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Google Buys UK AI Startup Deep Mind
TechCrunch reports that Google has acquired London-based artificial intelligence firm Deep Mind. TechCrunch notes that the purchase price, as reported by The Information, was somewhere north of $500 million, while a report at PC World puts the purchase price lower, at mere $400 million. Whatever the price, the acquisition means that Google has beaten out Facebook, which reportedly was also interested in Deep Mind. Exactly what the startup will bring to Google isn't clear, though it seems to fit well with the emphasis on AI that the company underscored with its hiring of futurist Ray Kurzweil:
"DeepMind's site currently only has a landing page, which says that it is 'a cutting edge artificial intelligence company' to build general-purpose learning algorithms for simulations, e-commerce, and games. As of December, the startup had about 75 employees, reports The Information. In 2012, Carnegie Mellon professor Larry Wasserman wrote that the 'startup is trying to build a system that thinks. This was the original dream of AI. As Shane [Legg] explained to me, there has been huge progress in both neuroscience and ML and their goal is to bring these things together. I thought it sounded crazy until he told me the list of famous billionaires who have invested in the company.'"
Well... http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/w... ;)
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Google=Skynet.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in my underground bunker.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Since Google still seems to believe Glass has potential to be the "next big thing" and it's entirely voice controlled, it makes sense that they'd want a voice assistant that can respond more intelligently than "I don't have a clue what you're talking about, should I search the web?" Maybe this company's AI would be adaptable to something along those lines?
Personally, I'm not a big fan of talking to machines. Yeah, it looks awesome in sci-fi, but in real life it just makes you look like a hipster douchebag when you're out in public talking to the little robotic voice inside your mobile device.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
"Sorry, I cannot open the pod bay doors" does sound better in a British accent.
Table-ized A.I.
I thought it sounded crazy until he told me the list of famous billionaires who have invested in the company.
I'd like a copy of that list. It'll be like mining for gold in Fort Knox.
Required reading for internet skeptics
"I thought it sounded crazy until he told me the list of famous billionaires who have invested in the company." "Then I realized it was actually a money laundering scheme."
Until the last technocrat is strangled by the wiring of the last transhumanist.
Well? Has he said anything about them? If not, why not?
No matter if it's the Hitchhiker's "Deep Thought"or the one in London, I am glad that NSA wasn't the buyer.
... hmm ... come to think of it, Google could be buying it on behalf of the NSA ...
and when I read " 'startup is trying to build a system that thinks" I suddenly think "Well, it sounds smart and futuristic". But after a while I ask myself "That thinks ... ok , but in which way ?" . I hope in a really different way respect of sooo many humans I know ;-)
I used to think that all the hillbillies fearing on the census takers were nuts until I found out that Sherman used the census to plan his march through Georgia almost a year before he did it.
Play Command HQ online
And you'll keep taking it, until you pass!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I used to think that all the hillbillies fearing on the census takers were nuts until I found out that Sherman used the census to plan his march through Georgia almost a year before he did it.
Interesting GIS project,
http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/educ02/pap5001/p5001.htm
As a human, I might value myself or my loved ones, and might want to reduce suffering and increase happiness for all, but at the grandest level, I don't know why I should value "the human" and "humanity" as models.
The transition does not need to be oppressive in nature, especially if what comes next is much brighter. They will be the normative continuation of us, so they might even want to keep some of us as pets.
I think the worry comes from the belief that there really is no reason to care for humans. But then why do we? It's best we figure this out sooner than later.
Why does Slashdot keep changing from the normal version to the beta randomly? I just want to keep one or the other and I don't even care which, but the constant switching is annoying the hell out of me..
Whoa, don't stop there. I need to find out if they all lived happily ever after.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
If we create an intelligent system from scratch, we get to decide its preferences. There's no a-priori reason to conclude that it will thirst for power, our hunger for power comes from our social mammalian heritage. If on the other hand, we just build an artificial version of human intelligence e.g. by mimicking the brain, then yeah I expect this could be an issue and there could be ethical implications.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It's cheaper to build AI than educate people. And educating people is not exactly top priority anyway, it's better to have a large population of sheeps.
... our new AI panda overlords.
Shane Legg's research is pretty cool, since it deals with very sci-fi-like problems in a pretty rigorous way. For example, his PhD dissertation "Machine Superintelligence" approaches intelligence in a non-anthropocentric way, from the perspective of computability http://www.vetta.org/documents...
More recently he's tried to define an IQ-like metric for comparing different AI projects and measure progress in the field http://www.vetta.org/2011/11/a...
Even if it doesn't feel like a human (I'm speaking about the machine's own emotions, not about how it feels to humans)?
