OpenAI technical goals

https://openai.com/blog/openai-technical-goals/

by runesoerensen • 10 years ago

220 70 10 years ago

jimfleming3• 10 years ago

This is great! The goals seem reasonably ambitious and mostly doable over a few years.

I am surprised by #2: "Build a household robot". It's my understanding that efficient actuation and power are largely unsolved problems outside of the software realm. What's the plan for tackling stairs, variable height targets, manipulator dexterity, power supply, etc. in a general purpose robot with off-the-shelf parts? (Answering these questions may be part of that goal but maybe someone knows more on the subject.)

jhuckestein• 10 years ago

I wonder if OpenAI could define and build against a robot API that hardware robots would implement in different ways. That way OpenAI could focus on the software and various other teams could compete to solve all the mechanical challenges you mention.

nightski• 10 years ago

When it comes to AI/ML most problems seem "doable over a few years". Yet in practice this rarely is the case. These are some extremely lofty goals. The team behind OpenAI is quite capable but to say they'll have any of these done in a few years is quite a stretch. I'm guessing they may achieve one of the goals in a decade. But I'd love to be wrong.

jimfleming3• 10 years ago

It was an off-hand remark. I'm aware of the landscape, though perhaps slightly more optimistic. The first goal is simple enough and largely underway with the Gym. Significant progress has been made on #3 and #4 just in the last year but I agree that "a few years" is a bit brief. I remain doubtful about #2.

ylem• 10 years ago

At least on stairs, I think this is a solvable problem: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601240/an-impressive-walk...

In terms of off-the-shelf: http://makezine.com/2015/05/01/meet-stair-bear-adorable-clim...

I also vaguely recall seeing some demos of first responder robots and stairs. I don't know about the other issues you've raised...

tlb• 10 years ago

Off-the-shelf robots are convenient for developing learning algorithms. When the learning algorithms are good enough to take advantage of more capable hardware, it'll make sense to build it.

davmre• 10 years ago

Pieter Abbeel has been working towards household robots for quite a while; given his involvement and several of his students at OpenAI it's not surprising they'd be thinking along similar lines. The issues you mention are real, but current hardware is already capable of useful tasks if we had software to control it properly. For example, here's a demo of a tele-operated PR2 performing household chores: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GAz5F03Ls#t=60s

JoshTriplett4• 10 years ago

#4, solving multiple games with one agent, seems like a reasonably interesting step towards more general intelligence. An agent that can play a new game without any game-specific information other than "what can I do" and "what should I value" starts to sound a lot more like an agent that can solve non-game problems. Especially if that agent can play games that model real-world problems.

fitzwatermellow• 10 years ago

Goal 5: Inventing the Next Paradigm

Any impetus into actually dreaming up what may come next after GPUs and Async DRL? Non-neural models, quantum computing based AI, optogenetic hacking ;)

Otherwise, excellent list!

nxzero4• 10 years ago

Is OpenAI willing to support true AI having basic rights to given to humans?

If so, why is this not one of the fundamental technical goals?

If not, why?

jimfleming3• 10 years ago

You should have a look a PETRL[0]: People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners :)

[0] http://petrl.org/

castis• 10 years ago

That was way more of an interesting read that I thought it was going to be. Thanks for posting that.

JoshTriplett4• 10 years ago

I would argue that we should avoid building sentient AI in the first place. Human-level or better problem-solving ability does not require the inclusion of sentience or independent agency.

nxzero4• 10 years ago

Then I assume you're against any tech that would allow brains to be digitized, right?

ktta6• 10 years ago

I find it really interesting that Goal 4 is a game playing agent. Deepmind has been focussing on this since the beginning[0] and actually has great progress as far as Atari games go[1].

And DeepMind is able to use a single agent rather than a different specific one for each game. I wonder if OpenAI wants to go in a different direction although RL has considerable success. Whereas the other goals definitely need a lot of work before they are "real-world" functional, especially Goal 3. But of course that depends on their definition of 'useful'.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbsqaJwpu6A

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf

ratsimihah• 10 years ago

I feel like both companies are trying to "solve intelligence" by aiming for true AI, in which case there has to be some overlap in the work they're doing to get there.

argonaut6• 10 years ago

You're mistaken, DeepMind uses a different agent for each game. What's the same across games is the learning method. But the model is trained separately for each game.

ktta6• 10 years ago

I feel like I'm a bit confused at what constitutes a model. You basically have the same 'agent' to start off on the RL process. You can just group the learning agents together and make it (easier to tell it) automatically detect the game that has to be played.

I guess I wanted to say that there isn't a lot different to be done when an agent is being trained for different games. And that makes it a general game playing agent, doesn't it?

Houshalter2• 10 years ago

I'm concerned that none of these goals involve AI safety. Instead all of their goals are nearly the exact opposite, of accelerating AI technology as much as possible.

