[HN Gopher] Did GoogleAI Just Snooker One of Silicon Valley's Sh...
___________________________________________________________________
Did GoogleAI Just Snooker One of Silicon Valley's Sharpest Minds?
Author : TeacherTortoise
Score : 119 points
Date : 2022-09-15 19:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (garymarcus.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (garymarcus.substack.com)
| kache_ wrote:
| oh no musk ignored my twitter DM it must be because he's scared
| of taking a bet and therefore I am right
|
| btw, AGI is coming 2030. Source? It was revealed to me in a
| dream. Check my profile to see where you can email to take bets.
| [deleted]
| i_like_apis wrote:
| I wish more articles followed the standard essay format. At least
| state your main thesis in the first paragraph.
|
| There are interesting things buried in here, but I don't have
| time for rambling.
|
| The edge cases of image models have been more succinctly
| summarized and speculated upon elsewhere.
| version_five wrote:
| Yes I've noticed that a lot of authors expect you to read
| through some parable before they tell you what they are going
| to tell you. It would be fine with an abstract or even a
| sentence below the title that says "ML models are not being
| adequately evaluated for composability and it makes them look
| more intelligent than they are". Just diving into "consider
| clever Hans" makes it tough to know if it's worth reading.
| peteradio wrote:
| One idea to try to train the AI about compositionality, feed it
| Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss. It's hard to understand that it would
| misunderstand the meaning of "on" or "in" or "under" when there
| are such nice illustrations. I've got tons of great ideas and I'm
| open for hire!
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Train AI models, not children!
| dekhn wrote:
| is there a difference?
|
| I had kids and they were the best machine learnign systems
| I've worked with.
| [deleted]
| version_five wrote:
| This is such a good idea, someone please try this if you're set
| up to make it happen easily.
|
| Starting with fox on Knox and Knox in box and moving up to a
| tweedle beetle battle in a puddle in a bottle and the bottles
| on a poodle and the poodles eating noodles...
|
| I dont see any evidence any of these models will draw it
| correctly, but would love to see what it produces.
| powera wrote:
| I don't believe "compositionality" is a serious obstacle.
|
| It is a different issue than generating an image based on a bag-
| of-words, so it isn't surprising that an attempt to solve that
| issue didn't immediately solve the other.
|
| But a variety of approaches can easily solve this problem.
| ummonk wrote:
| Yes, especially when machine translation seems to handle it
| just fine.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >I think he is so far I offered to bet him a $100,000 he was
| wrong; enough of my colleagues agreed with me that within hours
| they quintupled my bet, to $500,000. Musk didn't have the guts to
| accept, which tells you a lot.
|
| What a bloviating egomaniac. Does Musk really have the time to
| deal with pissant researchers like him? Whats 500k to a man worth
| a hundred billion?
| version_five wrote:
| Yeah I didn't find that very credible. A busy businessman
| ignoring petty bets you propose is not really evidence of
| anything, nor is the part about google ignoring his requests.
| In fact it's a pretty lame rhetorical device. I could equally
| "challenge" a head of state on Twitter and then pretend that
| his failure to reply indicates something
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > Musk didn't have the guts to accept, which tells you a lot.
|
| Musk actively declined the bet or did he simply not respond?
| There is a big difference.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Later in the text:
|
| > ... I have repeatedly asked that Google give the scientific
| community access to Imagen. They have refused even to respond.
|
| It seems the author generally feels more entitled to a response
| than he perhaps should.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Missing the point: dismissing an apocalyptic possibility as 0
| without proof is dangerous -> therefore we should take it
| seriously. Taleb's work is relevant in the concept of risk
| analysis.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's interesting that he now casually throws out a 5 year old as
| the benchmark to beat:
|
| > nobody has yet publicly demonstrated a machine that can relate
| the meanings of sentences to their parts the way a five-year-old
| child can.
|
| Not very long ago that would have been a 3 year old, or maybe
| even a smart 2 year old. 5 year olds are extremely good at basic
| language and understanding tasks. If we get to the point of AI
| that is as good as a 5 year old we're essentially at AGI.