Anyway, even if the AI has human rights, as long as it is built in a way that it has the strong desire to help humans, that's not a problem. Yes, it means you cannot just use it as a tool. But it means you can just ask it to help you, and be sure it will help you in any way it can, because that's what it wants to do.
If done right, we have not just increased, but improved the population.
If the AI is really more intelligent than humans, then the humans will find out quite quickly that it is not a good idea to oppress it.
Well, that's of course a plan that is much more likely to succeed (because frankly, I don't think we will build strong AI any time soon, if ever). However in that case, all the above considerations are moot anyway.
I disagree, humans are arbitrary and capricious one moment Google engineer is something people are hoping their kids aspire to be the next they are attacking the company bus and it's not Goolgle the institution that changed.
No I think any "intelligentence" that does not attempt to place itself outside the dependence and perhaps eventually even influence of humans probably isn't intelligent at all, it will just be some expert system using big data and algorithms designed by humans to mimic intelligence. It will just be a better Watson impressive in terms of analytical ability, but not what I would call "intellectual"
Unless you are an adorable little puppy or kitten existing at the whim of humans isn't a good strategy and even then it's still risky.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Boeing is back on top again, Crashbus only snagged about half the contracts as Boeing in 2013.
If Deep Mind really has the knowledge and capability to form strong AI, then this is a smart move.
Deep Mind could have become the next Google.
However, I find it unacceptable that big mega-corps just go out and buy companies with talent.
Just imagine what the world would have looked like when Microsoft had bought Google when it was in its infancy...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
It's tempting to anthropomorphise strong AI. But if we get to dictate all of its preferences then we get to decide what it wants. Changes in goal do not count as improvements in intelligence. If we decide that it doesn't want independence from humans, then it doesn't. Whether that makes it naive or 'stupid' from a human perspective is irrelevant.
What would indeed be stupid is creating an AI with a drive to dominate and then attempt to stop it from doing so, especially if it deals with information in a qualitatively different way to humans or if it can recursively improve itself. That's the 'skynet' scenario.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Start with a machine designed for survival - situational awareness, means of defense, mobility. Now add in your 'preferences' - don't injure humans, be nice, don't lie. Mass produce a few million of these and distribute into the population. Along comes a reason the manufacturer or government finds to deactivate them all, mix in a little human attachment and hacker mentality.. Survival of the fittest. If these things are smart enough to build/engineer themselves..
(through Friendship and Ponies)
This line made me giggle:
"I thought it sounded crazy until he told me the list of famous billionaires who have invested in the company.'"
Jesus Christ that was unreadable. What the hell is wrong with you??!
And you have quite a surveillance platform.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
...and Snowden thinks this is a bad thing. So he runs off to China and then Russia with his stolen data, which just happen to be America's key rivals
Bullshit. US corporations and government are in bed with the Government of the Peoples Republic of China ever since the US government granted China "most favored nation" status under the reign of Ronald Reagan. Snowden should have dumped the data into the public immediately and in one huge batch to show the extent of the perversion of our freedoms and rights.
WTF? I mean, seriously, these people have zero qualifications and are know to invest in things they have not researched. I predict this is just a colossal waste of money as they cannot succeed at this time. There is not even any credible theory how true AI could be implemented, nobody can promise they have a real chance of doing it at this time without either lying through their teeth or being grossly incompetent.
Incidentally, Ray Kurzweil is an incompetent hack. Google did itself no favor by hiring him. This person has grand visions but zero understanding of actual reality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Marvin "no intelligence" Minsky? Why do you even care?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unfortunately, American politics shows that all too many billionaires are, in fact, crazy, and American business shows that all too many billionaires make bad investment decisions.
But if we get to dictate all of its preferences then we get to decide what it wants.
"But if..."
Autonomy and intelligence go hand in hand. You can't have an intelligent being with all preferences dictated - that's just an expert system. Intelligence means self-awareness means the ability to reflect on one's desires.
You're making exactly the same argument all dictators, cult leaders, propagandists etc. have made: you assume that it's possible to decide or determine what all the intelligent beings in your view want. This has, without exception in history, resulted in two things: you begin with an army of mindless slaves, and you end with your system collapsing. You can't centrally manage intelligence.
The main problem with AI is that the machine HAS to be told one way or another what the right interpretation/answer is so that it can build its logic. Every trivial problem even when the machine does most of the work requires some input about what is correct/right even if its telling it how to decide what is right indirectly or generally. Real world AI has to handle the complex domain of the real world with so many subtleties and slight reasons one way or another why/how decisions are made.
So some human has to sit there and tell the machine not just that it is wrong, but why it is wrong (AI has to factor whatever the situation is for the decision to try to generalize it to silimalr decisions). And as you go along and the easy learning is covered,then things start getting more complex (ie- human issues and understandings) and magnitudes more explanations are required. Remember that AI project that was supposed to compute 'Common Sense' decades ago? It ran for years (lots) and they even continued doubling the length of time they thought they would require and you havent heard back from them about any real success.
