is absolutely correct
- rawoke083600 4y ago
  True ! Does anyone know if Blizzard got access or usage from AlphaStar afterwards? For example to improve the current a.i/bot in the game ?
  - Jensson 4y ago
Kiro 4y ago
This is exactly right. ChatGPT (and Copilot) didn't blow my mind because people told me about it. It blew my mind when I started messing around with it. Doesn't matter how good things sound in theory. All the things that made me a believer are things I haven't even told anyone. It's too "you need to try it for yourself" for me to even try explaining.
impulser_ 4y ago
This is DeepMind, not Google. DeepMind is an AI research lab. They aren't a company. They solely do research. They don't produce products.
- rudasn 4y ago
  > They don't produce products. That can be said about Google as well, and I think that's what parent meant to express.
LoveMortuus 4y ago
Yeah... So many people miss the: "Show don't tell" That's for visual medium, for software it would be more like: "Touch, don't show" Especially with software, pretty much every programmer knows that sky is the limit, and that's why promises mean so little. In a way it's a similar problem to pre-orders. People need to try it to truly understand it and its value. Eg.: That new MMORPG looks amazing, but what's the gameplay like, because at the end of the day gameplay > graphics, if there's nothing to do except just the visuals people will get bored. And people usually forget the boring stuff.
- theknocker 4y ago
  [dead]
anigbrowl 4y ago
Organizing the world's information and keeping it inaccessible
xiphias2 4y ago
The problem for them isn't coming up with ChatGPT competitor. It's keeping their ads revenue.
skybrian 4y ago
Hardly any scientific research has a demo for you to try. The job of researchers is to publish research and their primary audience is other researchers. We can read about it but they aren't marketers and they don't have a product to sell to you.
amf12 4y ago
> Maybe they should make a persuasive demo if they want people to care. This is the right response for Google's AI news, but not Deepmind. Building products isn't Deepmind's purpose. They have essentially "demo'd" it by releasing the paper and simulation videos. They don't build any products. This research is absolutely irrelevant for most people right now, but hopefully will be used by other researchers to make progress. It's like saying "Stanford should build products and do demos instead of just releasing papers".
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
I’d absurd to see basic research criticized by its lack of showmanship, especially when looking at paywalled secondary reporting on it. Hype isn’t the goal. In fact, hype and showmanship are generally counterproductive with research. That’s why a paper with a title “Compound B associated with low concentration of stuff in mice” turns into “Science says coffee will kill you.” Lack of showmanship and circus is a good thing here.
narrator 4y ago
I think the Deepmind guys are ahead technologically because of Google's vast talent pool and computing resources, but they are scared of what they are making. The CEO of Deepmind was considering that they should stop publishing research because bad people might use it. If it wasn't for the Open AI guys putting pressure on them, they'd just toy with this stuff forever and never release anything. I wonder what Larry and Sergei think of all this. Has Sergei said anything lately? Larry has been on a remote island in Fiji for years now. It seems with all this exciting geeky AI stuff they should be passionate about the business, but as far as I can tell they aren't very engaged. Edit: Here's a recent article. Apparently, Sergei is back working on things for the first time since 2019. Larry and Sergei also checked in on the AI strategy in December: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-files-request-to-access-lamda-code-9998251.html https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/google-co-found...

lettergram 4y ago

So in a contrived environment where the AI is given the ability to train on its attributes (aka same simulation framework, different layout). It can effectively explore the layout and complete tasks at the human level. Perhaps there’s only a few search algorithms and humans (and now this AI) are optimized to do it as well. One of my shower thoughts are that we’re effectively recreating the wheel with AI. Yes it can be immensely powerful and outperform humans for specific tasks. However, humans are generalized and evolved to interact with the real world independently. I imagine an AI would effectively match a human in this regard someday, but it’s worse as it can’t generate energy from eating some plants or animals (ie naturally occurring solar generated food). The interconnected nature will let AI have an advantage for many tasks, no doubt, but humans are pretty well optimized for the real world. Imo it’ll be hard to beat.

