On ai
- The physics Nobel went to neural networks
Hopfield and Hinton won the physics prize, and Hassabis and Jumper shared chemistry for AlphaFold. A mechanical engineer's reaction to physics and AI converging.
2 min reads likes comments - The decade cameras learned to see
Looking back at 2010 to 2019 from the end of it: the moments that mattered to me, what I got right and wrong on this blog, and one bet for the 2020s.
2 min reads likes comments - The Bitter Lesson, read by someone who hand-built facial features
Rich Sutton says 70 years of AI research show that general methods plus computation beat human knowledge every time. He's right, and it stings. My one objection is about data.
2 min reads likes comments - AlphaStar and the fairness of fast hands
DeepMind's StarCraft agent beat two pros 10-0, then lost the one game where it had to move a camera like a person. What counts as intelligence when the body is different.
2 min reads likes comments - AlphaGo Zero threw away human games and got better
Starting from random play, with no human data, it beat the version that beat Lee Sedol 100 games to 0 after three days. Human knowledge was a ceiling.
2 min reads likes comments - Ke Jie in Wuzhen
The world's top Go player lost 3-0 to AlphaGo in China this week, and Chinese viewers mostly couldn't watch it live. Why this match will matter more in China than the Lee Sedol one did.
2 min reads likes comments - Poker fell
CMU's Libratus beat four top professionals at heads-up no-limit hold'em over twenty days. Hidden information was supposed to protect humans a while longer.
2 min reads likes comments - Move 37
AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol four games to one. The move everyone is talking about, how the system found it, and why self-play is the part that matters.
2 min reads likes comments - Re-reading Society of Mind as an engineering manager
Marvin Minsky died this week, the same week DeepMind announced a Go program that beat a professional. Two very different ideas of how minds get built.
2 min reads likes comments