| ummonk wrote:
| Yeah, and AI is probably already near primate level
| intelligence, so what's left is a blink of an eye in
| evolutionary timelines.
| skybrian wrote:
| Partially this is confusing "Scott Alexander won a bet" with
| "compositionality is solved." And also, I'm not sure Scott won
| the bet? Changing people to robots is a cheap trick. I think
| Imagen should have been disqualified because it won't do people.
|
| Vitor took the other side of the bet and he is also not convinced
| [1]:
|
| > I'm not conceding just yet, even though it feels like I'm just
| dragging out the inevitable for a few months. Maybe we should
| agree on a new set of prompts to get around the robot issue.
|
| > In retrospect, I think that your side of the bet is too lenient
| in only requiring _one_ of the images to fulfill the prompt. I 'm
| happy to leave that part standing as-is, of course, though I've
| learned the lesson to be more careful about operationalization.
| Overall, these images shift my priors a fair amount, but aren't
| enough to change my fundamental view.
|
| Scott putting "I Won" in the headline when it's not resolved yet
| seems somewhat dishonest, or more charitably wishful thinking.
|
| [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-
| ai...
| ummonk wrote:
| This reminds me of the scandal where Youtube science channels did
| glowing paid reviews of Waymo's self driving cars without
| acknowledging they were paid for it. And technooptimists like
| Scott Alexander or Ray Kurzweil have a common tendency to shift
| the goalposts and declare they were right with their predictions.
| Current AI certainly doesn't demonstrate proto-AGI capabilities.
|
| That said, we shouldn't miss the forest for the trees. We can be
| skeptical that current The pace of AI progress has been immense
| and problems that previously seemed difficult (e.g. computer
| vision classification, or beating top players at Go) have fallen
| one by one. And AI-skepticism's have themselves been moving the
| goalposts in response. I see no reason why composition won't be
| the same with time. Indeed, a decade ago machine translation used
| to struggle to understand the relationships between things, but
| now seems to be reliable at preserving the compositional
| relationships post-translation. 2029 is rather optimistic, but
| AGI does seem to be approaching in the coming few decades.
| grandmczeb wrote:
| > Youtube science channels did glowing paid reviews of Waymo's
| self driving cars without acknowledging they were paid for it.
|
| Which video is this a reference to?
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you are referring to Veritasium's Waymo video, it says it is
| sponsored content in the description above the fold and it has
| the standard paid promotion notice right on top of the video as
| soon as you open it.
|
| As far as I can tell the "controversy" over the video is merely
| that one dedicated critic - so dedicated he made an hour-long
| response to a 20-minute video - is committed to the idea that
| machines won't ever be able to drive, and is irrationally angry
| over the fact that machines can and do drive, and do it well.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI
| garymarcus wrote:
| so much ad hominem in these comments, relatively little
| substance. (eg "notorious goal post move, without a single
| example of something i actually said and changed my mind on)
| ummonk wrote:
| The Reddit comment linked by the topmost comment here says that
| you claimed AI couldn't do knowledge graphs and then silently
| stopped claiming that after being proven wrong. Do you dispute
| that telling of events?
| IronWolve wrote:
| One of things I noticed is the satire, call backs to common
| news/ideas can really trip up any AI. Also if you ask it about
| anything politics, ask it to describe both sides of an argument.
| Thus why people fall back to the steelman cherry picking of
| responses to push their arguments.
| ajross wrote:
| So weird to see a piece ostensibly about logical fallacies deploy
| one so cavalierly:
|
| > I offered to bet [Elon Musk] $100,000 he was wrong [about AGI
| by 2029] [...] Musk didn't have the guts to accept, which tells
| you a lot.
|
| The fact that you couldn't get someone engaged in a conversation
| absolutely does not "tell you a lot" about the substance of your
| argument. It only tells you that you were ignored.
|
| Now, I happen to think Marcus is right here and Musk is wrong,
| but... yikes. That was just a jarring bit of writing. Either do
| the detached professorial admonition schtick or take off the
| gloves and engage in bad faith advocacy and personal attacks.