sebzim4500 4y ago
Isn't getting energy from food incredibly inefficient when you look at the entire system though? And while the plants themselves may be 'solar powered', the tractor used to plant them isn't. Neither is the factory where they made the fertilizer etc.
- ccozan 4y ago
  With a very few exceptions, all the energy on Earth is coming from the Sun, aka "solar power".
- akira2501 4y ago
  Well.. we are not a dead end for those nutrients, in that we excrete waste that isn't completely stripped of nutrition. This waste, treated properly, can be quite valuable to a variety of ecosystems.
belter 4y ago
All valid points. Then the title gets generalized as to "DeepMind AI as fast as humans in tasks not seen before..." missing the point of the constrained environment. This is the type of article that will do wonders for Google stock price, but nothing towards measuring if there is a leap forward on AI.

margorczynski 4y ago

It's behind a paywall, any way to go past it? Also would be great if there was an actual paper or more serious article about it. I see a lot of this type of articles recently and most of them are wrong/hype/etc. and the only valuable part are the links to the sources. EDIT: Found these with Google: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07608 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07608 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U93bUQ1roiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U93bUQ1roiw

ngrilly 4y ago
This article publicly available provides a summary: https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/01/24/a-new-transformer-based-reinforcement-learning-agent-called-ada-inhabits-a-rich-3d-world-and-can-rapidly-adapt-to-tasks-it-has-never-seen-before-in-minutes/ https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/01/24/a-new-transformer-ba...

greatpostman 4y ago

Google pumping out PR to get some damage control on chatgpt. No evidence in the public of any of these claims. Show us the models google

we_never_see_it 4y ago
[dead]
nightski 4y ago
Lecun @ Meta has been doing the same thing on Twitter lol. Re-tweeting all these papers with no actual public information.
- waboremo 4y ago
  Half of the reason I still have a twitter is for this very reason. Highly intelligent people exhibiting some of the most petty behavior. It's a great reminder, of many things, including how tribal we still are in the worst ways.
amf12 4y ago
These are based on published research by Deepmind, which is an AI research lab. They don't build products to "demo" anything to the public. They research and publish peer-reviewed papers. The only thing they can "demo" is the simulation of the model, which they have published as videos on YouTube. Here's the paper if you're curious btw: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07608.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07608.pdf
- greatpostman 4y ago
  All I hear about is deep mind, when will they release a model I can interact with? That’s the standard chatgpt set
- jjfoooo45 4y ago
  Plenty of academic research in computer science comes with concrete demos of capabilities

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

antondd 4y ago

Just realised the article is behind a soft paywall. Here’s a LinkedIn post by a Deepmind engineer working on ADa: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ada-ai-adapts-fast-humans-edward-hughes https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ada-ai-adapts-fast-humans-edw...

asim 4y ago

It's funny. The way deepmind is going about it, these AI agents are going to live in a total virtual world in which we then enter and participate. It's not clear that AI will actually immerse itself in the real world. While we find general uses for differently trained models, the whole robots being everywhere thing seems less likely than say a 3D metaverse we participate in using AR glasses so we can see these digital creatures. Could be totally wrong, could argue for the other case, it mostly doesn't matter. I just don't think our interactions with this technology will be physical.

kyleyeats 4y ago
It's not gonna happen, Mark. Just drop it.
Havoc 4y ago
Not sure the distinction matters given how the two are blurring together. See digital twins etc.
espadrine 4y ago
Nah. They need to walk before they can run. In 2016, their system could locate objects in a scene[0]. In 2017, it could answer questions about a scene[1]. In 2018, it could infer how a scene looks from any angle using a couple photos[2]. Now, it can perform inference tasks in a 3D scene. Going to the real world will require more work! But they will be helped by converging existing advances[3]. [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08575.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08575.pdf [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.01427.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.01427.pdf [2]: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/neural-scene-representation-and-rendering https://www.deepmind.com/blog/neural-scene-representation-an... [3]: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/stacking-our-way-to-more-general-robots https://www.deepmind.com/blog/stacking-our-way-to-more-gener...

theknocker 4y ago

[dead]

faeriechangling 4y ago

I don't believe them because they won't release it to the public and let us see for ourselves and that says everything.

habibur 4y ago

The key part : > The AI, called Adaptive Agent or AdA, works in a 3D virtual world where it is asked to solve tasks that involve navigating, planning and manipulating objects. Not in real world.

