awal2

Ok, so there's a lot of tension here:

1. A lot of people want these systems to be open, and don't want the power that comes along with them to be locked up in the hands of a few rich people.

2. But some people also think these systems are powerful and don't want them in the hands of bad-faith actors (spammers, scammers, propagandists).

3. A lot of people also want these systems to be weakly safe and not have negative externalities when used in good faith (avoid spitting out racism when prompted with innocent questions). This is already hard.

4. Even better would be for the system to be strongly safe and be really hard to use for bad-faith purposes, but this seems unreasonably hard.

5. It's often easier to develop the "unsafe" version of something first and then figure out the details of safety once it's actually able to do something. This is basically where OpenAI is now.

6. The details around liability for the harms caused by this kind of thing are not clear at all.

So OpenAI is in this position where it has built this thing that is not yet weakly safe. People have very different ideas about how potentially harmful this could be, ranging from very dismissive ("there's tons of racism on the internet already, who cares?") to the very not dismissive ("rich white tech people are exacerbating inequities by subjecting us to their evil racist AI systems!").

What should OpenAI do with this thing? Keep it locked up so that it doesn't hurt anybody? Release it to the world and push accountability onto the end users? Brush aside the ethical questions and use the hype generated by the above tensions to get as rich as possible? So far their answer seems to be somewhere cautiously in the middle.

My personal opinion is that these questions will be very important for real AGI, but this ain't it, so the issues may not be as bad as they seem. On the other hand, maybe this is a useful test case for how to deal with these problems for when we do actually get there? Also from past experience, it's probably not a good idea for them to allow open access to something that spits out unprompted racism. I would like to see OpenAI more open, but I also realize that it's very hard for them to make any decision in this space without making people unhappy and generating a lot of bad press and accusations.

You can do sprite matching using new fangled ML tools and save the same amount of developer time.

When all you have is a hammer

The reputation of a university takes decades to shape and is tied to the reputations of individual professors. For the other schools to "learn to replicate" Berkeley's success, all of their professors would have to become the top experts in their fields overnight. If the professors knew how to do that, they would have done it already, and then a lot of them would have tried to move Berkeley because it has a better reputation.

I'm not saying the other schools have no experts, just that it's a situation where talent tends to concentrate.

Monocular depth estimation has gotten really good recently though[0]. Not saying this one paper/method is 100% sufficient, but we're closing the gap in this one capability (depth estimation from pure vision) quite rapidly.

[0] https://roxanneluo.github.io/Consistent-Video-Depth-Estimati...

I've worked with these (Azure Kinect), and they are quite nice, but they are much bigger and heavier and require a lot more power.

This is a popular take, but (with respect) I don't think a more aggressive DA is the answer for the following reasons:

A. The problem is too big to just arrest and charge everybody. There aren't enough police to track all the petty crime even if you had a DA with an appetite to charge them.

B. Even if you start heavily prosecuting the few people you do have the resources to bring in, this isn't enough of a deterrent to stop other people who are committing small time property crime. People aren't doing it simply because they can get away with it, they're doing it out of desperation.

In my opinion (feel free to disagree) the problem won't go away until there is real upward mobility for the lowest end of the economic spectrum so that people have something better to do than break into people's houses, cars and garages. There's a perverse dynamic where if you have zero money it's probably easier to be in the city of Seattle than pretty much anywhere else nearby (more shelters, more services and more other people already living in tents and vans). At the same time, the city is incredibly expensive, and there aren't a lot of entry-level jobs for people trying to get out of poverty, so making the jump from zero to stable seems like it must be really really hard here. So there's a huge wealth/income gap without any real bridge to get across it which leads to a lot of desperation, and (I think) that has more to do with anything than whatever soft policies in the DA's office.

I also don't think I witnessed much crime until I moved to Seattle. In the six years I've been here though I've witnessed:

1. Somebody broke into my Aunt's place while nobody was home and took some jewelry and a cell phone. Police came by, handed her a form, said nice things for five minutes then took off. Never heard anything about it again.

2. My car window smashed after being parked on the street overnight. I called the police. They pointed me to a website where I could report it so that they could keep track of statistics, but said they don't investigate individual cases. Never heard anything about it again.

3. I saw someone in a car pulling the key cylinder out and doing a thing that looked like what people do when they hot wire a car in movies (I know I'm surprised this is still a thing, it was an older car). Walked to a safe distance, called the cops. I never heard anything about it again.

4. I saw a person trying to use a screwdriver to pry the lock off a neighbor's garage as I was walking to the bus. Walked a safe distance, called the police. Never heard anything about it again.

5. People broke into the parking garage at my apartment complex and broke into cars several times. Neighbors called the police. Each time, somebody comes by, hands over a form, says there's nothing they can do. Never heard anything about it again.

I hate that this app exists. Seems terrible for all the reasons. I'm also not a hard core law-and-order person, and I don't think the answer is beefing up local law enforcement. But I can also empathize with people who live here and feel unsafe, and are looking for someone who will actually provide some level of security, although I think it's misguided to turn to this kind of app/service.

El Camion taco truck on Sand Point way is pretty good

Right. I think the question though is why isn't somebody fixing this situation? There's money sitting on the table for them when they figure it out and get their act together.

The fundamental truth of ML at the moment seems to be that gathering data takes at least as much effort and infrastructure (and often much more) than actually training the models.

Calvinball?

https://xkcd.com/1002/

That comic is from 2012, and since then Arimaa, Go and Poker have moved solidly into the "Computers Can Beat Top Humans" category. Jeopardy would probably be there too if there was a consistent effort behind it. I think the Starcraft AI is pretty good these days, but people argue over things like APM restrictions.

You know an organization is corrupt AF when someone can use it to make the US military look like a bastion of accountability.

It's unfortunate that Alireza isn't mentioned by name in the headline and top photo accompanying the article is of Magnus alone holding a trophy.

I can buy this argument for a new leader of a small company, but at the time these things took place, Ed was a senior leader at a very high level for ~ten years. Also, at the time that the lawsuit covers, it was definitely not 400, but probably closer to a thousand employees, and more importantly for at least most of that period Pixar was a wholly owned component of one of the largest entertainment companies in the world (Disney). So Ed either should have known, or he shouldn't have been in a position to make those kinds of decisions. Furthermore, at the time of the lawsuit, this was not some small mom-and-pop shop trying to eke out an honest living, but was the most successful animation studio in the world for a decade, whose films were producing hundreds of millions in profits every twelve to eighteen months, so it's not like they were in some tight pinch and couldn't afford to compete on wages, they just didn't want to. As one of the principle people behind Pixar, Ed also benefited enormously from the studio's success, so to see him trying to suppress the wages of others is disappointing. In light of all this, the "oopsie, didn't mean to" line doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

With that said, he's done a lot of cool things, and deserves recognition and credit for a lot of important pieces of technology. This award is deserved.

For reference, I was involved in the class-action lawsuit as an employee of one of the other studios involved in the price fixing ring.

+University of Washington

When somebody installs Linux on their computer without knowing what they are doing they might make break their computer. When somebody tries to install after-market self-driving equipment in their car without knowing what they are doing they could easily kill people.

Despite the luck/noise in Poker, there are reasonable measures of performance, and while I'm not an expert in this area, the bot seems to be doing very well (see paper for details). Poker is not a "crap game for AI" it's actually quite a good game. It's a very simple example of a game with a lot of randomness (a feature not a bug) and hidden information that still admits a wide variety of skill levels (expert play is much better than intermediate play is much better than novice play). This is a great accomplishment.

More links for reference: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/pluribus-first-ai-to-beat-pros-... https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/scie...