Right on cue, this past week heralded in an announcement of OpenAI, a new non-profit started by a number of tech luminaries to spearhead AI research that is publicly accessible. The motivation is that apparently these scions of capitalism lose faith in Adam Smith’s invisible hand when it comes to AI R&D. Musk continues to promote the idea that AI will be humanity’s largest existential threat. Challenging this view, the HBR asks if “OpenAI [is] Solving the Wrong Problem“, pointing to the implied lack of trust in capitalism. This is similar to my own parry: that the biggest existential threat to humanity is humanity. Under this premise, the idea of focusing on AI/human symbiosis seems downright crazy, since AI don’t have amygdalas.
Credit: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, et al.
Returning to more tangible issues, the HBR article notes that the organizations best able to exploit the knowledge coming out of OpenAI would be those with the most computational resources and best data. This is no different from the status quo, since most research is already public. This is basically an extension of the academic system, which already follows this model. Research institutions, whether academic or corporate, know the value of publicly publishing research. The secret sauce is still the data, along with the methodology for encoding information. A good example of this is research from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, MIT, and U Toronto on using deep learning for story comprehension. This is impressive research with a lot of moving parts (video frames, script dialogue, Q&A). Judging from the article and the associated paper, at its core the system appears to be a probabilistic classifier that uses video frames and dialogue as supplementary data. Again the point is how important the dataset and the encoding of the data is to the overall …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com