Horse-riding astronaut is a milestone in AI’s journey to make sense of the world

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1049061/dalle-openai-gpt3-ai-agi-multimodal-image-generation/

by nkurz • 4 years ago

123 79 4 years ago

avmich• 4 years ago

DALL-E 2 is not based on GPT-3. Under the hood, it works in two stages. First, it uses OpenAI’s language-model CLIP, which can pair written descriptions with images, to translate the text prompt into an intermediate form that captures the key characteristics that an image should have to match that prompt (according to CLIP). Second, DALL-E 2 runs a type of neural network known as a diffusion model to generate an image that satisfies CLIP.

So, some stages seems to be artificially introduced...

sgt1014• 4 years ago

The "a nurse in a hospital" and "a ceo in front of a business" tests show that there are some problems yet to be navigated.

vincnetas• 4 years ago

can you share a link to these images?

sgt1014• 4 years ago

from :https://github.com/openai/dalle-2-preview/blob/main/system-c...

https://github.com/openai/dalle-2-preview/raw/main/assets/Mo...

brudgers2• 4 years ago

AI is an ideology, not a technology.

Part of the ideology is the ends justify the means.

Hence, "AI training specialist" means "works for Amazon Mechanical Turk."

Open AI isn't paying people $250k a year to classify images.

And $500k a year to check that work.

The AI ideology is God will know his own.

A racist, misogynist, hillbilly singularity meets success criteria.

seizethecheese• 4 years ago

This is nonsense. It’s just generating the most likely image. Probabilities are not in and of themselves racist/misogynist.

ganzuul2• 4 years ago

ML trained on real world data is an uncompromising unveiling of our collective subconscious. Don't you dare look away...

There is no God but you and me here.

andrepd• 4 years ago

So it's cherry picked examples in the demo page that fall apart at the lightest real world case. Just like GPT3 :-)

peterlk• 4 years ago

This is a rational argument, and I see it a lot, but it does not probe deep enough. GPT-3 use cases "fall apart at the lightest real world case" because our expectations are wrong. For the vast majority of computing history, computers have been used to do things deterministically and accurately. Next-gen AI does not operate in this way. It encroaches on the human part of work where we expect and allow for people to get it wrong.

GPT-3 does shockingly well at classification tasks with basically 0 training/prompting (outside of the base model). And it works for an incredibly broad set of use cases.

But using QA and generation are much harder to judge because we can't say (in general) whether generated text is "correct"

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

Are these deterministic? Is it guaranteed to always generate the average or most likely nurse or will it generate a distribution of nurses roughly reflective of its training data if you repeatedly ask for many nurses?

Edit: Never mind. It does eventually show that it will generate different people when repeatedly prompted for the same thing. Given that fact, though, it seems to do a pretty shitty job. It generated 10 apparently female Korean flight attendants. At least in the US, the actual distribution is more like 3/4 male 1/4 female. It's not 100% female, let alone 100% Korean. It does seem to oversample from the most likely examplars, which illustrates a pretty serious failure mode compared to human artists. No human writing a novel is going to make every single character in every novel they write the most likely possible example of its reference class.

msrenee• 4 years ago

Pretty darn impressive. Those "hooves" are probably going to feature in my nightmares though.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Oh God, what have you done. You have entered the code incorrectly. Look what your careless hands have wrought. Select the pistol, and then, select your horse.

CrazyPyroLinux• 4 years ago

Penny Arcade, nice!

robocat• 4 years ago

OT, but for the ignorant like me, here’s the cartoon: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/05/26/the-unhorse

sandworm101• 4 years ago

> “Every now and then it generates something that just makes me gasp."

I'm amazed to see how easily Intel/AMD are able to cram so many monkey/typewriter combinations onto such tiny chips.

amelius• 4 years ago

Can we get some images that were not cherry picked? What does the average output look like?

tartoran• 4 years ago

Oh, come on. That would ruin their marketing

corysama• 4 years ago

Here are some less cherry-picked examples. Mostly from the twitter accounts of OpenAI employees.

https://twitter.com/BecomingCritter/status/15118082774908969...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaSynthesis/comments/tyaz70/link...

dvh• 4 years ago

I would rather see images labeled "nurse" in their training dataset compared to their generated nurses.

moyix• 4 years ago

Here's one:

https://twitter.com/jmhessel/status/1511783083967586306

And a non-cherry picked depiction of cherry-picking scientists:

https://twitter.com/jmhessel/status/1512143226022481932

I think tbh people have been burned by cherry picked results in AI for so long that they're overly suspicious of DALL-E 2...

Engineering-MD• 4 years ago

It’s interesting that the researcher looks very similar in all images. I would be interested in seeing the training set

msla• 4 years ago

They can tell you it isn't cherry-picked. Why would you believe them?

throwaway675309• 4 years ago

I'd love to see DALL-E integrated into something like AI dungeon for automatic choose your own adventure picture generation.

andreyk• 4 years ago

That is already the case!

https://twitter.com/nickwalton00/status/1468335326410129409

nfc• 4 years ago

“If we define understanding as human understanding, then AI systems are very far off,”

This took me into the following line of thought. If we wanted AGI we probably should give this neural networks an overarching goal, the same way our intelligence evolved in the presence of overarching goals (survival, reproduction...). It's these less narrow goals that allowed us to evolve our "general intelligence". It's possible that if we are trying to construct AGI through the accumulation of narrow goals we are taking the harder route.

