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Are there any examples of substantive AI work to come out of MIRI? And have they succeeded at all at engaging the actual AI research community? The last time I
by idlewords 11y ago
Are there any examples of substantive AI work to come out of MIRI? And have they succeeded at all at engaging the actual AI research community?
The last time I looked at them, they were consumed with grandiose philosophical projects like "axiomatize ethics" and provably non-computable approaches like AIXI, not to mention the Harry Potter fanfic. But I'm asking this question in good faith - have things changed at MIRI?
- pjscott 11y agoIf you'd like to give them another look, here's an up-to-date list of their publications: https://intelligence.org/all-publications/ https://intelligence.org/all-publications/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sampo 11y agoCounting only articles and conference papers that look like they are in at least somewhat established journals or conferences, I quickly count: 2015: 4 2014: 6 2013: 1 2012: 5 2011: 1 2010: 4 That would be about the level of 1 or 2 very mediocre early career scientists. And very little for MIRI's 8 people staff and 13 Research Associates. MIRI publishes a lot more, but they mostly operate outside of traditional scientific journals, a lot of MIRI technical reports published on their website.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoHow many of their staff hold PhDs, particularly in cognitive science, foundations of math, or AI? It would seem like a useful thing for them to get.
- sampo 11y agohttps://intelligence.org/team/ https://intelligence.org/team/ Staff: 1 out of 8 seem to have a PhD Research Associates: 3 out of 14.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoHuh. They should probably increase that number.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vilhelm_s 11y agoThey have produced a bunch of technical reports (linked to in a sibling comment), but so far only one of them has been published in a peer-reviewed venue (https://intelligence.org/files/ProgramEquilibrium.pdf https://intelligence.org/files/ProgramEquilibrium.pdf), so I think a lot of people still doubt whether they are being productive at all. (An ordinary research lab employing that many people could clearly produce more papers; but an ordinary lab is not trying to bootstrap a new field from scratch). On the other hand, the original post we are commenting on specifically held up AIXI as an example of the kind of thing they are trying to create, so if you don't like that, then you probably will never like MIRI's research no matter how successful they are. :) As for engaging the AI community, the most high-profile example I know of is that Stuart Russell is apparently now concerned about the MIRI-style "value alignment problem" (https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150421-concerns-of-an-artificial-intelligence-pioneer/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150421-concerns-of-an-artif...) and has some DARPA grant to work on it.
- sanxiyn 11y agoYou don't consider AIXI part of the actual AI research community? Also, AIXI is non-computable, but AIXItl is.
- sampo 11y ago> You don't consider AIXI part of the actual AI research community? I just briefly tried to read up on AIXI. The concept is ...not without merit, but I think it totally sweeps the central problem (We have no idea how to program an AI) under the rug in two ways: (1) The problem of programming ...programming anything at all, is swept under the rug by assuming a formalism in which every possible algorithm/program can be enumerated, and then just using brute force to go through, essentially search though all the character strings that represent implementations of any kind of algorithms, however bad they might be. (2) The problem of trying to decide what we actually should want to do in complex situations is swept under the rug by just assuming that we have access to a reward function that tells the desirability of each outcome at each step. So if this kind of helpful assumptions are allowed, the problem of, say, constructing a good chess program can be easily solved by the following meta-algorithm: 1. List all chess programs 2. Choose the best one There, problem solved!
- chriswarbo 11y agoYou're right, of course; AIXI doesn't attempt to tackle the practical problem of building an AI. However, it does give us a concrete, non-hand-wavey algorithm which can reasonably be considered "AI, if we ignore resource constraints". Consider that it took ~50 years to go from the inception of AI to a formal model like AIXI; or ~40 years from the definition of NP-completeness (ie. the realisation that scalability and resource usage are the real challenges for AI). In that sense, AIXI provides two things: a hypothetical "gold standard" for AI builders to compare their research to; and a formal model which can be studied right now by those who aren't directly building AIs (like MIRI). Consider an analogy to space flight. The engineering contains all kinds of resource constraints (eg. launch mass, strength-to-weight ratios, etc.), but it's still useful to ignore them temporarily and ask: what if we had as much fuel as we could ever want? What if we could keep the crew frozen during the journey? and so on. In other words, if we manage to overcome our current difficulties, what could we actually do with this tech?
- JulianMorrison 11y agoGiven that what they are trying to do is, pull things out of the domain of philosophy and into the domain of comp sci, then it's quite likely that they are not trying to do what you'd consider substantive AI.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI don't have enough knowledge to evaluate MIRI's productivity, but I've noticed an interesting thing in this subthread. On the one hand, it is widely understood (especially here on HN) that the "publish or perish" culture of modern academia is a source of lots of bad science and pointless work, and yet here we are, using number of papers as a metric for productivity. So which way is it?