Unmaking Sense

Episode 11.23: Google’s Gemini from DeepMind and some of its implications for education and life.

This week Google announced the newest AI tool called “Gemini”. It is an integrated multimodal platform that doesn’t stitch together AIs that were originally trained on separate areas, such as video and audio and text and image. It starts from an integrated base and can therefore deal with all of these things straight out of the box. It can mark homework, correct it, and suggest new things ways to approach it, new ways to process it and it can provide new problems to solve to practise the same skills. The teacher as traditionally conceived is redundant. But what about motivation, about the question why it’s worth anyone ever learning this at all?

Episode 11.22: How Q-learning overcomes the need to search to the end of every branch of a tree.

The problem with chess is that searching beyond a few moves ahead causes a combinatorial explosion: the number of possibilities overwhelms us. So how does Q-learning overcome this problem?

Episode 11.21: Solving mathematical problems using Process (PRM) and Outcome Reward (ORM) Models.

A footnote to the OpenAI saga involving trying to improve the AIs’ mathematical reasoning.

Episode 11.20: Q-learning and AIs that change their own methods of operation.

A continuation of 11.19.

Episode 11.19: Q* = The latest speculation about what really happened at OpenAI regarding Altman.

The twitterati (exorati doesn’t quite do it) are speculating that what the board were concerned about over Altman’s alleged “lack of candour” concerned undisclosed research into an amalgamation of GPT technology with Q-learning that could give (or in some versions already has given) rise to an AI capable of cracking the top encryption algorithm in use: AES 192. Nobody knows for sure, but the speculation is rife.

Episode 11.18: The Dorothea Brooke Syndrome and why nobody knows what is going on most of the time.

Reading the future is computationally expensive, which is why so few can do it at all and most can only imperfectly for very brief periods of time. AGI might be able to do better.

Episode 11.17: The AGI that sees patterns no human intellect can discern, and some implications.

To be able to see patterns that no one else can see confers upon an AGI, at least potentially the capacity to see the future more clearly than any human being conceited and that has very serious implications for the way we deploy AGIs because the future that they see and the way they evaluate it, and the way they suggest that we should try to aim for it or aim away from it could have very very serious consequences indeed.

Episode 11.16: What is AGI and how might it be able to see more than we humans could ever see?

The key to artificial general intelligence is not that it is just more intelligent than any other AI, but that it will be able to see patterns in data in which it has not been trained to see them, and discern in them patterns and their likely consequences that no human being or lesser AI could ever conceivably see. And the question that we and those considering the ethics of AI need to address is “What constraining factors are there to prevent an AI with the power to affect the world from acting in the best interests of the world in ways that we as human beings might not think to be ethical, or in fact, in the best interests of the world?” We are in familiar territory, the territory of John Stuart Mill’s famous question, whether we ever would feel justified in killing 10 people to benefit 30, 300, 3000 or 300 million people, and how we would or could train our AI to make similar decisions.

Episode 11.15: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is effectively here in all but name.

When, as is the case with the latest versions of online chatbots. an artificial intelligence can respond to almost every conceivable kind of question, and service almost every conceivable request, there I think a case can be made for saying that we are at AGI in all but name.

Episode 11.14: AGI will arise under the influence of international competition to stay ahead.

AGI will arise because nations will engage in just the same kind of arms race that led to the development of nuclear arsenals and mutually assured destruction, for the simple reason that they dare not do anything else for fear of falling behind, and so falling prey to the devices that other people have developed. If the only way to defend ourselves is to develop a means of scrutinising everyone’s behaviour all the time, then we will in effect have created an AGI that has all the powers that we have historically traditionally attributed to our deities. The only difference will be that these deities will exist and be real, and will be fighting one another rather as the Greek and Roman gods were thought to do, for good or ill.