iotb

Indeed. I don't see anyone born in the 80s/90s dictating policies or in politics. I see the same boomers that sold this country's middle class up the river still doing what they do best. Gray and white hair, wealth from a career of servicing companies, steps away from the grave and they still don't want to let go of the reigns for the "new generation". It's like a sick obsession they have with trying to control the world. Never stopping once to enjoy what they have profited from their enterprises... Seemingly aiming to dictate policy until they take their last breath.

The state of politics in this country is at trash tier levels.. Even more insane when you think of the trillions of dollars tied up in this circus and what it could do for American society if it was actually put to good use.

I see this as a system that started off with good intentions, order, and promise that eventually just gets ran down with clowns. Interestingly, a good number of 1st world countries have governance of similar characteristics right now. It's like they lost the narrative as to what they should be doing so just engage in a soap opera on a day to day basis to keep up appearances.. Meanwhile squandering trillions of dollars of tax payer money.

There's no mystery to how prior civilizations hit collapse events when I read comments like this. Every system has a limit, if you don't believe this is the case, you'll likely hit it in catastrophic fashion.

In the year 2018, you'd think people would be more focused on higher pursuits and inquiries about the Universe than just a joy ride from life to death and a maximization driven social trend to see how much money you can make and spend in a lifetime.

Anytime prior civilizations have forgotten about the fundamentals or considered themselves to be so technologically advanced to be beyond the impact of nature, there usually is a reckoning and that reckoning usually occurs at the peak of society when resources are being improperly dedicated to vanity and idiocy. There's a reason the hallmark structures of past civilizations are erected pretty close to their demise.

The Sun goes through cycles we have yet to fully understand. That alone could cause significant effects to the earth and its something we have zero control over. I'd think it would be a far better social culture to be focused on dedicating resources to exploring and studying the universe and fundamental nature therein than mining clown coins via bit flipping wasting energy/computing resources on a ponzi scheme. However, look how many billions are involved with this.. In a so called modern highly educated society.

As far as population goes, why does a human being feel entitled to have kids? Why are there so many poor individuals having kids? Why should we try to test the limit of nature's carrying capacity? Why do we continue to push the world population higher? We did we create economic models that depend on population growth? Again, a different kind of life from just popping out kids and enjoy the rides of life. A life of inquiry and the pursuit of understanding....

> There's a lot more room left for human growth on this planet

Until there's not or nature throws you a cyclical curve ball. See history for what the results are.

You make things wildly unaffordable. You make the most basic need of a human being (a roof over their head a ponzi scheme speculative investment) You destroy the middle class. You plunge everyone into debt with over- financialization. You play divisive social games to cement power structures finalizing in men vs. women politics. You destroy the family unit. You undermine men. You push male guilt. You push social trends for women to party through their most fertile years You convince women that long term monogamous relationships are prison... You turn everyone on to Tinder and glorify transient lifestyles... All because such lifestyles make various corporations richer via higher consumption.. society be damned. Optimal profit at the expense of broader society... Up until broader societal conditions drag down corporations that made it so.

The cause and effect are obvious to anyone w/ two brain cells.

And just to show its all for the almighty dollar, millions of dollars are pumped into studies/research of this phenomenon only to avoid the elephants in the room. We call this modern society where we pretend to not know why things are the way they are. Society optimizes for certain things like profit above all else and there are a slew of negative outcomes or things that are harmed as a result.

Why would someone have a kid in the current environment? This process is pushed out to someone who either is quite wealthy and has no impact or is quite poor and is uncaring of the impact. The middle is hallowed out. It's why from anywhere from the first world EU to the US there is a big push for immigration. That too is steeped in economic factors and has little to do w/ a genuine interest in helping people. Instead of fixing core societal problems, the powers that be deem it easier to just pave over the domestic populous with new-comers who would willingly tolerate such conditions and birth new workers into the fold. The middle core of the population deems it ridiculous to have kids. The number crunchers see this as an impact to their precious economic models... and thus comes the political push to import people from places in the world who have kids in far more impoverished conditions and see 1st world countries as a step up.