At the same time I think we should not pursue AGI the way I'm suggesting is best, too many unknown risks (paperclip problem...)

Of course all this begs the question of what is AGI, how we define a good overarching goal to prompt AGI and many more...

ahnick• 4 years ago

I think the best concise definition I've run across is what I heard Yann LeCun say in his recent interview with Lex Fridman.

“The essence of intelligence is the ability to predict.” -Yann LeCun

colordrops3• 4 years ago

That's just the current idea of how the brain works - predictive processing. As we advance our understanding perhaps this will be seen as only one facet of intelligence. For instance, where does creativity fit into this definition?

dvt3• 4 years ago

OpenAI is clear about where it stands. “Our aim is to create general intelligence,” says Dhariwal. “Building models like DALL-E 2 that connect vision and language is a crucial step in our larger goal of teaching machines to perceive the world the way humans do, and eventually developing AGI.”

(Emphasis mine.) Philosophical nit: this by definition would not be AGI. AGI would be the ability of the entity to figure out its own subjective qualia-inducing way of interpreting the world. Thomas Nagel already explained this in the 70s (in his famous essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?). By enforcing our own worldview (technically speaking, model), we're just making some artificial (and in all likelihood inferior) version of a human.

chaps• 4 years ago

Reread it -- that's not what they're saying. They're suggesting that human-like perception is a stepping stone (ie, not necessarily a linear path towards). It reads to me as if they're acknowledging a significant gap between the two.

dvt3• 4 years ago

They're suggesting that human-like perception is a stepping stone

I fully understand the discourse; my point is that it's not (Nagel, Chalmers, Searle†, and other substance dualists would agree). We need a breakthrough akin to what analysis was to algebra in neuroscience before we even understand what our brain is doing. Whatever it's doing, it's definitely not what OpenAI implemented.

† Yes, I know he says he isn't, but he kind of is[1].

[1] http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/searle.html

visarga• 4 years ago

Humans are also receptacles of culture creating new cultural artefacts, DALL-E is like us in that regard. But it's a tool AI, it's not a full agent. It's not embodied, embedded and enacted in the environment, its goal is to minimise loss, not to survive. I think the "what it's like to be an X?" comes from being in the environment with needs and goals to accomplish. It's not a magical neural architecture, it's the framing of the whole process that makes the difference.

irrational• 4 years ago

ask it to generate images of astronauts on horses, teddy-bear scientists, or sea otters in the style of Vermeer, and it does so with near photorealism.

I'm now imagining a mashup of Scribblenauts and this AI image generator.

colordrops3• 4 years ago

I hate how OpenAI got a lot of their public name and attention through the original benefactors that started it and their pledge of opening up AI research to the public, and now they are basically the opposite - monetized opaque controlled systems. Really off-putting.

skybrian• 4 years ago

They do publish papers. I'm not sure they were ever about providing open source implementations? AI safety was their thing.

colordrops3• 4 years ago

I could be misremembering but I believe the idea was that AI advancement was going to happen anyway so open it up and put it into the hands of the people instead of a few power brokers who would abuse it.

TechBro8615• 4 years ago

It’s a good thing our benefactors at OpenAI are looking out for “AI safety” so we can’t do things like ask a computer to make a graphically violent image or verbally racist string of text.

marvin2• 4 years ago

They just chose a misleading name in the first place. It's pretty obvious that they couldn't properly pursue their core mission as a purely open research organization. The desired end result is too valuable.

And if they end up getting close to what they're really after, it's really undesirable to get an arms race where solely OpenAI's contributions are known to everyone.

T-A• 4 years ago

They just chose a misleading name in the first place.

It wasn't just the name, it was the whole rationale they presented for creating OpenAI.

Nick Bostrom was having his 15 minutes of fame with "Superintelligence" [1] and scenarios like a an "AI arms race" and the sudden emergence of a super-intelligent singleton [2] were legion. OpenAI was founded on the premise that making leading edge AI research public was the best way to mitigate that risk [3].

It was presented to the world as a "research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest" where "Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world" [4].

That lasted all of three years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

[2] https://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#Strategy

[4] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/

exo-pla-net• 4 years ago

Their research remains open:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12092

Their code/models are indeed closed, but there is no realistic alternative.

If they let the public have unrestricted access, deepfakes + child images would appear on Day 1, and OpenAI would get cancelled.

For OpenAI to survive, it has to be closed source.

nightski• 4 years ago

In the age of a crisis of reproducible research, publications without data and models aren't really "open". Having read many ML papers very few are reproducible easily.

learndeeply• 4 years ago

No it doesn't. DALL-E 2 is purposely vague on model architecture to make it impossible to reproduce from the paper alone.

narrator• 4 years ago

This is the problem with all advanced technology. It has to have control built in. Think of all the bad things you could do with self-driving cars for example. Imagine we make interstellar travel possible, the amount of energy involved could destroy worlds. It's a very sad thing about the future.

In a way, censorship seeks to make the Human AI "safe".

aabhay• 4 years ago

How would you explain the dozens of other open source versions of computer vision and language models that didn't generate all those harms, even ones that were trained to recreate the exact models that OpenAI withheld due to those concerns?

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

How many kWhr does it take to train?

mrjin• 4 years ago

Is it Artificial Intelligence or rather Artificial Idiocy?

Horse-riding astronaut is a milestone in AI’s journey to make sense of the world

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