Posted: Mar 07, 2017 11:42 am
I did my Masters back in 2007, and the top student (out of 200) in the year did his thesis on Go using genetic algorithms. He was an avid Go-player (not sure which Dan), and lived for three months in China to play. By the end of his thesis, he thought Go was basically hopeless, and changed to a different area of AI for his PhD.
So this stuff surprised me. Deep-learning people seem to be everywhere now. The new guy sat opposite me is one of them, and his old supervisor was a big deepmind guy at Oxford who has now "sold out" to work for Google. Our first chat in the pub was around the future of AI, and he ranted pretty extensively over scare-stories from people like Stephen Hawking and Sam Harris, insisting that these guys don't know what the fuck they're on about and that all this deep learning stuff is still basically just numerical optimisation (though I can't say I understand the maths myself).
On the other hand, another of my mates, who did his PhD at Imperial, on a topic which he believed was in the direction of General AI, submitted the first version of his thesis with a dismal conclusion that all such research should be abandoned lest we unleash hell. We have pretty much the same argument every time we meet up, with me saying that I don't buy the pessimism for a second. My concerns over AI are more pedestrian: I worry that people are going to start relying on recommender systems and other automated systems as authorities and forget to do sanity checks, ignoring that they'll often just be finding really shitty optima, over-fitting and otherwise solving for the completely wrong problem.
So this stuff surprised me. Deep-learning people seem to be everywhere now. The new guy sat opposite me is one of them, and his old supervisor was a big deepmind guy at Oxford who has now "sold out" to work for Google. Our first chat in the pub was around the future of AI, and he ranted pretty extensively over scare-stories from people like Stephen Hawking and Sam Harris, insisting that these guys don't know what the fuck they're on about and that all this deep learning stuff is still basically just numerical optimisation (though I can't say I understand the maths myself).
On the other hand, another of my mates, who did his PhD at Imperial, on a topic which he believed was in the direction of General AI, submitted the first version of his thesis with a dismal conclusion that all such research should be abandoned lest we unleash hell. We have pretty much the same argument every time we meet up, with me saying that I don't buy the pessimism for a second. My concerns over AI are more pedestrian: I worry that people are going to start relying on recommender systems and other automated systems as authorities and forget to do sanity checks, ignoring that they'll often just be finding really shitty optima, over-fitting and otherwise solving for the completely wrong problem.