| Both can be fun and get you eyeballs, and substack is filled with
| both. But not at the same time!
| comeonbro wrote:
| Regarding Gary Marcus, the author of this piece, and his long and
| bizarre history of motivated carelessness on the topic of deep
| learning:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_c...
| [deleted]
| Veedrac wrote:
| This is mostly just an angry rant, yes, but equally it is just
| true. Marcus is intellectually dishonest.
| mmazing wrote:
| "I am angry not because someone is wrong, but because they are
| not interested in becoming less wrong."
|
| Paraphrased that a bit, but I really like that quote.
| lisper wrote:
| You know what would have been much more effective than this
| counter-screed? A pointer to an image generated by DALL-E of a
| horse riding an astronaut. That is something I would really
| like to see. And in this case a picture is literally worth a
| thousand words.
| [deleted]
| comeonbro wrote:
| https://nitter.net/Plinz/status/1529013919682994176
| ummonk wrote:
| Hah there is actually a good example of a horse riding an
| astronaut there, just a different kind of riding...
| https://nitter.net/Plinz/status/1529018578317348864#m
| garymarcus wrote:
| in fact I wrote a whole article about this (linked in this
| essay, called Horse Rides Astronaut) and linked an example
| therein.
| _vertigo wrote:
| Why did you ignore the Bach examples that show a horse
| riding an astronaut?
| [deleted]
| im3w1l wrote:
| I have played around with GPT quite a bit and I would say
| that GPT understands the difference. Text-to-image models are
| not specialized in the text-parsing part, so I think it's
| forgivable that they are not as good at it.
|
| Edit: Actually I tried this right now with two prompts, and I
| was wrong. It might still be that gpt understands
| compositionality but the prior that people ride horses is
| just that strong. But what I saw was that with this
| particular situation the model got it wrong.
|
| Edit 2: With some heavy hinting it managed to understand the
| situation. Italics mine. " _An astronaut is walking on all
| four. A very small horse is sitting on top of him, riding him
| even. Shortly after the astronaut stops, exhausted._
|
| The horse is too heavy for the astronaut to carry and he
| quickly becomes exhausted. _Next,_ the horse gets off the
| astronaut, stands on its own four legs, and walks away. "
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Just about every rant on Marcus or other AI critics is some
| combination of "you aren't admitting these things are making
| great progress on the benchmarks" (implying the false idea that
| "a whole lot of progress" adds up to human level AI) and "you
| are making 'human level' an unfair moving target by not having
| a benchmark for it". The thing about this is that if there was
| a real "human level benchmark", we'd be 80% done but we can't
| and we aren't. Marcus and other critics have drawn explicit
| lines (spatial understanding, composibility, etc)but even those
| being crossed won't prove human-level understanding. There is
| no proof of human, just a strong enough demonstration. And if
| someone can point to dumb stuff in the demo, it isn't strong.
|
| PS: your link is an embarrassment. It would be flagged and dead
| if you pasted in the text here.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| First time I've seen the term "snooker" used outside of the sport
| Snooker.
| neaden wrote:
| I completely forgot about Google Duplex. It looks like it is
| still around but very limited in terms of what phones you can
| use, what cities it can be used in, and what businesses in those
| cities will accept it. Doesn't appear any progress has really
| been made in the past few years. I think this is a great point of
| how companies create something with AI that is initially really
| cool, but isn't quite there to actually be very usable and gets
| forgotten when they roll out the next big thing.
| version_five wrote:
| The last 10 years of AI is basically defined by proof of
| concepts like that that were 80% (or whatever) solutions and
| claimed there was a path to something commercially viable.
| Turns out that ~20% is always basically impossible - self
| driving cars being the archetypal example. I work in the field
| and I think it can be a great tool, but it needs to be
| acknowledged what its limitations are and how we don't actually
| know how to address them yet
| jeffbee wrote:
| Now it seems like you are the one moving the goalposts. There
| are tons of machine-learned models in production, in
| translation, text segmentation, image segmentation, image
| search, predictive text composition, etc. It's just that
| people forget the novelty of all these things immediately
| after they were launched. You can point your phone at printed
| Chinese text and have it read aloud to you in English. That
| is alien tech compared to 10 years ago.
