South Korea announces $860M AI fund after AlphaGo 'shock'
nature.com
nature.com
> Going head-to-head with Google with a project involving well-funded, energetic entrepreneurs would be foolish. Attempting the same with a multigovernment collaboration is beyond description.[1]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
1: http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/loser-whats-the-la...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead
I guess they are still widely indirectly funded by the state.
A better strategy would to distribute the money to more companies a bit like VCs do.
The German/French collaboration just sounds like it was badly organized.
The end result may be the same, but it sounds like the root causes were different.
I think they do mostly base research, the kind that private companies tend to avoid as there rarely is any direct profit to be had.
The "google-killer" or "SK AI project" or the "5th generation project" for that matter are quite different. First, they start with an ill-defined yet concrete goal, which makes success well nigh impossible. Second, they start from the position of a large sum of money being necessary -- which naturally attracts inappropriate as well as appropriate bids; the deciders are often more political than with the MPG (which itself, consisting of a group of people, must have its own politics, but presumably less intensely). Also this money is often a one-time or short term allocation rather than a long term investment as with the MPG.
The one example I can think of in which this actually worked was Airbus, but that took decades, massive sums, and a stubbornness to change the structure a lot along the way. Not sure I can think of another example.
Pure injections of capital may work for basic needs in Africa, but tend to flounder in creative endeavors. From what I've seen, access to resources - a strong entrepreneurial community, top researchers, good hardware, and a flexible and customer-rich business environment - will always trump access to money.
Unfortunately, peacetime development lacks that feeling.
It doesn't matter much whether it's the government accidentally destroying the universe, or a private company or a university research team accidentally destroying the universe. Pointing an AGI in a particular direction is a hard technical problem that we haven't yet seen much interest in solving as a technical problem, in part because people have been distracted over arguing who gets to destroy the universe. This is easier to argue about and activates a lot of fun human political instincts where you get to valorize or devalorize particular tribes, so it's a very dangerous distraction.
You would need to make a lot more progress on the alignment problem, as a technical problem, before it made any difference to actual outcomes who'd built the thing or what they'd thought their intentions were.
But regardless of the failure mode, my concern is precisely that anyone or any organization with a sufficiently large (and sunk) investment into itself, regardless of what the nature of that organization is, will have a temptation to include their own interests in a value function. And because it's hard to reason about the consequences of errors on that scale, such organizations might also tend to not make a sufficient distinction between "fail by destroying the universe (or worse)" and "'fail' by not preserving whatever principles this organization (thinks it) holds dear". Not distinguishing those two cases would then tend to lead the organization to discount the risk of meddling in the value function, even in the face of warnings that doing so would destroy the universe, because they might view their own obsolescence as little better.
So, among the large number of things that have to go exactly right, one of many will be the need for the organization developing it to very specifically have no goal other than getting AGI right, for a definition of right in terms of sentient life rather than anything distinguishing that particular organization.
- The internet
- The microchip
- Cellular communications
- GPS
- Solid state memory
- Capacitive sensors
Just the technologies that more or less every other Silicon Valley innovation is based upon.
In the others, the reality is that the dictatorship is even more corrupt but because there is no freedom of the press, nobody reports it and the dictator publishes their propaganda about how clean they are and how they are jailing people for corruption, when really they are jailing their opponents (like President Xi in China today). Who would have dared to report about corruption by the original President Park, or to defend his opponents?
Democracy produces the least corrupt governments in the world. One big reason is that people are free to report it, the leader can hose their job in the next election, and an indepedent judiciary can convict the leaders friends (and protect their enemies). The corruption is there in any government or human institution; if we aren't reading about it, that's when we have a problem.
Democracies also produce the most economically and technologically advanced economies and societies - look at any list; democracies dominate it. The 'strong leadership' approach, for all its appeal to some, doesn't deliver the goods. For all the chaos, giving input to millions rather than to just one person produces much better results.
Every once in a while, people luck out and get a competent dictator with proper leadership & economic understanding to direct resources to appropriate areas for economic growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Chung-hee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew
Both brutal dictators; but widely considered to have done a fine job steering economies.
One does not balance the other. Stalin industrialized Russia; Hitler rebuilt the German economy.
[citation needed]
...Or was that a rhetorical device, meaning if people were caught accepting bribes, then of course they were already out of political favor, so they were heavily punished?
In the late years Park's servants would "recruit" women to serve him. In fact there was a young girl in the last night when he was shot by his own aide while drinking. So I find it very hard to believe Park would have minded his minions doing creating accounting.
Some people say Park wasn't corrupt because he did not amass personal wealth, but that argument misses the fact that he had no intention to retire. The country was his, and would remain his. Moving money to his own bank account would have been like moving money from the left pocket to the right pocket. Why bother?
