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About That OpenAI "Breakthrough"
- gwnywg 3y agoI find it weird to see people calling A* an 'AI technique'... Is BFS or DFS an AI technique too? I thought it's merely a search algorithm...
- svachalek 3y agoAI is the cutting edge of CS. When it's well understood it stops being AI. Some day LLM and neural nets will get the same reaction... who calls LLM "AI"? It's just a formula!
- nuc1e0n 3y agoQuite. One of the best uses I've seen for LLMs is for NPC dialog in computer games.
- vekker 3y agoIs it really though? I feel like it's mostly non-technical people who think this, because back when I was a CS student, AI was just a big field of study that included many types of problem solving, from simple to complex, including all types of search such as A*.
- ashiban 3y agoMost likely for historical reasons where A* was used alot in games path finding for in-game AI characters
- furyofantares 3y agoI first learned it in the famous book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Peter Norvig. I think 3 chapters are dedicated to search. A lot of AI can be framed as search, and a whole lot of historical AI, or mundane present AI, is straightforward search.
- Ukv 3y agoWhen it was published, A* was considered within the field of AI. The paper[0]'s authors were from Stanford's AI group. The "AI effect"[1] describes how the field tends to get left with only the cutting-edge research. [0]: http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/OnlinePubs-Nils/PublishedPapers/astar.pdf http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/OnlinePubs-Nils/PublishedPap... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- T-A 3y agoBy way of [1], here [2] is a paper about A* also posted under CS/AI. It introduces "Q* search, a search algorithm that uses deep Q-networks to guide search" and uses it "to solve the Rubik's cube", the thing which Gary Marcus complained about OpenAI not having done with a neural network in 2019. As pointed out by techbro92 [3] the authors do not seem to be affiliated with OpenAI, but AFAIK nobody claimed that OpenAI invented Q*. It's not hard to imagine OpenAI trying it out with their Rubik-solving robot hand and then starting to think about other things it might be applied to. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38395959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38395959 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04518 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04518 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38398243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38398243
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI still think the "AI effect" is bullshit. A* was/is AI under a different meaning - it's what understood as "AI" in computer games, where the point is for the computer opponent to pretend to be smarter than a brick, and literally any trick, cheat or heuristic used to do that is part of "AI". A*? Obviously AI. Random walk? Yes. Fuzzy logic? Yes. State machines? Yes.
- Ukv 3y agoTrue that A* would later go on to be used in computer game bots (as LLMs may eventually be) where "an AI" doesn't necessarily correspond to the field of AI, but A* was still within what was understood to be the field of AI at the time it was published. The meaning shifting over time, and the reason for which it shifts, is the AI effect. Heuristic-guided pathfinding is no longer what's meant by AI, IBM Deep Blue's alpha–beta search is no longer what's meant by AI, and I'd claim it's even shifting away from earlier image classifiers in favor of only generative models like GPT4.
- naasking 3y agoSearch is 100% key to AI, even historically. Prolog has its roots in AI research, and Prolog evaluation is a form of unification, which is a search.
- lagrange77 3y agoI think (probabilistic) logic programming also relies on graph traversal/path searching, which is part of the symbolic AI paradigm.
- flohofwoe 3y agoProbably because of A*'s popularity for path finding in game development. Everything that imitates human-like behaviour in games is called "AI", even when most of it is just a big messy hairball of adhoc if-else code under the hood ;)
- OJFord 3y agoThere's no magic in 'AI', all of it can be described as something else. The whole of ML is 'just statistics', especially classification. (That said I was and I suppose am a bit of a sceptic because of that. But mainly I think because to me it's more useful to call a spade a spade and say we're doing some advanced blah stats to blah. Helps explain, onboard, and motivate the next generation (who likes stats at school? But if that's how AI works, oh suddenly it's cool). Demystify it. If you're just searching over Levenshtein distance [to a technical audience] say that, don't start waffling about 'AI'.)
- x86x87 3y agoYes,ultimately everything is just a bunch of ifs. Wired together in a very complicated fashion but ultimately a bunch of ifs.
- terminous 3y agoLinear regression is AI.