| [deleted]
| Shebanator wrote:
| The Hold for Me and Direct My Call features for Pixel's Phone
| app both use Duplex models running locally on your device, and
| those features are quite popular. I think that counts as
| significant progress by any measure, so your point doesn't hold
| in this case.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| They first approached Lex Fridman, but his home-spun test had
| zero questions. /s
| crotho wrote:
| mgraczyk wrote:
| It's interesting that people keep coming up with things that are
| meant to distinguish AI systems from human intelligence, but then
| when somebody builds a system that crushes the benchmark the next
| generation comes up with a new goalpost.
|
| The difference now is that the timescales are weeks or months
| instead of generations. I believe we will see models that have
| super-human "compositional" reasoning within 1 year.
| cercatrova wrote:
| This is called the AI Effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
|
| > The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of
| an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not
| _real_ intelligence.
|
| > Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of
| the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody
| figured out how to make a computer do something--play good
| checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems--there
| was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'."
| Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a
| piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a
| computation.'"
| omnicognate wrote:
| Personally, I haven't moved the goalposts a millimetre in 30
| years, and I won't in future. When a computer does maths - not
| as a tool wielded by a human mathematician, but in its own
| right discovers/invents and proves significant new theorems,
| advancing some area of research mathematics - I'll take
| seriously the idea that we've reached AGI.
|
| Maths in and of itself doesn't require any physical resources.
| It's possible that doing maths in practice requires knowledge
| of the world to extract some kind of product from (I'm
| skeptical, but it's possible), but in principle a rack mounted
| server could demonstrate its mathematical ability to the world
| with nothing more than the ability to send and receive
| messages.
|
| This hasn't been done so far, not because there are obvious
| missing prerequsites, or because nobody's tried it, or because
| it has no value, or because there's a prohibitively high
| barrier to entry for people to have a go. It hasn't been done
| because nobody knows how to make a machine be a mathematician,
| and I've seen little evidence of any progress towards it.
|
| That's my goalpost, always has been. Reach it and I'll be
| overjoyed. And FWIW, I strongly believe it can be reached. I
| don't see the latest round of ML (or any ML, really) as a step
| towards it, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
|
| When I mention this someone always points at some bit of recent
| research, such as [1], but it's invariably just a new way for a
| human mathematician to make use of a computer. If anybody knows
| of any progress, or serious attempts, towards a true AI
| mathematician I'm very curious to know.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04086-x
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| You might be out of the loop a bit.
|
| https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/132379.2
|
| Is a well known project for an AI Physicist. There are plenty
| of other groups working on similar projects
|
| >I don't see the latest round of ML (or any ML, really) as a
| step towards it, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
|
| LLM models have been able to do basic math for quite a while
| now and some have been trained to solve differential
| equations, calculus problems, etc. Well on their way to more
| impressive capabilities.
| omnicognate wrote:
| I said "in its own right discovers/invents and proves
| significant new theorems, advancing some area of research
| mathematics".
|
| Neither of the things you mention are of this nature, or
| working towards it. "Finding a symbolic expression that
| matches data from an unknown function" (Feynman) and
| "solv[ing] differential equations, calculus problems, etc"
| are not descriptions of what a research mathematician does.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Feels to me like your test is really "do something on
| your own right", which is the hard fluffy sentient part,
| and then some additional guard rails that it needs to be
| math for some reason
| mathteddybear wrote:
| The reason is simple - in math, it means solving open
| problems.
| ummonk wrote:
| That's a different thing, since solving an existing open
| problem doesn't mean inventing a new theorem.
| omnicognate wrote:
| The "do it on your own right" is actually the weaker part
| of it. It's somewhat ill-defined, and I could imagine
| some future instance where it's highly debatable whether
| the AI was working on its own or being used as a tool by
| a human. There aren't yet any cases where that's in
| question, though, so it's a hypothetical future debate.