Not sure how this comment will go here but that's just the plain reality. A reality people like to play pretend they don't know exists. A reality people make hordes of money to ignore and further. Humanity will pay a hefty price in the years to come for these stupid games we play. Historically, various reckonings have occurred when civilizations and empires play these stupid games. Then the cycle resets and is born again only to arrive at the same juncture when people stray far enough from sound principals.

He says it. Others have done it years ago.

To make an accurate projection or statement about something, it is generally necessary that you have a sound understanding of it. This is just my general intelligence speaking here. I see nothing of note that reflects that this person has a fundamental understanding of General Intelligence or has even been in the pursuit of it. Authoring an optimization algorithm suite doesn't mean you have an understanding of General Intelligence. A non-read before even clicking on the link. Two posts today about AGI. Seems the next hype train is arriving right on schedule and its banner will be (AGI).

You're focusing on an aspect of Neurons in which there isn't even an accurate understanding and attempting to make a direct mapping to computer hardware. This is framing w/o understanding and you should be able to clearly understand why you can't make analysis or forward projections based on it.

Video cards operate on a pretty limited scope of computing that might not even be compatible with Neuron's fundamental algorithm. The only thing SIMD has proven favorable towards is basic mathematics operations with low divergence which is why Optimization algorithm based NN function so well on them.

This is the entrapment many people in the industry fall for. The first step towards AGI is in admitting you have zero understanding of what it is. If one doesn't do this and simply projects their schooling/thinking and try to go from there, you end up with a far shorter accomplishment.

You can't back derive aspects of this problem. You have to take your gloves off and study the biology from the bottom up and spend the majority of your time in the theoretical/test space. Not many are willing to do this even in the highest ranking universities (Which is why I didn't pursue a PhD).

There is far too little motivation for true understanding in this world which is why the majority of the world's resources and efforts are spent on circling the same old time test wagons.. Creating problems then creating a business model to solve it. We are only fooling ourselves in this mindless endeavors. When you break free long enough, you see it for what it is and also see the paths towards more fundamental pursuits. Such pursuits aren't socially celeberated or rewarded. So, you're pretty much on your own.

> As I see it, that's what AGI is, and that seems to scare people, forcing them to confront their most deeply held beliefs about the meaning of life, religion, etc.

One thing about this interesting Universe is that when a thing's time has come it comes. It points to a higher order of things. There's great reason and purpose to address these problems now and its why AGI isn't far off. If you look at various media/designs, society is already beckoning for it.

If only this wasn't an fundamentally flawed theory that isn't scalable based on computational complexity and information theory.

Entrenched mindsets don't like for the flaws in their views to be highlighted. It's one of Humanity's most serious flaws. As far as AGI being 10-20 years away based purely on compute power, you can't make this statement accurately unless you have a firm understanding of the underlying algorithms that power human intelligence and by extension AGI. From there, you also need to have a formal education and deep industry experience with Hardware to know what its capabilities are today, what they will be in the future roadmap wise, and how to most efficiently map an AGI algorithm to them. I'd say that 0.1% of people have this understanding and nobody is listening to them.

> The real problem though (as I see it) is that the vast majority of the best and brightest minds in our society get lost to the demands of daily living. I've likely lost any shot I had at contributing in areas that will advance the state of the art since I graduated college 20 years ago. I think I'm hardly the exception. Without some kind of exit, winning the internet lottery basically like Elon Musk, we'll all likely see AGI come to be sometime in our lifetimes but without having had a hand in it.