- Buttons840 3y agoI'm trying to refresh mind on what Q learning is, if I may think out loud here? Q is an evaluation of how good a state is assuming the agent acts optimally going forward. In Chess for example, sacrificing a rook to capture a queen would have a high Q value. Sacing a rook is bad, but gaining the queen later is better. Q values are supposed to see past immediate consequences and reflect the long term consequences. How do we find a Q value though? We can look several steps ahead, or we can look to the end of the game, etc. These aren't real Q values though, because optimal actions probably weren't taken. We can use Bellman equations, which roughly update one Q value by a small amount to the maximum of the next possible states, which results in the highest Q values gradually flowing backward into states that can lead to good outcomes. I'm trying to think how this would apply to LLMs though. Where do the basic values come from? In Chess the basic values are the number of pieces, or whether or not a side ultimately wins. What are the basic values in a LLM? What is the Q agent aiming to do?
- jacquesm 3y agoIn computer chess, traditionally 'minimax' was the strategy that allowed you to efficiently probe ahead. The only requirement for this is that your evaluation function returns a single (scalar) value.
- seanhunter 3y agoI don't think your intuition about computer chess is going to help you here with transformer architecture. Usually in transformer models[1], for each attention head there are 3 vectors of weights, known as q(uery), k(ey) and v(alue). I was assuming that the q in q* applied to the q vector, so q-learning is training this vector. In a transformer model you don't have an objective function for any sort of state evaluation so it can't be the Q you're thinking of. If they've done something funky with the q vector that could indeed be a breakthrough since a lot of people feel that we are sort of running out of juice with scaling transformers as-is and need a new architecture to really have a step change in capability. That's pure speculation on my part though. [1] Here's Vaswani et al, the paper that first set out the transformer architecture https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
- throw310822 3y agoI am surprised by how dismissive the whole post sounds. For example: > OpenAI could in fact have a breakthrough that fundamentally changes the world Well, it appears to me that OpenAI already has such a breakthrough- it had it roughly 4 years ago with GPT2, and it's still scaling it. Considering that it's not yet a year since the introduction of the first ChatGPT, and given the pace at which it's evolving, I would say that the current product is already showing great promise to fundamentally change the world. I would not be surprised if just incremental changes were enough to fulfill that prediction. The impact at this point seems more limited by the ability of society to absorb and process the technology rather than intrinsic limits of the technology itself.
- naasking 3y agoThe article is from Gary Marcus, a well known AI skeptic. Not surprising if he's being dismissive.
- psbp 3y agoSkeptic and completely reactionary. I had to unfollow him on Twitter because he always has to have a "take" on every AI headline, and he's often contradictory between "AI is useless" and "AI is a huge threat".
- throw310822 3y agoYes, skepticism is healthy and useful, but this sounds more like intellectual dishonesty.
- naasking 3y agoI think his position is that "AI is not intelligent but is nevertheless dangerous, and even moreso because people think it's intelligent".
- thatguysaguy 3y agoIt was super weird to see him align with the "regulate AI people" after years of being one of the main "this is going nowhere" guys
- moneytide1 3y ago[flagged]
- gfodor 3y agoGary Marcus is a grifter and should be ignored.
- passwordoops 3y agoIn contrast to the level-headed, mature folks over at OpenAI?
- gfodor 3y agoIf we're talking about Gary Marcus, yes. Gary Marcus is in a league of his own.
- nuc1e0n 3y agoI used to be friends with some guys who made a rubiks cube solving robot at college years ago. It was a cool novelty back then, but is unimpressive for OpenAI to boast about now. That robot could solve a cube that wasn't specially instrumented like openai's is here as well.
- npalli 3y agoLet's see .. oh Gary Marcus. Never mind.
- akomtu 3y agoWhat problem is AI going to solve? This question is being carefully avoided for some reason, and many seem to believe that AI is like air or water, which is good by itself.
- zucker42 3y agoAutomated software writing from a codebase and a requirement description, with the model asking clarifying questions where necessary, would be an immensely valuable application. We're quite far away from that, but GPT-4 is already rather helpful for some coding tasks.