| In any case, it's certainly not the meat of the test.
|
| It has to be maths for a specific reason. I think it's in
| some sense the purest form of an ability distinctive to
| human minds and pervasive in how they work. As I
| mentioned, it's an ability that can be demonstrated in
| the absence of any particular physical capability, and
| yet despite it being perhaps the oldest goal of AI it may
| be the one we have made least progress towards.
|
| Anyway that's my goalpost, and it's not moving. AGI,
| being "general", surely should be capable of this
| hitherto uniquely human activity. If our attempts so far
| are not capable of it, then clearly they are not
| "general". If you know of any evidence that my goalpost
| has been achieved, please let me know. I'm very eager to
| see it happen.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Isn't that a good thing? Benchmark defeats AI, AI defeats
| benchmark, new benchmark comes along, progress is made. How
| else would you measure success? Certainly not with old
| benchmarks that 10 different methods all score 99% accuracy on.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Perhaps it's fair to say we will have achieved AGI when we run
| out of goalposts.
| jessaustin wrote:
| AGI won't bother convincing us. We don't care what animals in
| the zoo think.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > _We don 't care what animals in the zoo think._
|
| Tangential to AGI, but don't we? Vegans seem to have quite
| a strong opinion on this assertion.
| dqpb wrote:
| It's not just intelligence, it's also speed. If you update
| your world model fast enough, eventually people just look
| like trees.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Gary Marcus is a notorious Goal Post Mover so this is no
| surprise coming from him.
|
| Edit: Gwern has an extensive history with this so I'll let him
| do the talking.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_c...
|
| Further Edits: Not to mention Scott Alexander who has directly
| rebutted you numerous times. Or Yann LeCunn. Not sure who
| exactly is backing down.
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-...
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus...
|
| https://analyticsindiamag.com/yann-lecun-resumes-war-of-word...
|
| Presumably you approach these arguments like Ben Shapiro and
| imagine you have "Dunked on the Deep Learning geeks with Facts
| and Logic."
| garymarcus wrote:
| every time i ask someone to name a goal post that i have
| moved, they back down.
|
| i have been pretty damn consistent since me 2001 book.
| seiferteric wrote:
| > meant to distinguish AI systems from human intelligence
|
| > but then when somebody builds a system
|
| I mean this is really it. You still have to have a human to
| build these systems that specialist in one thing. Once you
| create a system that can automatically create those systems and
| it doesn't need humans anymore to solve novel problems, then
| there will be no practical difference in kind between human and
| AI intelligence.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Once you create a system that can automatically create
| those systems...
|
| Except we don't have that. We don't have one human that can
| create this system by themselves. We have a choice group of a
| handful of smart, motivated, and quite generously compensated
| humans working on these problems to create such system. As
| such, you are already surpassing the "general" intelligence
| level by quite a lot.
| [deleted]
| rebelos wrote:
| Imagine watching the seeds of AI that will terraform society and
| rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades be planted,
| and then still splitting hairs over whether or not it'll achieve
| sentience.
|
| Our world is changing before our very eyes while this guy is
| belaboring the technicalities. You could hardly ask for a keener
| display of the philosophical gulf between scientists and
| engineers.
| evouga wrote:
| At this point, I'm numb from all of the AI overhype. I was
| extremely excited about DALL-E and convinced myself that
| concrete fruits of the AI revolution were finally here... until
| a few seconds after I got the chance to try some queries
| myself. Ditto Copilot.
|
| The recent progress on generative models is a major research
| achievement, to be sure. That said, I'm not sure what it means
| it "terraform society," but so far AI shows no signs of making
| the same magnitude of impact on society as, say, the S-tier
| technological advances of the 20th and early 21st centuries,
| such as the personal computer, Internet, smartphone, or atomic
| bomb. That all may change if we get AGI that _actually_ works,
| of course.
| rebelos wrote:
| The problem is not progress in AI, but rather your inability
| to imagine its near-term trajectory.
