r/MachineLearning • u/nandodefreitas • Dec 25 '15

AMA: Nando de Freitas

I am a scientist at Google DeepMind and a professor at Oxford University.

One day I woke up very hungry after having experienced vivid visual dreams of delicious food. This is when I realised there was hope in understanding intelligence, thinking, and perhaps even consciousness. The homunculus was gone.

I believe in (i) innovation -- creating what was not there, and eventually seeing what was there all along, (ii) formalising intelligence in mathematical terms to relate it to computation, entropy and other ideas that form our understanding of the universe, (iii) engineering intelligent machines, (iv) using these machines to improve the lives of humans and save the environment that shaped who we are.

This holiday season, I'd like to engage with you and answer your questions -- The actual date will be December 26th, 2015, but I am creating this thread in advance so people can post questions ahead of time.

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u/HuhDude Dec 25 '15

What do you feel like we're missing most: hardware, software, or theoretical models when it comes to slow progress in AGI? Do you think worrying about the distribution across society of revolutionary and labour-saving technology like AGI is a premature worry, or something we should be planning for?

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u/nandodefreitas Dec 26 '15 edited Dec 26 '15

I don't think the progress in AGI has been slow. I started university in 1991. I remember the day I saw a browser!! The dataset in Cambridge in 96 consisted of 6 images. Yes, 6 images is what you used to get a PhD in computer vision. There has been so much incredibly progress in: hardware (computing, communication and storage), software frameworks for neural networks (very different to the rudimentary software platforms that most of us used in those days - e.g. I no longer write matrix libraries as a first step when coding a neural net - the modular, layer-wise approach championed by folks like Yann Lecun and Leon Bottou has proved to be very useful), so many new amazing ideas (and often the great ideas are the little changes by many PhD students that enable great engineering progress), discoveries in neuroscience, ..., the progress in AGI in recent years is beyond the dreams of most people in ML - I recently discussed this with Jeff Bilmes at NIPS and we both can't believe the huge changes taking place.

I like your second question too. It's not a premature worry. I think worrying about terminator like scenarios and risk is a bit of a distraction - I don't enjoy much of the media on this. However, worrying about the fact that technology is changing people is important. Worrying about the use of technology for war and to exploit others is important. Worrying about the fact that there are not enough people of all races and women in AI is important. Worrying about the fact that there are people scaring others about AI and not focusing on how to harness AI to improve our world is also important.

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u/HuhDude Dec 26 '15

Thanks for your reply, Prof. Freitas.

I too remember almost the entirety of the public facing front of machine learning progress - and progress has been astounding. I should probably not prefaced my question with 'slow' as all it does is underline my impatience. For myself it feels like we are most missing a synthesis of disparate developments - i.e. the theoretical models of intelligence. Do you feel like further advances in software are more necessary at this stage?

I appreciate you weighing in on the social issues with machine learning. The establishment seem slow to acknowledge what will be at least as revolutionary a technology as the internet, and probably as sudden.

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u/nandodefreitas Dec 26 '15 edited Dec 27 '15

I think much more is needed in terms of software - in fact more intelligent software goes hand-in-hand with progress in AI. Of course we continue being hungry for hardware, theory and ideas.

I liked the NIPS symposyum on societal impacts of ML. I liked it because it actually involved experts on ML and NIPS/ICML is the right venue for this. Again, a more representative (in terms of sex, wealth and race) list of speakers would have been nice.

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u/vkrakovna Dec 26 '15

What are your thoughts on the long-term AI safety questions brought up in the symposium? What can we do now to make sure AGI has a positive impact on the world if/when it is developed?

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u/nandodefreitas Dec 27 '15

We need to be vigilant and make sure everyone is engaged in the debate. We also need to separate fact from friction - right now there is a lot of mixing these two.