- gloosx 3y agoIn this specific use case though it sucks the most since one will be answering more questions than code needed in sheer volume. Because the code is already straightmost clarification to the initial question. We will never be closer than looking up what you don't understand to solve your problem in the first place and it will always take more time than directly solving it. I had a good example recently and I'll quote it again: People seriously using the "Please write an expression for me which adds 2 and 2" prompt in order to get the "2+2" expression they need – advocating that they got it with magical efficiency
- drngdds 3y agoWith the hypothetical AGI, the answer is "most non-manual forms of human labor"
- pixl97 3y agoAnd at the same time most manual forms of human labor. Object recognition is AI. A decade ago we were piss poor at Object recog, today labeling AI is at human level. Being able to recognize your environment is the first step in navigating it effectively.
- TheRoque 3y agoI have a hard time being happy about it. A lot of people - including me - find pride in solving problems, and selling this as a valuable skill. When it's no longer the case, when the only valuable skill becomes just being a presence in the physical world an act on it (but without the problem solving part), it will really feel like we are enslaved by the AIs. In a sense, we kind of already are already, since out internet feed is (for most apps with recommendation algorithms) just spoonfed to us, rather than the product of our own search. To be honest, I wish the progress will stop and that AGI won't happen. That possibility scares me.
- nullc 3y agoJabberwocky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas
- m3kw9 3y agoNo one should care unless OpenAI has shown a new demo.
- man4 3y agoCool. Glorified autocomplete is going to take over the world.
- hallqv 3y agoGary Marcus is not a serious person
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- passwordoops 3y agoAs opposed to the serious people running OpenAI?
- KasianFranks 3y agoOperation Smokescreen
- kmeisthax 3y agoWait, does that mean Q* is just tree-of-thought reasoning? Like are we at the point where OpenAI is so closed that they NIH everyone else's ideas with different names?
- TeMPOraL 3y agoAnything would be better than the current common names for simple ideas. "Chain of thought", "tree of thought", a rag... sorry, "RAG". Seriously?!
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoThe Q function is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning. It's a function that gives the expected reward of an agent given a specific action and state. Deep Q Learning, that is using a neural network to estimate the Q function has been around for a while now.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoI remember every technology they said was going to revolutionize the world. But the only revolution I have seen is in entertainment and warfare, and I guess turn by turn navigation. Everything else is the same as it has been for over half a century. Putting lipstick on a pig doesn't change what it is.
- Rastonbury 3y agoFunny the author cherry picks the rubiks cube "breakthrough" but not AlphaGo or from GPT2 to ChatGPT. I don't think anyone could've predicted the massive jump from pre-instruct GPTs, heck even going 3.5 to 4 is a clear step difference. If Altman was referring to Q* in his "pushing the veil of ignorance" comment then Q* is in OAI's top four breakthroughs
- dkrich 3y agoI think he’s using that to show that there is a precedent with this company to make misleading announcements that at first sound exciting but under the surface turn out to be overstated. It does seem a bit odd to make a grandiose, vague announcement about a breakthrough outside of a major Jobs-esque unveiling. If you had some amazing new capability, what’s the motivation to hint at it publicly versus unveil it with a major announcement/demo? It makes me wonder if it’s an attempt to keep the public in awe with a dangling carrot. I’m also skeptical when companies’ and founders’ reputations seem to greatly outpace actual product deliveries.
- Rastonbury 3y agoAlphaGo and ChatGPT were groundbreaking and are more recent, if anything those should form a new precendent, he is deliberately ignoring them and dug out the most underwhelming one. Q* was a leak when the company was without a CEO, their DevDay was 2 week ago That said, based on many comments here the author is a skeptic to the point that people don't take him seriously
- bomewish 3y agoTldr: ‘meh’. Saved you a click.
- Applejinx 3y agoSo that's what 'QAnon' is made of. Q stars!
- nojvek 3y agoGary - his posts go from -“oh my god! AGI is 6 months away, Take all GPUs, stop all AI” to “AGI will take 600 years, what a bunch of horseshit, idonbelieveit”. I wish he actually put out research saying how we solve some of the shortcomings of current techniques instead of pointing fingers. I do agree the media loves to hype for clicks. I loved his book “Rebooting AI”. I think openAI is overvalued and overhyped. But such is the train of progress.
- emmender1 3y agoopenai has a funding round in play and they need all the "attention" they can get. so expect more rumors of "AGI is around the corner"