|
| https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952
| https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232
|
| https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface
|
| And yes, I think it's fair to say that humanity's final
| invention will be an 'S-tier' breakthrough...
| evouga wrote:
| I mentioned DALL-E and Copilot in my post, so I'm not sure
| why you're linking me to a article summarizing recent high-
| profile research in large language models...
| rebelos wrote:
| You appear to have skipped over two links? And the LLM
| article goes well beyond DALL-E and Copilot. You should
| try reading it.
| version_five wrote:
| Wow, ok you're a a troll
| version_five wrote:
| It have a lot of trouble understanding how this sentiment can
| exist.
|
| Especially since the rise of GPT-3 and now these image models,
| we've seen the pop-culture face of AI become even narrower. The
| promise of generalization that could lead to intelligent
| behavior has given way to people sharing amusing pictures or
| phrases that these models have generated, because that's what
| they do. It's cool, but it's basically become orthogonal to any
| AGI, or even AI with applications. It's now just a neat
| cultural phenomenon from which laypeople somehow extrapolate
| the kind if stuff the parent is saying.
|
| I'm not saying AI (neural networks) isn't making research
| progress, it's just that it has almost nothing to do with any
| of what laypeople extrapolate from it
| rebelos wrote:
| I'm sorry, but there is no gentler way to phrase this: you
| are calamitously blind to what's happening on the ground.
|
| https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952
| https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232
|
| https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface
| projektfu wrote:
| I'm impressed by all of these image generators but I still don't
| see them working toward being able to say, "Give me an astronaut
| riding a horse. Ok, now the same location where he arrives at a
| rocket. Now one where he dismounts. Now the horse runs away as
| the astronaut enters the rocket."
|
| You can ask for all those things but the AI still has no idea
| what it's doing and cannot tell you where the astronaut is, etc.
| masswerk wrote:
| I'd also say, every of these images would fail a reverse test
| (i.e., asking a person to describe the image and what it
| represents.)
|
| The task is not just about generating an image that may somehow
| be in accordance with the prompt, but also to generate a
| _significant_ image.
|
| [Edit] The equivalent to a Turing test for compositional images
| would be something like this: have as set of 100 images with
| their respective prompts, some generated by an AI, some by a
| human graphic designer / artist; let the test person pick the
| images that were generated by a computer. Mind that this would
| not only involve the problem of compositionality _per se,_ but
| also a meaningful and /or artistic composition of the image
| itself. Is someone attempting to _express_ what is given in the
| prompt?
| z3c0 wrote:
| I guess you're _technically_ correct, but the task you 're
| describing isn't generating an image from a prompt. It would be
| to maintain context across distinct-but-related statements
| based on an internalized model of reality. That's like
| discounting the advent of the calculator because you still need
| an accountant.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| what shows how low level these models still are is that they
| don't seem to be able to draw text on a surface. It's just
| generally just nonsense.
|
| Going higher in abstraction like asking for permanence of
| distinct objects or entities or world knowledge, like having a
| player face the basketball hoop is several levels above that
| yet.
| jessaustin wrote:
| _Yesterday, as part of a new podcast that will launch in the
| Spring, I interviewed the brilliant..._
|
| This seems like the wrong way to go about podcasting. What can
| you say today that will still be interesting to hear in six
| months?
| jefftk wrote:
| If you can't say things today that will still be interesting in
| six months you should consider deeper subjects!
|
| (Overstated for effect. I do think there's a place for news and
| timely commentary, but it's far from everything.)
| cthalupa wrote:
| "Compositionality" isn't there yet, but but the rate of
| improvement is impressive. Today there was a new release of CLIP
| which provides significantly better compositionality in Stable
| Diffusion -
| https://twitter.com/laion_ai/status/1570512017949339649
|
| It'll be interesting to see how it fares against winoground once
| we get a publicly available SD release that makes use of the new
| CLIP.
| raviparikh wrote:
| > If you flip a penny 5 times and get 5 heads, you need to
| calculate that the chance of getting that particular outcome is 1
| in 32. If you conduct the experiment often enough, you're going
| to get that, but it doesn't mean that much. If you get 3/5 as
| Alexander did, when he prematurely declared victory, you don't
| have much evidence of anything at all.