Safety was one of the main goals they promoted when it was founded. 2 of the 4 authors listed have publicly spoken about their belief of AI as an existential risk.

I'm not saying that a game playing AI is going to take over the world. But it does demonstrate the risk - we still have no idea how to control such an AI. We can train it to get high scores. But it won't want to do anything other than get high scores. And it will do whatever it takes to get the highest score possible, even if it means exploiting the game or hurting other players, or disobeying it's masters.

Now imagine they succeed in making smarter AIs. And their research spawns new research, which inspires new research, etc. Perhaps over several decades we could have AIs that are a lot more formidable than being able to play Pac Man. But we may still not have made any progress on the ability to control them.

astanway2• 10 years ago

Almost no one who actually works or has done serious research in ML is genuinely concerned about "malevolent AI". We are so, so, so far away from anything remotely close to that. Please stop trying to gin up fear and listen to the experts, who uniformly agree that this is not something to be concerned about.

ikeboy• 10 years ago

Obligatory http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-ri...

crpatino• 10 years ago

The issue is not "malevolent AI", the probability of producing an AI with "malevolent goals" by random chance is so much more unlikely than getting any AI at all that it's not even worth it to worry about that.

The problem is "any AI" whose goals are not positively aligned-with/respectul-of human society's values. In terms with Asimov's Lay of Robotics meme, the problem is not robots harming humans, but robots allowing humans to come to harm as a side effect of their actions. This is an important ethical issue that, IMHO, technologist in general are failing to address.

Unethical AIs are only a special case in the sense that they are believed to be able to cause much more chaos and destruction than spammers, patent trolls or high frequency trading firms.

Houshalter2• 10 years ago

The fact they aren't concerned is exactly the problem. They should be. And in fact many are. See the SSC link posted below (http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-ri...), or this survey (http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf). Certainly I am worried about it. There is far from "uniform agreement" that AI is safe. And appeals to authority would not comforting even if there was an authority to appeal to.

alex_hirner• 10 years ago

In contrast to popular fiction, my concerns don't lie in a conspiring super AI. Rather, we should take countermeasures against suffering from a thousand cuts. Flash crashes in financial markets are a precursor to other sytemic risks ahead. Maybe this is a distinction that helps to appreciate safety for AI more.

saltvedt• 10 years ago

"AI: A Modern Approach (...) authors, Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, devote significant space to AI dangers and Friendly AI in section 26.3, “The Ethics and Risks of Developing Artificial Intelligence.”

https://intelligence.org/2013/10/19/russell-and-norvig-on-fr...

In addition, there is the AI Open Letter, which is signed by many "who actually works or has done serious research in ML", including Demis Hassabis and Yann LeCun. From the letter:

"We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do. "

http://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/

Are the experts concerned about a "Skynet scenario"? No. But there is certainly genuine concern from the experts.

auganov• 10 years ago

I am actually genuinely concerned about terrorists developing killer robots. There's already designs out there for robotic turrets that can utilize commodity firearms. I even feel uncomfortable thinking of all the nasty stuff you could build.

gdb2• 10 years ago

We think safety is extremely important, and will have concrete things to say here soon.

tomp2• 10 years ago

Who are you?

ocdtrekkie2• 10 years ago

It may be noted that safety isn't considered a "technical goal", but some other class of goal. And as others have mentioned, in the very short term, safety is inherent by the lack of actual thinking on the part of our "AIs" today.

But I think the biggest concern for OpenAI right now is not being behind the curve. If OpenAI is going to build safe AI, they have to beat everyone else to the level of AI that needs to be made safe!

To use an analogy from a favorite show of mine, Person of Interest[1] OpenAI has to build The Machine before someone else manages to build Samaritan.

It would be particularly scary if someone like Google or Facebook had a monolithic AI capable of accessing large percentages of our information, and influencing our lives using it, before anyone building more ethical AI was capable of doing so.

[1]Person of Interest is an amazing show, it's series finale airs tomorrow on CBS. If you're interested in the topic of morality in artificial intelligence, and enjoy a good scifi show, watch this one.

mrfusion2• 10 years ago

Just realize it takes a couple seasons to get good. Don't quite after the first few shows.

FeepingCreature• 10 years ago

If OpenAI is going to build safe AI, they have to beat everyone else to the level of AI that needs to be made safe!

This is exactly the kind of arms race that the AI safety people have been warning about basically from the start.

Just saying, this does not fill me with confidence.

235337• 10 years ago

See, I feel the more interesting thing about AI safety is not the fear/possibility of a malicious AI, but the ethics of teaching AI things that we have yet to figure out ourselves.

A good example of this is the autonomous car, which is forced into the choice between protecting the human in the car, or the pedestrians on the street. This is an ethical/moral question that most humans cant really come to a consensus about, but we are expecting to be rely on a centralized set of programmers who either through code will force a choice, or (through code again) come up with the process that makes the choice.