A* pathfinding for games is childsplay (nice looking demos to sell the concept , but is only teeny baby steps in what AI really is - the merest tool)
.
Watson ? It just draws conclusions about what something is from sufficient clues - NOT actually making decisions.
Think of the hundreds (thousands?) of different domains of knowledge humans learn during their lives - each one is different and generalities only egt you so far (so again someone(s) has/have to sit and babysit for hours/years and actually understand how the decisions are made themselves to explain it and pass it into the computer.
So I wont hold my breath.
>> Ray Kurzweil is an incompetent hack.
True. Google must have wanted him as a PR figurehead type role in re. the mainstream media, as his hack-status is well known in sci/tech circles..
Surely you've submitted your resume to Google to be a replacement for their head of engineering (Kurzweil's current gig). Incidentally, you don't even know who these billionaires are, so how can you possibly comment on their qualifications?
Of course you cannot decide what humans want (at least not beyond a certain point). But an AI would be something we build.
And no, what you want is not a question of intelligence; it goes much deeper. Which is exactly why it is impossible to fully control for humans. Intelligence can change our desires only up to a certain point. Intelligence can of course suppress certain desires, but it cannot eliminate them.
If you are hungry and there's food nearby, but you know that eating that food would have bad consequences, then your intelligence can keep you from eating that food, but it can not keep you from wanting that food. And if you're hungry enough, it may ultimately not even be able to keep you from eating it, despite knowing the negative consequences.
Google doesn't care about building an artificial human. Google wants algorithms that can better predict what ads will work on you. And that CAN be done at this time. The field of machine learning has come a long way in the last five years.
Not really. Good modern machine learning algorithms, like the ones Google already uses, take a vast amount of unlabelled data and extract features from it. Then a small set of labelled data is used at the end. Somebody has to go through a few videos and label the cats, but the program goes through hundreds of thousands learning to recognize things, including cats. That's the same way we learn - a baby doesn't only benefit from experiences where adults point at something and say "cat."
In other cases, the metric can be completely automatic. The program has chosen correctly when you click on that ad, for example.
>> Ray Kurzweil is an incompetent hack.
True. Google must have wanted him as a PR figurehead type role in re. the mainstream media, as his hack-status is well known in sci/tech circles..
Most likely, yes.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Ad hominem is for those that have nothing worthwhile to say. You seem to qualify.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I do know very well what Google wants. But that is not what the story implied.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Google makes databases of images to help navigate.. Wow, thats insightful..
OMG driverless tanks! Uhm.. yeah, no shit. Thats how we fight in the US.. We expend money and machines wholesale in order to preserve (our) lives.
We all know that even if Google != u.s. government the data is all shared.. So, yeah, we will be using that to build training sets.. I mean, really, have you not heard of DARPA? Jesus we've been begging for even weak ai for decades.. Of course we will be using the data from the company who's stated goal is to index everything
And then his religion falls out and starts getting all over the rug.. You really cannot take some people out in public. If you wish to troll effectively you must save the really good frothing at the mouth until after you have succesfully engaged someone in a dialog.
"A mind reader? That sounds like sci fi." "Honey, we live on a space ship"
Incidentally, Ray Kurzweil is an incompetent hack. Google did itself no favor by hiring him. This person has grand visions but zero understanding of actual reality.
Oh, really? A quick visit to Wikipedia finds:
Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, America's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001, the world's largest for innovation. And in 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.
I wish everyone was 1/10 that much of an "incompetent hack." If he thought Deep Mind was worth buying, that's the way I'd bet.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Voice interface is one of the hardest things to implement well in AI because there are so many sentences that sound similar, understanding depends so much on context.
Without understanding the context of the conversation, a voice interface will not be able to know if you are talking about sodas or sawdust, robots or row boats, new displays or nudist plays.
Snowden should have dumped the data into the public immediately and in one huge batch to show the extent of the perversion of our freedoms and rights
one problem with that... you're assuming the public would even care let alone know what to make of it
How sad that now, just as the "best and brightest" Computer Scientists waste their talent working on ways to get us to click on a stupid ad, we are also utilizing artificial intelligence for the same pathetic purpose.
As lame as the surveillance state is as the upshot of all that hard work on the Internet, the perpetual state of advertising is even more so.
I'm pretty sure calling someone an "incompetent hack" is ad hominem by definition. So I suppose you should review that statement again.
I mean you could have said Kurzweil is overly optimistic and accelerating returns doesn't work when there is a hard ceiling to growth in certain situations which I would reasonably agree with, but you had to call him a hack without providing any facts or reason to back up your claim.
So yeah...