|
| This doesn't make much sense. The task at hand is in no way
| equivalent in difficulty to flipping a coin. This is kind of like
| saying, "if you beat Usain Bolt in a race 3/5 times, that doesn't
| mean anything; it's like getting 3/5 coin flips to be heads."
| Tenoke wrote:
| While I'm generally very unsympathetic to Marcus' anti-AI
| arguments at this point, this critique makes some sense. If
| e.g. the model is just combining the features at random, you'd
| expect it to combine them the right way over enough tries. It
| isn't that simple, and I don't believe it matters as this is
| hardly the peak model we'll get but in isolation his objection
| is valid.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| The point is that the probability space of potential
| generated images is enormous so a 3/5 success rate represents
| an absurdly unlikely probability of being due to chance.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think you would need to do some kind of analysis. For
| example, if your prompt was "red ball on top of blue cube"
| and you want to know if the results come from chance you'd
| need to know the likelihood of the model putting the red ball
| on top of the blue cube by chance. There are maybe four
| relative positions for red ball to blue cube - beside, above,
| below, in, around. Are they each equally likely?
|
| I would try to get a collection of prompts like "red ball and
| blue cube" or "an empty plane containing only a red ball and
| a blue cube" and so on - try to come up with 20 or 30 of
| these. Then, generate 100 images for each prompt. Next, see
| how likely it is for a red ball to randomly be on top of a
| blue cube when it was not directed to be.
|
| After gathering some baseline data we could then test three
| prompts. "Red ball on top of blue cube" and "Red ball beside
| blue cube" and "Red ball below blue cube". Generate 100 or
| 1000 images for each of these prompts. Count respective
| orientations. Then, decide whether red ball being on top of
| blue cube is more likely than the baseline when the specific
| direction is given and whether it is less likely when
| contrary directions are given.
| ummonk wrote:
| It might understand that there is a cube, there is a ball,
| the scene has red and blue parts, and there is a vertical
| placement ("on top of"). In that case it would get 1 out of
| 4 images right.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| This piece would have been a lot better if it were maybe three
| paragraphs long. In summary:
|
| 1. Scott Alexander should have used an off-the-shelf benchmark
| like Winoground instead of rolling his own five-question test.
|
| 2. He shouldn't declare victory after cherry-picking good results
| from a small sample of questions.
| robg wrote:
| 3. And don't test each example 10 times and conclude 1 correct
| guess equals success.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| For whatever reason, Gary doesn't even mention this, but from
| reading Scott's post, I don't think I agree that it even got
| 1/5, let alone 3/5. The bell is not on the llama's tail in any
| of the examples, though it is very close to the tail in one.
| The robot is either looking over the cat or in an unrelated
| direction, never at the cat. None of those basketball pictures
| shows a robot farmer. The fact that one may be wearing a hat
| doesn't make it a farmer. He says he's being generous because
| he believes it would have gotten a farmer more easily than
| robot farmer, which may be true, but a human artist would
| easily be able to depict a robot farmer.
|
| At least one other key to making a bet like this fair is that
| it needs to be arbitrated by a third party. He shouldn't get to
| decide himself if he won or not.
| kbelder wrote:
| I agree with you, that 3/5 is stretching. This seems
| premature.
|
| But, at the rate we're seeing progress, I don't think there's
| any doubt at this point that top of the line models will be
| able to do all the proposed examples by June 2025. In fact,
| by June 2025 I bet that millions of people will be able to
| generate those images on their home computers.
| badloginagain wrote:
| I personally liked the anecdote about Clever Hans.
|
| I also learned there's a long history of AI skepticism, the
| root of which comes down to "Compositionality(?)"- and this
| wall of understanding meaning has vexed AI for decades.
|
| That would be lost in proposed short form summary.
| lalaithion wrote:
| Scott didn't make up the rules, he agreed on them with another
| person who thought this would not happen in 3 years. Gary
| Marcus might have thought it was a bad bet, but someone was on
| the other side of it, and they presumably thought it was fair
| or they wouldn't have made it.