They don't get lost so much as they become trapped for reasons due to systematic and flawed optimization structures found throughout society. All is not lost if one breaks out long enough to realize they can make certain pursuits if they are willing to make a sacrifice. The bigger the pursuit, the bigger the required sacrifice. Not many people are willing to do that in the valley when you have a quarter of a million dollar paycheck staring you in the face. You could of course make a decision to sacrifice everything one given day and you'd have 5 years of runway easily if you saved your money properly. Obviously, VC capital wont fund you. Obviously universities aren't the way to go given the obsession with Weak AI. Obviously no AI group will hire you unless you have a PhD and/or are obsessed with Weak AI. Obviously you might not even want this as it will cloud your mind. So, clearly, the way to make ground breaking progress is to walk off your job, fund a stretch of research yourself, and be willing to sacrifice everything. Quite the sacrifice? People will laugh at you. What happens if you fail? Socially, per the mainstream trend, you'll fall behind. If you have a partner, this will be even more difficult as the trend is to get rich quick, get promoted to management, buy a million dollar home, have kids, stay locked in a lucrative position at a company. And what of your pride? Indeed.. And therein is the true pursuit of AGI.

The winners are pushing fundamentally flawed AI techniques because it requires massive amounts of data and compute which is their primary business model. They wont succeed because they are optimizing a business model that is at the end of its cycle and not optimizing the pursuit of AGI.

AGI is coming and it is completely out of the scope of the current winners. If a person desires to pursue and develop AGI, they'd have to be bold enough to sacrifice everything... It's how all of the true discoveries are made for all of time and science. Nothing has changed but for reasons due to money primarily, when the historical learning lessons are far off enough people attempt to re-tell/re-invent the wheel in their favor.. Only to be reminded : Nothing has changed.

The individual discoverers change over time however for they learn from history.

It mainly comes down to the software and algorithmic techniques. It's not something many people want to hear as there is a lot of money and effort placed on an alternative framing. If you believe it takes massive amount of hardware/compute, it favors the current billion dollar lucrative business of cloud computing at scale. If you are made to believe it takes 100s of top ranking PhDs because its so incredibly complex, you are more likely to value the groups pursuing it higher. If the techniques and white papers are all a convoluted mess of spaghetti, one becomes of the belief that this is an unworldly pursuit.

It is none of these things however. The hardware is already capable. The fundamental techniques that are popular and theories are the flawed. Essentially, you need to start over as Geoffrey Hinton said. Something no one wants to put effort into doing or fund.

So, indeed AGI is here today. It's just not within the frame of the populist efforts. An capable individual with the freedom of doing deep pondering and constructions w/o any outside influence is more likely to crack this puzzle than a room of PhDs all systemically subscribed to the same fundamentally flawed approach of Optimization algorithms.

As far as the compute goes, does anyone even truly spend the time to understand it anymore in this day and age of frameworks on frameworks? I mean truly understand it? And there lies to other fundamental problem. How can one make broad statements about the computational requirements of AGI when the most they know about the underlying hardware is an AWS config file?

Swaths of the industry have shut themselves out from ever developing AGI. Sadly, they're the groups w/ the most funding and backing because they represent the same flawed mainstream ideology as every other AI group.

It will be an outsider and the core theoretical approach is already resolved.

What are your thoughts on Starting over completely from scratch as Geoffrey Hinton has suggested? What are you doing as a group to attract and bring on such individuals? Does this occupy any portion of your efforts at OpenAI?

If you were given a demo of an AI system that uses a completely new/revolutionary approach towards various different problems with success, how open would you be to rethinking your position on 'Optimization techniques'?

Modeling seems as a stop-gap towards getting over the limitations of Weak AI. As I recall, this is what knowledge-based expert systems tried in a time's past and failed at because it's nothing but a glorified masking of the underlying problem with limited human inputted rulesets. I don't agree with Yann LeCun that the way forward to AGI is modeling. I feel like it's the best solution people worked up towards the limitations of Weak AI which were broadly and publicly acknowledged in 2017 and early 2018.

> The main limitation right now: the ideas are very computationally expensive.

This is because the fundamental core set of algorithms being used by the industry are fundamentally flawed yet favorable to big data/cloud computing.. A quite lucractive business model for currently entrenched tech companies. It's why they spend so much effort ensuring the broad range of AI techniques fundamentally stay the way they are.. because if they do, it means boat loads of money for them.

