OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on the transformative potential of artificial general intelligence
That lab grew into OpenAI, which counts Altman, Elon Musk, LinkedIn executive chairman Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and other titans of industry as its backers. Its stated goal is to “build safe human-level AI,” and to advance the field of AI with groundbreaking research in robotics, games, and dataset generation.
There are three things that power all AI systems: data, compute, and algorithms. We live in a world where it’s all about these very rare, precious labeled datasets, and now we’re starting to see models like the one that [OpenAI] released for language that is able to consume unlabeled data. They read thousands of books and don’t require you to go and very carefully apply these labels, and in the end, give you a system that can read the internet and these massive corpora.
The second piece we’re doing on the data front is something like [the Dota 2-playing AI] OpenAI Five. It plays 180 years worth of games against itself every single day, which is an example of using compute to generate data.
On the compute front, in the past couple of months, we published a post looking at how much computing power had been thrown at deep learning models over the past six years. You can see that the largest AI training runs have been doubling every 3.5 months at a 300,000 times increase. To put that into perspective, it’s kind of like if in six years, smartphone batteries went from lasting one day to lasting 800 years.
That brings us to the algorithms. Everything we’ve made so far has involved simple ideas, but are these the right simple ideas? Are they going to go further? The truth is that we haven’t hit them all yet, so we don’t know — we don’t know whether they’ll break down … We’re in a bit of a fog, and we’re going to be in that fog until the landscape stops changing so rapidly.
VentureBeat: The idea of artificial general intelligence — so-called superintelligent AI — is concerning to some people.
I think it all boils down to one core idea: artificial general intelligence has the potential to cause extremely rapid change. And when you have rapid change, it’s hard for the policy machinery and social norms — how people relate and fit into the system — to keep up.
The most important thing for governments to be doing at the policy level is developing ways to measure it.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/25/openai-cofounder-greg-brockman-on-the-transformative-potential-of-artificial-general-intelligence/