Elon Musk + AI + Microsoft = Awesome Dota 2 Player (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: Tonight during Valve's yearly Dota 2 tournament, a surprise segment introduced what could be the best new player in the world -- a bot from Elon Musk-backed startup OpenAI. Engineers from the nonprofit say the bot learned enough to beat Dota 2 pros in just two weeks of real-time learning, though in that training period they say it amassed "lifetimes" of experience, likely using a neural network judging by the company's prior efforts. Musk is hailing the achievement as the first time artificial intelligence has been able to beat pros in competitive e-sports... Elon Musk founded OpenAI as a nonprofit venture to prevent AI from destroying the world -- something Musk has been beating the drum about for years.
"Nobody likes being regulated," Musk wrote on Twitter Friday, "but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that's a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too."

Musk also thanked Microsoft on Twitter "for use of their Azure cloud computing platform. This required massive processing power."

Comments

Re:Not AI

[Dutch Gun]

As game developers, we call our automated agents "AI" in a long tradition of overloading and bastardizing words from other fields, but we all understand it's not actually real "AI" of any sort. I mean, even pathfinding goes under the term "AI" for our purposes. So, yeah, this is deep learning, but no more "AI" than what we do inside the games. Very often, we actually have to work to make our opponents *less* effective, because computers have so many advantages over players, especially in any game at all where reflexes count, or broad analysis of lots of details is important.

But more to the point, Elon keeps talking about regulating AI to prevent it from destroying the world. Every time he talks about this, he sounds like an unhinged lunatic that has some irrational fears about something he doesn't deeply understand. I still haven't heard a realistic scenario about how AI is going to go about doing this. And let's be honest... the perception of his capacity for rational thought on matters outside his domain of expertise was NOT helped by his declaration that he's 99.9% certain we're living in a computer simulation.

Besides which, how exactly would one "regulate" this, short of simply banning AI development by private enterprises? Massive governmental oversight requiring a programmer to pinky swear or sign in blood that they'll use those neural networks for good instead of evil? I honestly don't get it.

Re:Not AI

[Maxo-Texas]

Decomposed to it's components, the brain is not intelligent.

The Brain is composed of the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain.
Alone, none of these are intelligent.

The forebrain consists of the cerebrum, thalamus, and hypothalamus (part of the limbic system).
None of these these three subcomponents are intelligent.

The midbrain consists of the tectum and tegmentum.
Neither of these pieces are intelligent.

The hindbrain is made of the cerebellum, pons and medulla.
None of these these three subcomponents are intelligent.

People with dysfunctional Amygdala are incapable of logical thinking because they can't emotionally weight the factors correctly.. They find snakes interesting but not scary (so they want to touch them).

Most people driving are not doing so intelligently. A minor "driving" expert system is running while their brain is elsewhere.

Computers beating humans at go is weak A.I.

We are 8 years ahead of the projected schedule for landmarks. It's going faster than we expected.

----

We *must* be very careful with A.I. because we only get one shot at it. Any serious A.I. research must be done air gapped, with analog power meters, with fuse limited power suplies, and many other precautions.

We have overconfident people playing with extinction level technology. It might never click. It might click 10 years from now. It might click tomorrow.