Oh and even if a consensus existed about the dangers/nondanagers of AI, you would still have to examine your "Experts opinion bias" to see if they are the only argument you have that is supporting your belief.

PS we need more of the Older semi AI training games, things like RoboCode(with neural Nets), NERO, ect. Iv seen a few pop up over the years but they always fizzle out. Huge opportunity for Tactical AI training as a game.

duaneb• 10 years ago

What does AI safety mean to you, specifically? What kind of scenario would this solve, specifically? What kind of mechanisms would help, specifically? It seems that redognizing danger to humans (particularly in a general case) would itself be an AI problem.

lukeschlather• 10 years ago

I'd rather they focused primarily on existing safety concerns. Google/Alexa/Siri for example all require people to relinquish privacy and control to a third-party to get the benefits of AI. Can we get those same benefits while maintaining privacy and control of our data?

That's great if anyone can have a home robot, but can we have home robots that don't keep logs of everything that goes on in our house at undisclosed locations managed by a multinational corporation with unknown access control standards?

We already have AI safety problems, never mind hypothetical future problems.

wrsh07• 10 years ago

In the opening paragraph, they mention missions of safety and wide accessibility.

Then they say:

We’re also working to solidify our organization's governance structure and will share our thoughts on that later this year.

I interpreted that to mean that their governance structure will be key to the "safety" aspect of the mission.

Like you, though, I await their discussion of safety with great anticipation.

endergen• 10 years ago

This is their opening line: "OpenAI’s mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible."

Real AI isn't coming anytime soon, so it's better to focus on the market imbalance of Google et al's who are rolling up all the smart AI people and technology and have a huge head start. Having more companies exploring more business models that aren't ad based and hopefully are privacy first or non-profit would be much healthier.

willmadden• 10 years ago

The concepts of 'master' and 'control' may simply not apply here. I think the danger is that typical human ignorance and fear will slow what would otherwise be glorious, self driving cars that get me to where I need to be at 140 MPH average with no stops. Look, if it really hits the fan, we'll just fire off a lot of high altitude EMP's with local/analog targeting. Neutron bomb for AI. Unless they faraday cage themselves. Details.

feral• 10 years ago

Question:

"Build a household robot" is high up the list. That doesn't seem inherently 'general'.

Certainly, people have been working on that for years; there are all sorts of subproblems like vision, contextual reasoning etc.

It could be treated as a general problem, requiring a lot of 'common sense'.

But a team which sets out to optimize that particular goal, could spend years on relatively narrow tasks that get good performance returns on household chores (e.g. developing version 10 of the floor cleaning algorithm), but don't really make progress towards the problem of general intelligence.

For me, what was really interesting about the benchmarks that Deepmind chose (the choice of a selection of Atari games) was that they were inherently somewhat general.

Are you not worried that by putting a narrow domain fairly high up, you'll get distracted by narrow tasks, rather than making progress towards what's really interesting - generality? Won't it introduce tension to try and keep the general focus in the presence of a narrow goal, where you can get good returns by overfitting?

argonaut6• 10 years ago

This isn't a particularly meaningful issue.

The problem you describe of falling into the trap of brute-force optimizing a narrow task also applies to the Atari games. In fact it applies even more-so: it would be trivial for a lot of HN programmers to brute-force code an AI for challenging Atari games that deep learning still struggles against (like Montezuma's Revenge). But it would be nontrivial (difficult but still possible) to brute-force code a program for many narrow household robot tasks. You avoid this problem by... not hard-coding brute force solutions/heuristics! The research community can smell BS very easily (HN, not so much).

A household robot is substantially (probably an order of magnitude) more general than Atari games, even for narrow tasks (obviously it is nowhere near the vicinity of the generality of AGI). The perception problem is tremendously more complex. The control/planning problem is similarly tremendously more complex.

ktta6• 10 years ago

But it would be nontrivial (difficult but still possible) to brute-force code a program for many narrow household robot tasks.

How difficult are you talking about here? Similar to training game agents? I really doubt it.

I feel like the training problem is VERY hard in case of real world random object handling (factory like fixed, mechanical situation can be purely hard coded and be much better than a human). In case of virtual games you can just use a bunch of GPUs and accelerate the process. But it is a much more difficult problem in reality. The grasping ability that we have with everyday objects is a marvel once you try to make a computer to do it.

This might be of interest: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...

lowglow• 10 years ago

Are the objectives of "OpenAI" conflicting with the interests of the startups applying to YC? OpenAI is building their own products/platforms and insights acquired from AI/Robotics startups applying and sharing information about what they're working on might be used as a competitive advantage.

Is there an information firewall between what startups are sharing in the hope of investment and what is shared to advance OpenAI? If there is a firewall, how is it enforced?

mrfusion2• 10 years ago

I wish they had mentioned asimovs three laws.

OpenAI technical goals

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