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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

I haven't seen anyone saying that the current trend of deep learning using neural networks will result in strong AI soon.

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Except for Elon Musk, who with all due respect, I believe does not count as an informed person in DL.

It really bothers me that he (who is clearly an excellent entrepreneur and human being in general) makes such strong statement on a topic he is clearly not an expert in and is so vocal about it too. Given the amount of influence and number of online followers he has, I find this irresponsible.

He doesn’t say soon.

See e.g. Smerity reporting on Elon's talk in NIPS 2017: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/938994837323259904 as well as https://goo.gl/trX8SJ & https://goo.gl/aTMqv6

What's your evidence for saying he does not say so? A bit mean of you to downvote without asking for evidence.

You don't know who downvoted you and who did not.

With the exception that it could not have been the person you replied to. (Or yourself, for completeness)

I assumed akvadrako downvoted that since the vote and the comment appeared very close to each other and both right after my comment. But of course, I surely could be mistaken.

And anyways, downvoting is not a big deal and they have the absolute right to do so. It's just that stating why you disagreed or downvoted would be helpful.

I don't know if it's still true, but it used to be the case that if your reply to a comment your downvote to that comment does not count. It was a pretty clever mechanism in that you could be certain any downvotes didn't come from people replying to you.

I don’t see why HN doesn’t require every down vote to have a comment. Judging from the sheets of gray on most threads, most down voted comments aren’t actually in violation of site policy, off topic, trolling, etc. It’s just a few little people disagreed. Which is fine! But it’s not constructive or interesting to just slap the commenter with your dick.

Because then every other comment would have a stream of replies justifying the downvotes - replies which, presumably, would be regular comments, and thus susceptible to further downvotes (with comments)!

In other words, this would be a huge noise generator.

I don't see any evidence in your links; why don't you provide a quote?

Asking me for evidence someone didn't say something is a bit absurd.

Elon's training is in physics and economics. He understands linear algebra and programming perfectly well. He also understands that policy (economic or otherwise) won't be developed unless people put it on the government's plate. And he understands that government tends to be reactive - they are invariably way behind the curve in governing tech. So he's using his bully pulpit to get the troglodytes (a concept that maps nicely to many Republicans) and luddites (a concept that maps nicely to a lot of Democrats) in Congress to start working on the problem (for context, Ted Cruz of all people runs the Senate science and technology committee).

I'm worried about machine learning taking over corporate management. Optimizing for shareholder value is a goal a machine learning system can work on.

Yup. Machine learning driving the optimization loop, with humans working as smart sensors and actuators, responding to high-level commands. That's a pretty powerful AI right there.

Did he really say that specifically about the "current trend of deep learning using neural networks"? Surely he would have been speaking more generally about AI?

See the references I give below; if he is talking about general trends in AI and is giving an estimate of 7 or 8 years for emergence of AGI, where is he basing it on? Is he basing the estimate on unseen breakthroughs (i.e. unknown unknowns) to occur within that 7 or 8 years frame, or is he talking about current DL techniques pushed to their limits? For the former, nobody can make a reasonable estimate (nature of unknown unknowns) and for the latter, most experts in the field seem to agree that that current techniques do not lead to AGI. (Like have you seen how hard it is do things like visual question answering (VQA) or text summarization tasks? These are much much simpler than AGI but like AGI do not lend themselves easily to supervised learning.)

He talks about AI in those links, and does not mention specific approaches like DL etc. He's been around long enough to see the different approaches to AI, so as to not confuse it with a specific technology. I doubt it would even occur to him think AI=DL.

Many people have made estimates for human level AI, without relying on specific technologies. e.g. Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy. For example, the lower part of Vinge's range included the 2020's - for his prediction made a few decades ago.

Is Musk accurate? How can any of these be very accuracte, with so much unknown, as you note. Is he optimistic (er, predicting too early)? I guess so.

I'll note that even for Musk's own companies, upon which he is the expert, and upon which he wields more influence than anyone, he is notably optimisitic in his estimates...

Anyway, the answer to my question is: no, he didn't speak of those specific technologies, just AI.

BTW some more in my other comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16350798

I think a lot of people say this. Very few informed people say this. But for a layperson, its difficult to tell who is informed and who isn't (and in fact laypeople haven't heard of the real experts: Hinton who?)

Well, I get the feeling a lot of AI experts see some real potential for AGI to arrive sooner than expected, but they will be the first to admit that current techniques are insufficient and it would require some smart team to significantly augment current techniques with major new ideas.

It's not what the people who are experts believe, it's what everyone else thinks. The fact is that "deep learning" is now just routinely and casually called "AI" across the industry. And you can bet that people who make decisions who are not sufficiently savvy to know the limits will be duped into a false sense of confidence in this technology.

As a person outside the field, my subjective experience is that every day comes headlines with new superlatives regarding "The Coming AI Revolution." My expectations are being set for radical transformation across most areas of technology in the next decade or two on the basis of current developments in this area.

this mainly has to do with the incentives of journalists in an attention-based industry, I think.

