AGI-21: Oct 15-18, 2021
Oct. 15th, 2021 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmmagi-conference.org/
(Registration for online participation is free; a small fee if one wants to do it in person.)
This is not a "first-tier" AI conference, but this year has a larger number of interesting "external" keynote speakers than usual (perhaps, people are starting to feel that "artificial general intelligence" is no longer a far-in-the-future remote topic, but something becoming acutely relevant): Yoshua Bengio, Francois Chollet, Tomas Mikolov, Joseph Urban.
(Registration for online participation is free; a small fee if one wants to do it in person.)
This is not a "first-tier" AI conference, but this year has a larger number of interesting "external" keynote speakers than usual (perhaps, people are starting to feel that "artificial general intelligence" is no longer a far-in-the-future remote topic, but something becoming acutely relevant): Yoshua Bengio, Francois Chollet, Tomas Mikolov, Joseph Urban.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-17 02:33 pm (UTC)Hopefully, today will be more interesting (most of the invited keynote speakers are today).
(Late start again; I don't know, it might be better to just watch a replay later unless one wants to participate in chat; but I'll try to watch real-time. Schedule change: Francois Chollet first.)
Francois Chollet is pessimistic, is focusing on things which don't adapt and generalize well, (deliberately?) ignoring things which do (perhaps, it is just a function on his Keras focus; a typical work in this field does not generalize, but some do generalize, it's just takes special efforts focused on that; but it might be that autonomous driving does work less well than it should because those systems are too specialized; perhaps, if they are taught to do more tasks than strictly necessary they would work better). The end result is that he is very biased (similarly to his views on impossibility of intelligence explosion; so that's not new about him). So, his criticism is mostly correct about the bulk of the field, but what is missing from his presentation is that many people came to these conclusions a while ago, and actually started to do something about that and actually started to create more adaptable systems.
And we should do more of those!
Then his talk becomes more useful, as he talks about his nice work, in particular, his Abstraction & Reasoning Corpus (ARC) test set: https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1228011358362324992?lang=en ; https://www.kaggle.com/c/abstraction-and-reasoning-challenge/overview ; https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
Prototype-centric abstraction vs program-centric abstraction (both are important).
Yes, a useful talk, if one discounts the initial segment. A lot of interesting material.
At the end he is talking non-sense on program synthesis, ignoring a variety of advances enabling to avoid discrete search. So the end is not too useful either.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-17 05:49 pm (UTC)(Interesting, difficult; he thinks language is helping to reason "out of distribution"; but then I would say that Transformers might already have this capability (not even a surprise, the only question is whether attention use there is enough for "consciousness", or not quite).)
I really need to listen to this once again.
Discussion between Ben and Yoshua is interesting :-)
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Date: 2021-10-17 07:00 pm (UTC)So far, disappointing. I don't see much in terms of insights yet.
He advocates the ALife approach (which I like too), but so far he is not saying new non-trivial things about that.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-17 08:45 pm (UTC)https://sites.google.com/site/jonathanwarrell/ (this has slides)
A very technical talk; he seems to be closely related with some of the newer Ben/OpenCog developments.