Re: Followup thoughts

Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn’t sound super hard. High-level linking of a large number of deep nets sounds like the right approach or at least a key part of the right approach. ███████████████████████████████

The probability of DeepMind creating a deep mind increases every year. Maybe it doesn’t get past 50% in 2 to 3 years, but it likely moves past 10%. That doesn’t sound crazy to me, given their resources.

In any event, I have found that it is far better to overestimate than underestimate competitors.

This doesn’t mean we should rush out and hire weak talent. I agree that nothing good would be achieved by that. What we need to do is redouble our efforts to seek out the best people in the world, do whatever it takes to bring them on board and imbue the company with a high sense of urgency.

It will be important for OpenAI to achieve something significant in the next 6 to 9 months to show that we are for real. Doesn’t need to be a whopper breakthrough, but it should be enough for key talent around the world to sit up and take notice.

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Several points:

• It is not the case that once we solve “concepts,” we get AI. Other problems that will have to be solved include unsupervised learning, transfer learning, and lifetime learning. We’re also doing pretty badly with language right now. It does not mean that these problems will not see significant progress in the coming years, but it is not the case that there is only one problem that stands between us and full human level AI.

• We can’t build AI today because we lack key ideas (computers may be too slow, too, but we can’t tell). Powerful ideas are produced by top people. Massive clusters help, and are very worth getting, but they play a less important role.

• We will be able to achieve a conventionally significant result in the next 6 to 9 months, simply because the people we already have are very good. Achieving a field-altering result will be harder, riskier, and take longer. But we have a not unreasonable plan for that as well.