• Underlying all the recent hype about AI, industry participants are engaging in furious debates about how to prepare for an AI that’s so powerful it can take control of itself.
• This idea of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, isn’t just dorm-room talk: Big name technologists like Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen talk about it, using “in” terms like “misalignment” and “the paperclip maximization problem.”
• In a San Francisco pop-up museum devoted to the topic called the Misalignment Museum, a sign reads, “Sorry for killing most of humanity.”

By one major metric, artificial general intelligence is much closer than you think.

• By one unique metric, we could approach technological singularity by the end of this decade, if not sooner.
• A translation company developed a metric, Time to Edit (TTE), to calculate the time it takes for professional human editors to fix AI-generated translations compared to human ones. This may help quantify the speed toward singularity.
• An AI that can translate speech as well as a human could change society.

After a researcher with a position at DeepMind—the machine intelligence firm owned by Google parent Alphabet—co-authored a paper claiming that AI could feasibly wipe out humanity one day, DeepMind is distancing itself from the work. 

The paper was published recently in the peer-reviewed AI Magazine, and was co-authored by researchers at Oxford University and by Marcus Hutter, an AI researcher who works at DeepMind. The first line of Hutter’s website states the following: “I am Senior Researcher at Google DeepMind in London, and Honorary Professor in the Research School of Computer Science (RSCS) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.” The paper, which currently lists his affiliation to DeepMind and ANU, runs through some thought experiments about humanity’s future with a superintelligent AI that operates using similar schemes to today’s machine learning programs, such as reward-seeking. It concluded that this scenario could erupt into a zero-sum game between humans and AI that would be “fatal” if humanity loses out.  Read More

Read the Paper

Earlier this month, DeepMind presented a new “generalist” AI model called Gato. The model can play Atari video games, caption images, chat, and stack blocks with a real robot arm, the Alphabet-owned AI lab announced. All in all, Gato can do 604 different tasks. 

But while Gato is undeniably fascinating, in the week since its release some researchers have gotten a bit carried away.

One of DeepMind’s top researchers and a coauthor of the Gato paper, Nando de Freitas, couldn’t contain his excitement. “The game is over!” he tweeted, suggesting that there is now a clear path from Gato to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a vague concept of human- or superhuman-level AI. …Unsurprisingly, de Freitas’s announcement triggered breathless press coverage that DeepMind is “on the verge” of human-level artificial intelligence. This is not the first time hype has outstripped reality.

…That’s a shame, because Gato is an interesting step. Some models have started to mix different skills, …DeepMind’s AlphaZero learned to play Go, chess, and shogi, …but here’s the crucial difference: AlphaZero could only learn one task at a time. After learning to play Go, it had to forget everything before learning to play chess, and so on. It could not learn to play both games at once. This is what Gato does: it learns multiple different tasks at the same time, which means it can switch between them without having to forget one skill before learning another. It’s a small advance but a significant one. Read More

Within one century, biological intelligence will be a tiny minority of all sentient life. It will be very rare to be human. It will be very rare to have cells and blood and a heart. Human beings will be outnumbered a thousand to one by conscious machine intelligences.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)1 is about to go from being science fiction to being part of everybody’s day-to-day life. It’s also going to happen in the blink of an eye — because once it gets loose, there is no stopping it from scaling itself incredibly rapidly. Whether we want it to or not, it will impact every human being’s life.

Some people believe the singularity won’t happen for a very long time, or at all. I’d like to discuss why I am nearly certain it will happen in the next 20 years. My overall prediction is based on 3 hypotheses:

1. Scale is not the solution.
2. AI will design AGI.
3. The ball is already rolling.

A new study has warned that it will become impossible to predict the actions of superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI), raising questions over whether humans may eventually lose control.

Research conducted by the Max-Planck Institute for Humans and Machines and published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research has found that in order to accurately predict what an individual AI is going do, scientists would have to run an exact simulation of the system – a feat that will grow more difficult as AI systems become more and more advanced. Read More