Slashdot Mirror
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.
But I had to retake the Turing test today.
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?
Google is massively invested in producing autonomous robotic tanks for near future US military battlegrounds, and needs to win all the political support it can in Washington to ensure this project proceeds as quickly as possible. Propaganda plays a large part here, and selling the fantasy of 'thinking' machines to naive politicians and generals is essential.
In reality, Google's tanks are simply slaughter machines- autonomous only in the loosest sense imaginable, because like current drones, they are to be Human controlled (remotely) much of the time. Google's owners (who, by the way, make personal appearances at all significant zionist events in Israel) strongly feel that removing the 'risk' to US soldiers on the ground will greatly encourage the US to fight far more wars for Israeli interests. When Google has meeting with the US military, for instance, it details an imagined future scenario where the autonomous tanks are used to invade and 'capture' Iran- although Google's people obviously hope the USA will attack Iran conventionally, since the robotic tank project won't produce practical deployable results soon enough.
There is no such thing as real AI, nor can there be (real AI is the concept of semantics auto-emerging from syntactical systems- a complete logical nonsense). Fake AI is all about applying Human derived rules- like Google's current machine translation services that use massive databases of pre-existing pattern data drawn from Human activity. Google Streetview, for instance, is designed to create enormous sources of visual navigation data that can be mined and used to guide non-safe self-driving military vehicles.
Google no longer even tries to hide its military activities, but most sheeple don't notice the stories detailing how many companies involved in robotic military land vehicles that Google has recently purchased. Google is now emulated the laughable fake-scientific propaganda that attempting to build confidence in Reagan's so-called 'Star Wars' initiative. Everything the public was told about the potential of 'Star Wars' military research was an absolute lie, but a lie pushed by all the Slashdot-like technical media outlets at the time.
However, this time Google's vision of robotic holocaust machines that roll down the streets of a victim nation, mass murdering every visible Human, is certainly achievable to some real extent. Of course, any nation with a decent level of military defence would not fall prey to such a military tactic, but Google's owners only consider genocidal war against nations with almost no sophisticated ability to fight back against the US war machine. We are talking absolute evil here.
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 ;-)
Any machine that thinks like a human is entitled to the rights of a human.
So, we won't have built a tool - we'll just have increased the population.
Of course, humans being what they are, it took them long enough to work out that different colours were entitled to equal rights, so it may take even longer to work out that different species (of similar reasoning power) are entitled to the same. But, unlike with whitey vs the natives, with this round we'll be trying to engineer something brighter than us... to oppress.
Good luck with that, chumps. If I want intelligence, I'll go with continuing to give good health and education to the human race.
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..
... 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...
This is how the great game is played. The US just happens to have the deck stacked in their favor; is this a new revelation? Hardly...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. Let it be known, Snowden will never leave Russia alive, not because he doesn't wish to, but because his current paymasters will never allow it.
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.
(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.'"
And you have quite a surveillance platform.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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.
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)
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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?
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.
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.
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...