>Who said "overnight"? I don't see that word used in the article. "Overnight" in the scheme of technological progress. Research is slow, and especially in experimentally dense fields it can take years to make decent progress on a seemingly simple research question. The development of human-level AI is not a simple research question, and historical attempts at estimating how long it will take to make progress on it have been wrong by several orders of magnitude in the past (there are many more recent and varied examples but remember the Dartmouth Conference?). There is little reason to believe that our ability to estimate the amount of work required has gotten better. Claims that meaningful progress can be made in just a few years on such a complicated and poorly specified problem should be taken with great suspicion, and should be conditioned on the prior of us all historically having a very poor understanding of what and how long it will take to make progress in this field. > But regardless that's not an argument. Computer software often has bugs. The first AIs may also have bugs. It doesn't mean they can't be dangerous. It doesn't mean the bugs can't be worked out. Bugs or no bugs, the point I was making was about the time scale at which AI research operates and the current state of technology. On top of the already great difficulties we've historically had with estimating the progress of AI research, modern software engineering as a trade is notorious for three things: high project failure rates, the underestimation of project cost estimates, and the underestimation of project time estimates. I am not saying that it's unnecessary to worry about the future of automation technology or AI, but that the time scales espoused here and the projected successes are not founded in anything but wishful thinking in light of the current state of the art. > Betting the existence of the world on software bugs is just insane. I think we have very different positions on AI risk. I also think that much of the discussion centered around the existential threat allegedly posed by AI detracts from many of the more immediately real problems caused by growing automation in industry and bias in current ML systems, and gives the public at large a very skewed idea of what is possible in the near-future. I believe that this has a negative impact on the field as a whole. > Um what? Many, maybe even most, AI researchers don't release source code. OpenAI does release most of their code. He just said they won't release all of it if they actually get close to building an AI. Yes that may make other researchers lives harder. That's the point. My point is that there is in general a reproducibility problem with a lot of modern science (CS journals especially can wind up being mostly write-only because of an early reticence to release experiment code and data). A public figure claiming that there are altruistic reasons for this sort of behavior for reasons of alleged safety is, in my view, a bad thing because it normalizes this, again setting back the field as a whole. >OpenAI produces real AI research I was thinking more about their support of MIRI. If you want to talk about OpenAI I would contend that the goal of furthering AI research would be better served by providing grant funding for established research groups. > No one thinks gradient descent is magic, just that the results it produces are very complex and hard to understand. I was obviously being hyperbolic, but even so he explicitly states with regards to neural networks "you have _no_ idea what they’re doing, and they can’t tell you", emphasis mine. I don't disagree that sometimes it can be difficult to interpret the behavior of deep networks, but for a respected public figure to write off all of the computational learning theory work and all of the experimental work that has gone into trying to provide explanations for modern advances in machine learning is incredibly dismissive, and it gives the public at large a wrongheaded idea of what the current state of the art looks like.

>OpenAI produces real AI research. Yeah, one of their researchers commented about this article on Facebook recently. He said that their philosophy was pretty broad like the article mentioned, but they have a more robust set of tasks and things they are working on.

I didn't say he didn't, and I don't doubt that he does, it's just that his attitude towards AI programming is really naive and sensationalist and you'd expect someone with any amount of experience working with computers to know better.