mach1ne 4y ago
If it were a sufficiently realistic simulation it wouldn’t matter. That being said, it most likely isn’t.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  Do they need legs to be realistic?

mawadev 4y ago

I personally don't believe a single thing about chatgpt and any ai that pops up around it. To me it's the same as google search - instead of truly enriching our lives, it simply made us dependent and then more lazy to the point where we rather search instead of thinking for a brief moment. Now that google became unusable, ai is supposed to step in or what... I hope the volumes of worthless content it generates destroy the internet as we know it, so we can finally move on to better things and start building communities again.

chillfox 4y ago
Communities never went away, they are all over the place. I guess you got too lazy to seek them out?
d0mine 4y ago
Google search is still immensely helpful for a lot of tasks. ChatGPT even today performs some tasks well e.g., extracting the intent from a natural language query, or generating text that on the surface looks human. It is often inaccurate on most tasks but it can I believe become better on some tasks to have a great economic effect. Most most likely we won't get AGI though, and that's great because AGI that is not restricted by the human scalp is an existential threat. I'm not talking jobs, It is about surviving as a species.
revskill 4y ago
Skeptials keep being skeptial. It's not good for all use cases, but it's your problem to find good use case for it. It's the same as: all juniors can write code. Only senior can write code that's clean, simple to understand. Mind you, talking to ChatGPT is easier to talking to real human. Because most of the time, it understands your intent very well.
- qwertox 4y ago
  > Mind you, talking to ChatGPT is easier to talking to real human. Because most of the time, it understands your intent very well. Also it has an unlimited patience as well as unlimited time to dedicate exclusively to you. You can ask the same question from different point of views and it puts the same effort into each answer every time, even taking into consideration what it already told you and build upon that. How parents start to get annoyed when kids ask "Why?" in a recursive loop to every answer you give them, or a teacher or coworker would have to tell you "I don't have any more time for this", this technology can really answer your question. Ok, at this time the answers still contain too many mistakes, but once they start being correct more often than the ones from humans, something really powerful will happen to the society. Imagine kids being able to ask any question and getting the answer immediately, them getting used to it, how fast they will be able to learn. Also be able to learn to ask the right questions.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

Here’s the original article that this is reporting on: https://sites.google.com/view/adaptive-agent/ https://sites.google.com/view/adaptive-agent/

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

If some software/AI is able to do something, I expect it to be as fast or faster than a human because you can basically always throw more computing power at the problem. The important questions are (1) can the computer do it in the first place and (2) at what financial cost?

duncan-donuts 4y ago
What they’re addressing here is the first of your important questions. The answer to that question used to be, “well yes if it was trained to” and they’re saying, “probably even though it doesn’t know anything about that”

V__ 4y ago

> solve tasks that involve navigating, planning and manipulating objects. Without some real examples, this is just PR talk. I could just as well say that "the Stockfish AI" is able to solve previously unseen tasks on a virtual board, moving pieces around, thinking ahead to navigate around and outsmart any human and non-human opponent. Doesn't say much.

turingfeel 4y ago
What are the previously unseen tasks (the most important aspect of the above AI) involved the Chess engine Stockfish playing Chess?
- Jensson 4y ago
  It hasn't seen every board position, it still plays well in positions it hasn't seen.

panda88888 4y ago

Looks like currently the agents interact in the simulated world only. Would be interesting when combined with robots from Boston Dynamics or similar and see how it learns to adapt and operate under real world environment and constraints.

tehsauce 4y ago

Here's a video summary of the research: https://youtu.be/U93bUQ1roiw https://youtu.be/U93bUQ1roiw

banashark 4y ago
This is a great walk-through for an outsider's perspective into the structure of the agents.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

I think DeepMind is really good at solving “spherical cow” problems. They can model a very simplified model of a small aspect of the real world and solve it brilliantly. However, there is a big question of how much the results are actually transferable to the real world.

bigape911 4y ago

Depending on the problem, I expect it to be much much faster especially foor physics and math problems.

bigape911 4y ago

It's sad to see the great minds at Google fail to capitalize on their tech