> So we'll need engineers and researchers to help us to continue scaling our supercomputing clusters and build working systems to test our ideas. When you're attempting to resolve something and you are shown YoY that it isn't being resolved and requires even more massive amounts of compute, it means you're doing something wrong. It will be better to take a step back an re-evaluate your approach fundamentally. Again, what is the willingness you have to do so if shown something far more novel?

Accelerating the efficiency of an optimization algorithm doesn't get you AGI, this should be clear by now. As for fielding such systems, one quick way to destroy humanity to a degree is to turn everything into a glorified optimization problem which will no doubt be turned against people to maximize profit.

Did Artificial General Intelligence get redefined again towards something more short term? So, first AI is hijacked and hyped 50 ways to sunday.. Then came the apocalyptic narratives/control problem hype to secure funding for non-profit pursuits and research. Then, when it was realized that narrative couldn't go on forever. AGI was hijacked added to everyone's charter and a claim was made that it will be made 'safe'. Now, AGI's definition is getting redefined to the latest Weak AI techniques that can do impressive things on insane amounts of compute hardware. How can you ever achieve AGI if this is the framing/belief system the major apparatus of funding/work centers on? Where is the true pursuit of this problem? Where are the completely new approaches?

One cannot rule out something unless they've spent a concerted amount of time dedicated solely to trying to understanding it. If there is no fundamental understanding of Human intelligene, what is anyone frankly talking about? or doing?

I have yet to hear a cohesive understanding of human intelligence from various different AI groups. I have yet to hear a sound body of individuals properly frame a pursuit of AGI. So, what is everyone pursuing? There seems to be no grand vision or lead wrangling in all of these scattered add-on techniques to NN. I do see a lot of groups working on weak AI or chipping away at AGI like featuresets with AI techniques making claims about AGI. Everyone has become so obsessed with iterating that they fail to grasp the proper longer term technique for resolving a problem like AGI.

Void from the discussion are conversations on Neuroscience and the scientific investigation of Intelligence. There's more sound progress being made in the public sector on concepts like AGI than in the private sector. Mainly because the public sector knows how to become entrenched, scope, and target an unproven long term goal and project.

The hype as far as I see it is clearly distinguishable from the science. Without honest and sound scientific inquiries, claims in any direction are without support. Everyone's attempting to skip the science and pursue engineering in the dark with flashy public exhibitions namely because of funding.. You can't exit such a room and make sound claims about AGI. If a group claims they are pursuing AGI, I expect almost all of their work to be scientific research pursuing an understanding.

That being said, it appears no one is interested in funding or backing such an endaevour. Everyone states they want to back/invest in such a group on paper but when it comes down to it the money isn't there, they obviously are targetting shorter term goals/payouts, and/or don't frankly know what type of pursuit or group of individuals are required. No one wants to take the time to understand what such a group would look like. No one wants to make a truly longer term bet. This is why things have been spiraling in circles for years.

So, as it has been stated time and time again.. AGI will come and it will come from left field. There are individuals who truly care to pursue and develop AGI and they're willing to sacrifice everything to achieve it. If no funding is available, they'll fund themselves. If groups wont accept them because they aren't obssesed with deep learning or have a PhD (clearly the makeup that only results in convoluted weak AI), they'll start groups themselves.

Passion + Capability + lifelong pursuit is how all of the great discoveries of time have come to us. The mainstream seemingly never understanding such individuals, supporting them, or believing them until after they've proven themselves. No pivots. No populist iterations. A fully entrenched dedication towards achieving something until its done.

So, no.. you can't rule out AGI in the near term because there is no spotlight on the individuals or groups with the capability to develop it on such time horizons and the thinking just frankly isn't there in celeberated groups with funding. Everyone's in the dark and its an active choice and mindset which causes this.

Geoffery Hinton says start all over.... Yann LeCun raises red flags. No one listens. No one acts. Everyone wants a piece of the company that develops the next trillion dollar 'Google' like product space centered on AGI but no one wants to spend the time to consider what such a company would be, what is human intelligence, who is looking at it in a new way from scratch as some of the most important people in AI have stated. So, you see... This is why the unexpected happen. It is unexpected because no one spends the time or resources necessary to cultivate the understanding to expect its coming.