As well as the incentives of researchers, developers, and executives in the NN industry.

>My expectations are being set for radical transformation across most areas of technology in the next decade or two

As someone who as lived through most of the last four decades, this seems like a very reasonable expectation. I mean, this maybe wasn't obvious to people who weren't born into the IT industry, but to me? the '90s seemed to have a 'holy shit, this changes everything!" moment every few years. (Of course, some things stay the same. UNIX is older than I am, as is c, and both are recognizable and ubiquitous today.) - and I think as the aughts rolled around, those 'holy shit, this changes everything!' moments became, ah, more evenly distributed. More of this new tech touched the lives of ordinary people in obvious ways.

> on the basis of current developments in this area.

This part... I think that you have to understand that the way we talk about technological change is functionally science fiction. Yes, yes, it's very likely that the high rate of change maintained over the last few decades will continue and even continue to accelerate.[1] but I personally treat claims of where tech will be in 10 years as functional science fiction. A lot like how I treat predictions of what sectors of the stock market will be where in ten years. Yes, the market as a whole will probably go up... but to say you know the winners and losers ten years out? that's... a strong claim.

So yeah, saying "there will be revolutionary changes in the next decade!" is fine, and probably right. there were revolutionary changes last decade. And, hell, you could say that ML and similar have already given us revolutionary changes this decade. Arguing that ML will give us revolutionary changes next decade? well, maybe... but it looks more like Delphi than C to me, if you know what I mean. (Of course, I'm IT; I operate, manage and maintain infrastructure; I'm no programming expert. so take that how you will.)

[1]the counterpoint here is moore's law. Your compute per dollar is not getting massively better over time the way it was in the 80s through the 00s. I mean, it's still trending towards better, but not nearly as fast as it was. The difference between the compute power of available compute resources in 1980 and 2000 is gong to be dramatically greater than the difference between the compute power of available compute resources from 2000 to 2020. This means that if you want to make predictions, you can't rely as much on computers being more powerful in the future.

Re Moore's Law has slowed a lot. I still like Kurzweil's chart, showing that historically, we can backtrapolate the exponential improvement to previous other information technologies. So this might extend to some future information technology, other than silicon... but that form of reasoning really is science fiction.

Most of these imminant AI predictions are founded on computer complexity soon approaching that of the human brain. Even some fundamental discovery, like RNA playing an information processing role within/between neurons, that pushes brain complexity up by many orders of magnitude, would not push back exponential growth reaching it by all that many years.

The whole thing hinges on Moore's Law, which is (currently) looking rickety.

Yeah what we have is an nice improvement for things, but at the end of the day I think everyone is well aware of the limits of statistical methods. What we have is the machine acting kind of like a parrot, it can get good at certain tasks like imitating an artistic style. What we don't have is independent thought or reasoning or the ability to consume a narrative. A machine can make a strange mash up of styles in writing for example, but it can't generate a narrative simply by machine learning a series of novels. The best it can do is copy the writing style. However its still an amazing advance, but for creative fields you see AI enhancing the work of the creator rather than replacing it.

1) This is Jürgen Schmidhuber claiming that ANN-based AI will soon become as intelligent as small animals, then within a decade of that, as intelligent as humans:

But I think that within not so many years we'll be able to build an NN-based AI (an NNAI) that incrementally learns to become as smart as a little animal (...) once we have animal-level AI, a few years or decades later we may have human-level AI, with truly limitless applications (...)

Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence? Interview with Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber on Deep Learning

https://www.infoq.com/articles/interview-schmidhuber-deep-le...

2) Here's a quote from DeepMind claiming their DQN system is a stepping stone towards Artificial General Intelligence:

This work represents the first demonstration of a general-purpose agent that is able to continually adapt its behavior without any human intervention, a major technical step forward in the quest for general AI.

Human-level control through Deep Reinforcement Learning

https://deepmind.com/research/dqn/

3) Here's another example from MIT Press:

“With appropriate uses of the deep learning technologies, we could be a further step closer to the true human intelligence.”

Deep Learning Machine Beats Humans in IQ Test

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538431/deep-learning-mach...

4) Here's Elon Musk telling NIPS that auto-cars will be significantly better than humans in 2020:

Now at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) yesterday, Musk said that they could achieve some level of full self-driving within two years, but that the more important timeline would be 3 years, at which point self-driving capabilities would be significantly better than human drivers.

The quote doesn't mention deep learning, but he was at NIPS talking about deep learning.

Elon Musk updates timeline for a self-driving car, but how does Tesla play into it?

https://electrek.co/2017/12/08/elon-musk-tesla-self-driving-...

I believe, Eliezer Yudkowski et al Singularitarians have redoubled their efforts to convince everyone that the Singularity is Coming bolstered by the recent successes of Deep Learning- although youwon't find Yudkowski at least trying to make any specific predictions about AGI, or about anything.

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