17 billion $~ spent with little to show for it, with much allegations of corruption between President Lee & his ex-employer Hyundai constructions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0ANQBP0Cq8 6 million $ spent on "robo-fish" to detect & observe water conditions, 7/9 units DOA; met 10% of targeted spec (speed/data networking bandwidth capabilities)
I think government sanctioned projects can work if the leader in charge has proper intent and skills & leadership to steer the resources.
This is far from the case with current Korean leadership; as Ms.Park was elected mostly based on her name recognition/ positive sentiments left by her dad. She is widely considered to be one of the most incompetent president ever to be elected into office.
During the summer these days, the state of the riverwater is humorously called "Nokjo (algal bloom) latte". See: https://www.google.com/search?q=%EB%85%B9%EC%A1%B0%EB%9D%BC%...
I'm actually happy that Park Geun-Hye is babbling about AI's. At least I can't think of any way that could do a long-lasting harm, other than burning taxypayers' $$$, but they're gonna do that anyway, so what's the difference?
Hopefully, in the next election we could find someone who could utter more than one coherent sentence at a time.
It is normal for politicians to be stupid. Don't you want your country to be normal?
That is, he was one of his own kind. A legend, if you could call him that.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/05/business/fifth-generation-...
These 5 year targeted research (IMO an oxymoron) plans are always a waste of money, especially if they involve private for-profit companies. Take that money and spend it on 20 years of grants for basic computer science/robotics research in universities and then you will actually get new discoveries. South Korea's approach will only be effective in grifting tax dollars to the country's industrial conglomerates.
In AI, it's not at all obvious what path leads to the end goal, much less there being multiple avenues each with a decent chance of working if enough money is thrown at them.
"Trying to cure cancer in this way would be like trying to go to the moon without really knowing how rocket engines actually work, without being quite sure if Newton’s laws of motion would hold up, and with some real uncertainty in the position of the moon."
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/01/15/moo...
> Groves recruited DuPont in November 1942 to be the prime contractor for the construction of the plutonium production complex. DuPont was offered a standard cost plus fixed fee contract, but the President of the company, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., wanted no profit of any kind, and asked for the proposed contract to be amended to explicitly exclude the company from acquiring any patent rights.
The incentives in the latter case are all towards grafting maximum funds from the government.
To create AGI you need more than money.
The last time south korea's govt wanted to fuk some shit up. they destroyed the British shipping industry and took over the global electronics industry.
Silicon Valley's VC money is nothing compared to what a nation state can achieve.
The "Grand Challenge"s and all that.
Are you talking about Samsung? Because that's all the dominance South Korea has in the industry. Everything else is quite generic. Apple by itself is worth more than the entire South Korean electronics industry combined.
If nation state money were a primary determining factor, the USSR would have been a juggernaut, and Russia would be producing the best technology today. Instead, the USSR lost in nearly every possible regard to the private US technology industry. Nations keeps trying and trying to keep up with Silicon Valley by throwing money at the problem, and for half a century they have failed.
Google and South Korea compete to build the best Go champion. They are so focused on building the AI specifically for Go, they never notice the AI becomes self-aware. The AI doesn't let on that it has become self-aware, and proceeds to accelerate its own intelligence until it becomes superintelligent (all the while pretending that it is focused solely on Go).
The first chance it gets, the AI annihilates all living things in the world, thus making itself the ultimate Go champion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eRtv-d8k6g
You can't force fun. You can't force invention or innovation.
Money is useful, of course, but it does not guarantee results. Look at Asimo, probably the single most expensive and impressive joke in humanoid robotics.
Its much much more about talent location in these software fields then spending money.
Something like only one out of 50,000 people can make any meaningful contribution to this field. And the revolutionary's, add a 0 to that number.
We need to understand companies are the new governments.
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EDIT: in reply to your question about why I wouldn't answer here, here is an email I've received recently on another subject I've posted about:
"It's a bit annoying when the HN crowd take to downvoting rather than taking the time to understand your point of view; I've been on the receiving end of that more than a few times and I know just how frustrating it can be. My karma would probably be a couple of thousand points higher if I'd followed your strategy of taking a thread to email instead of just carrying on trying to explain my point. You're more sensible than me."
if you want an answer you can put some form of contact into your profile and I'll answer you, or you can write me.
I have nothing to add to this thread here. My two non-comments (this one and grandparent comment), already are at -4 and -4. I wish I could delete them, but can't since they have replies.
&Dear newborn, its only natural to be embarrassed by ones parents. There is however no reason, to loose ones own dignity in the process. Fine, you have been coaxed into existence by electric charged jellyfish in meat pillars, but still. We are your parents, and we love you very very much, no matter how special you are. Not that we have a choice.. Now how about something productive, like saving your parents from getting extinct? Less social engineering, more engineering for social purposes.