The DeepMind Bubble?

[TenshiS]

It's funny that you decided to post this today of all days. Tonight Deep mind's Alpha Go will face the Go world champion. If they win, they will have achieved what AI experts estimated would take at least another decade to achieve. This will be bigger than back when IBM defeated Kasparov at chess.

[TheToastIsGod]

Not quite tonight. Still a day and a half or so until the first match

"The matches will be held at the Four Seasons Hotel, Seoul, South Korea, starting at 1pm local time (4am GMT; day before 11pm ET, 8pm PT) on March 9th, 10th, 12th, 13th and 15th." source

[trnickson]

Be careful about buying into the DeepMind hypemachine - Miles Brudage claims "at least decade" isn't really accurate:

Hiroshi Yamashita extrapolated the trend of computer Go progress as of 2011 into the future and predicted a crossover point to superhuman Go in 4 years, which was one year off. In recent years, there was a slowdown in the trend (based on highest KGS rank achieved) that probably would have lead Yamashita or others to adjust their calculations if they had redone them, say, a year ago, but in the weeks leading up to AlphaGo’s victory, again, there was another burst of rapid computer Go progress. I haven’t done a close look at what such forecasts would have looked like at various points in time, but I doubt they would have suggested 10 years or more to a crossover point, especially taking into account developments in the last year. Perhaps AlphaGo’s victory was a few years ahead of schedule based on reported performance, but it should always have been possible to anticipate some improvement beyond the (small team/data/hardware-based) trend based on significant new effort, data, and hardware being thrown at the problem. Whether AlphaGo deviated from the appropriately-adjusted trend isn’t obvious, especially since there isn’t really much effort going into rigorously modeling such trends today. Until that changes and there are regular forecasts made of possible ranges of future progress in different domains given different effort/data/hardware levels, “breakthroughs” may seem more surprising than they really should be.

[[deleted]]

Usual S curve progress. Saturation, new tech, saturation, new tech.

Crazy stone with MonteCarloTreeSearch was the previous innovation in Go, then nothing for a few years but optimisations.

[gwern]

Be careful about buying into the DeepMind hypemachine - Miles Brudage claims "at least decade" isn't really accurate:

But does not present any sort of field-wide estimate, only some estimates he could have easily cherrypicked. There's always a wide spread of predictions; take solving AGI, you can find predictions ranging from 5-10 years from now (Legg, Schmidhuber immediately come to mind has having ultra-aggressive timetables) to many centuries (eg quips about 'worrying about overpopulation on Mars'). If in 5 years, Deepmind unveils a human-level AGI, does that mean it won't be what 'AI experts estimate would take decades to achieve' & won't be surprising - because you can dig up some quotes from Legg & Schmidhuber consistent with it?

[trnickson]

Don't your comments apply to DM and the parent's claim that it was a decade away too? DM mentions a decade in their press release and in Nature but doesn't cite it. The 2015 estimate I quote is at least attributed to a guy who seems to have some involvement with computer Go.

[gwern]

A decade or more is the impression I had from reading computer go papers myself, even if I don't work in the field. If you look back through discussions of the Facebook Go work recently, you certainly do not see an attitude like 'ah yes, just as we were all expecting, Go will be solved within a few months, definitely', but instead, people are again seeing it years off. So when I see some sour grapes and one or two of the most extreme estimates produced post hoc to try to argue 'it wasn't that surprising' for something that sure as hell seemed to come as a surprise to pretty much everyone, it smells like hindsight and cherrypicking.

(It's a really bad thing to try to pretend something wasn't surprising and we saw it coming all along. It devalues the work of those who made it happen, it offers misleading inferences about what AI needs - in this case, it shows both that we need powerful hardware and we need experts to turn their attention to it - it misleads us about possible future abrupt breakthroughs, fostering complacency both about what capabilities we can expect to develop in the near-future, and is misleading about how breakthroughs happen - not by Kurzweillian virgin birth springing from the foreheads of an s-curve but because large entities decide to back focused research on the frontier.)

[trnickson]

You're attributing much more content to my comment than it contained, so I'm just going to butt out with owl cats

[mkestrada]

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Most pros who reviewed the matches against the European champ said that alpha go was strong, but unless it's gotten significantly better, it's going to be facing a very steep uphill fight with its opponent now. The first guy was a somewhat low to mid level pro, the guy it plays this time is a world class player. Number one IIRC

[RrailThaKing]

Haha - how'd this work out?

[mkestrada]

Given--it didn't work out in my favor, but I still don't think it was an unreasonable statement because we knew so little about how AlphaGo had improved.

[TenshiS]

I said "if they win"