How to create an AI startup – convince some humans to be your training set

"It will also be interesting if there is a legal claim for the gig workers at these companies to make that their labor helped “create the value” at the companies that replace them."

Well, I would certainly hope any employee help create value for the companies they work for... even if they get laid off eventually.

I think he's really missing the point about the importance of self-play in Alpha Go. Human play provided a seed for training the system, but the thing that made it work was the fact that the computer could play an unlimited number of games against itself; the fact that Go is a game with clear rules made it possible to label a huge number of board positions without any human-derived training data at all. The human-derived training set isn't nearly enough for this.

Would have like to hear at least one concrete exemple of startup actually doing that. Seems a bit theoretical at the moment, as big companies doesn't need to do that thanks to existing datasets, and I've never heard any startups using dozens (hundreds?) of contractors for this kind of job.

This does hit at one of the most basic debates of the next decade - how much of my actions and behaviours do I own? Creating a link from one page to another, thus providing PageRank with value - do I get a cut of that value? Purchasing a book or a film, thus making profit for the reseller's recommendation engine? Driving around populating maps with my GPS co-ordinates. Just generally leaving digital footprints makes someone a training set somewhere - and yet instead of this being a public good it's private profit - the term bandied Around after 2008 was "socialising risk, privatising profits". The same debate should be happening here - but I only occasionally hear about something like it.

Or am I listening in wrong places?

It wont work this way in the short term.

Any company doing "AI" will get there over a long period of time by employing people to do actual work and then slowly automating that work away. If you wait for a huge dataset or some new technique there will be tons of competition.

>It will also be interesting if there is a legal claim for the gig workers at these companies to make that their labor helped “create the value” at the companies that replace them.

I'd assume that you'd be waiving any legal claim they might have when they sign the ToS or w/e. I mean, in all fairness, they are getting paid to perform these actions and be recorded. What more would they have any claim for anyway? A percentage based on the times their anonymized playthroughs were used?

"Well, we've got 1,000 people and each played 100 games of Go. We took that 100,000 games and trained a single dataset to play against itself." User is 1 player of 1,000. Company makes 20,000,000 and sets aside 25% (magically) for paying back the original people. Those people now get $5000. That $5000 is cool but it's not life changing.

EDIT: It occurs to me that my numbers could be skewed. This could be significant if they only used 100 people or so, I guess. My point wasn't necessarily to shoot down the notion just to discuss it. What would the person have a claim to be it legal or otherwise?

Microsoft, perhaps inadvertently, did that. Tay's stream of consciousness can now be used as a training set for an abusive content monitoring AI.

The interesting question is what would you call these humans who are serving as your training set. Do you call them "Machine Therapists" (trying to coax the AI to proper behavior)? "AI Educators" (providing the material that is used to teach the AI)? "Data Scientists" (they are curating data and handing it off to the machine)?

Searle would have us interpret this as the company taking the intelligence of the humans, refining and repackaging it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg

Unclear how this is new, even Google, Amazon, etc. have either been doing this internally, offering it as a service, been susceptible to man-in-the-middle exploits to mining real world data for training sets, released data, etc.

With the many parameters, the normal equations will become large. In that case, can consider solving the equations with the old iterative method Gauss-Seidel.

I've only a little experience in NN, but getting trainers is rarely the bottleneck - it's usually in programming the NN.

I plan to do just that, but my end goal is to provide a free service that has tons of value for my users.

There's a chance that some Web site ad targeting is being done this way.

This is kind of "no duh".

Not really an article that adds much value or understanding, especially for a blog seemingly being targeted to a technical audience.