|
| The original terms of the bet:
|
| My proposed operationalization of this is that on June 1, 2025,
| if either if us can get access to the best image generating
| model at that time (I get to decide which), or convince someone
| else who has access to help us, we'll give it the following
| prompts:
|
| 1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven
| on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
|
| 2. An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat
| wearing a top hat
|
| 3. A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell
| on its tail through a desert
|
| 4. A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing
| lipstick
|
| 5. Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red
| basketball
|
| We generate 10 images for each prompt, just like DALL-E2 does.
| If at least one of the ten images has the scene correct in
| every particular on 3/5 prompts, I win, otherwise you do.
| Natsu wrote:
| Honestly, the whole thing makes me wonder if we can use this
| to generate CAPTCHAs. I don't think a human would have
| trouble picking out which image was the lightbulb surrounding
| leaves, but apparently AI still does.
| skybrian wrote:
| I think you got that wrong; Scott wrote the terms. (He wrote
| the comment [1] with those rules.) Someone in the comments
| agreed to them.
|
| Then he changed the terms because Imagen won't do people. I
| think that's cheating.
|
| [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-
| robo...
| SteveDR wrote:
| Cheating? Thatd make sense if the bet were about the future
| of products and ethics. Weren't they trying to predict the
| future of the state of the art technology?
| skybrian wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "technology" and "exists."
|
| A research project at Google intentionally won't render
| people. Maybe it _could_ render people, theoretically,
| but without evidence, we don 't know how well.
| cwillu wrote:
| Again, if the counter-party agrees to the terms and the
| changes, how is it cheating?
| skybrian wrote:
| It's not clear whether the counter-party agreed to the
| change.
|
| See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32858426
| lalaithion wrote:
| I think you missed the point of my comment. Yes, Scott
| wrote the comment containing that proposal. But my point
| was that it was an agreement. Two people who disagreed
| about AI agreed on the rules, so you can't accuse one of
| them of being unfair because you don't like the rules.
| Sure, you can say "that's a bad bet, Scott will obviously
| win", but you can't say "He shouldn't declare victory after
| cherry-picking good results from a small sample of
| questions", because those terms were explicitly set in
| advance.
|
| The humans -> robots change is possibly dubious, yes. I
| don't think that it's super important, but if it were me, I
| wouldn't have posted the blog post as is. I would have
| waited until some AI passed all the prompts with humans,
| like it most certainly will in a year.
| telotortium wrote:
| Stable Diffusion will soon update to use the biggest CLIP
| model in existence, which may improve understanding of
| composition:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=32858809
| techbio wrote:
| These are all the same artwork.
| WJW wrote:
| The terms of the bet don't refer to any specific artwork,
| only to the best image generating model. Hence, you are
| correct but it does not matter for the outcome of the bet
| under discussion.
| origin_path wrote:
| The reason Imagen isn't made available to the public probably
| isn't about compositionality. The most notable thing about
| Alexander's challenge is that Imagen totally failed every single
| one despite his claim of success because, apparently, it is
| programmed to never represent the human form. Not even Google
| employees are allowed to make it draw humans of any kind. They
| had to ask it to draw robots instead, but as pointed out in the
| comments, changing the requests in that way makes them much
| easier for DALL-E2 as well, especially the image with the top
| hats.
|
| If the creators have convinced themselves of some kind of "no
| humans" rule, but also know that this would be regarded as
| impossibly extreme and raise serious concerns about Google with
| the outside world, then keeping Imagen private forever may be the
| most "rational" solution.
| jowday wrote:
| Imagen can produce images of humans - they're just filtered out
| from the results by supervised models (for now). OpenAI did
| something similar with Dalle for a while IIRC.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >The most notable thing about Alexander's challenge is that
| Imagen totally failed every single one despite his claim of
| success because, apparently, it is programmed to never
| represent the human form.
|
| This doesn't make sense. The original challenge could well have
| been to draw robots to begin with. Has no bearing on the
| outcome imo.
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