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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

For those who are scared about this technology, it’s good to look at what AI has done to Chess.

The best chess seems to be when AI is used along with humans. I think image and video AI will best be exploited when human input is also taken into account.

There is still something special about human creativity, I think AI will just be another tool to expand that. At least, in the short term I would say 10 years perhaps. AI will probably one day take over all aspects of creativity and humans won’t be able to contribute.

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> The best chess seems to be when AI is used along with humans.

I don't think this is true anymore. I don't think I've heard about successful centaur chess games in years. I would love to be wrong there though (in particular if anyone knows about how correspondence chess games have been played in the last 2 or 3 years with the availability of Leela Zero and Stockfish NNUE).

Found this interesting article http://chessforallages.blogspot.com/2021/02/correspondence-c... which linked to this thread on the topic: https://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=76382

Based on that thread, it looks like centaur chess is close to dead.

> Human input in top-level ICCF [correspondence games with chess engine support] games is now 99% eliminated, other than personal preference in selection of openings.

Don't worry, humans will still be relevant for ~10 years!.

(and then regrettably irrelevant thereafter).

I think it is a legitimate worry, as the pace of progress is considerable. These tools are impressive, and are only going to get more impressive: more people should be talking about where this is headed.

These models are literally one French court decision away from being banned and investment in them being completely halted. So I wouldn't worry too much about them specifically.

Why French court? If other countries don't ban them, France will just be hurting itself.

A french court banning it will probably be a (short) precursor to an EU-wide ban which is effectively a worldwide ban. EU courts will be fining companies heavily if they don't comply which effectively means big tech no longer invests a penny in models. I use 'French court' here mostly because I believe it most likely to be firstly litigated there.

I imagine plenty of companies in the rest of the world will happily make use of it.

Spoiler alert: EU can fine and (if needed) seize assets of companies based outside of the EU.

Only if those companies have EU assets*

Even still, if the EU chooses to regress, I can imagine a lot of non-EU-based companies—especially smaller ones—just choosing not to deal with them anymore

EU can pretty much unilaterally cut access to the financial system of said companies, demonstrated this year to a number of russian entities. Meanwhile, given what Xi has done in the last couple of years, I would not be surprised if China moves against the model makers first.

Yeah, just like Facebook and Google can't operate in Europe, or the US isn't still spying on the whole world still. Those eu courts really control them.

EU courts fined google just this week. Way to prove exactly how uninformed you are. There has been no reason to ban meta or google in EU so far, but you can ask RT how good their operations are at the moment.

EU wouldn’t ban homegrown technology. They’re making up laws an an excuse to punish Google for not being EU based, it’s not that Google happens to be violating the law.

The EU has had many sanctions against google, tried to force them to change various practices, just like the pointless attempts to get microsoft to make changes. None of them made any real difference.

>EU wouldn’t ban homegrown technology.

EU would ban any technology that disrupts the labor market to an extent it leads to widespread protests among a segment of society. For how a somehow similar thing has played out in the last 40 years (instead of banning technologies, it has mostly been instituting quotas, paying subsidies and banning/taxing imports), you can look at its agricultural policy.

Yes because banning alcohol, drugs, porn, prostitution and profanity in music sure got rid of them!

It would have gotten rid of every single one of those if the only method for their production required a tech company to invest a 8-digit sum in R&D and said tech company was threatened with litigation.

Porn companies, Facebook, Uber, ... these are just the latest companies, in a long line, for whom huge lawsuits and fortune-sized settlements are simply a line item on the expense sheet.

Are you somehow under the impression that, if a government decides to impose a fine that will financially kill the company once and for all, it is incapable of it?

Incidentally, Uber has been banned in the entire country where I live for 8+ years now.

Of course. And that kind of action would make corporations sit up.

But what a government can do, and what its politicians will do are very different things. The political backlash for going nuclear on corporations would be massive and sustained. Not even good acting corporations want that kind of thing happening.

Regarding, Uber and your country: your point makes my point stronger.

A whole country is now off limits to Uber, but on the whole, across all the countries, their aggressive behaviors has been a win for them anyway. Just another cost of business.

I think the opposite is true. I think we're closer to the beginning of a kind of arms race.

That is nonsensical. Maybe one country might decide to try to stop it, the internet has shown that doesn't work.

I think a key difference here is that with chess, 'goodness' is defined by winning. With content generation, the training methods point towards some form of comparing the generated thing to some observed data, but the 'goodness' of the content from the perspective of potentially competing with or displacing human creators is "do people like to consume it?"

If one trained using e.g. a tiktok like dataset showing viewer response measurements for each video, and do conditional generation on those response values ("prank video watchers are highly likely to watch the full video"), are we really that far from a system that learns to generate content that attracts and hold eyeballs? Not so long ago there were a lot of concerning trend pieces about how youtube had a network of creators making bizarre, disturbing or transfixing videos being watched entirely by young children. Before that, it was clickbait listicles. "Bad" content that can get eyeballs can still wildly steer what humans create and consume. I'm wondering if in 2 years we'll have an enormous number of short videos that we all agree are "bad" but which are nevertheless constantly watched.

I may be mistaken but I believe that human/machine pairing was dominant for a long while, but the last few years the chess solvers have progressed to a point where they're dominant on their own.

Poker on the other hand I think human players still win vs GTO solvers, but again I may be mistaken here too.

> Poker on the other hand I think human players still win vs GTO solvers, but again I may be mistaken here too.

Also an outsider, but I think this has changed in the last year and that AI now is consistently better than top-tier humans at even no-limits poker.

I think AI now beat humans at poker

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190711141343.h...

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~noamb/papers/19-Science-Superhuman.p...

Is there a single "intellectual" game left that humans can beat computers at? I suppose an AI has yet to beat lebron james at basketball, but I suppose that's for want of having a body.

What does “best” mean here?

AI is the winningest in chess, but the real life purpose of chess is to produce interesting gameplay for people to watch, and so AI is less good than Magnus at that. You’d need the AI to throw games and write press releases.

>it’s good to look at what AI has done to Chess It completely ruined the game to the point where it's more about memorization than it's ever been.

There are two classes of engines. One is like you describe, faster and faster brute forcing. AlphaZero was much more creative and didn’t use brute force.

top tier chess ais crush human grandmasters and achieve super human performance with no assistance

what? Alphazero trained via self play and in ~10 hours became unbeatable by humans

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