Google’s DeepMind works to improve AI
ZDNet’s Tiernan Ray tells Karen Roby about what Google’s DeepMind is doing to improve AI and how humans may play a bigger role in determining success from failure than initially thought. Read more: https://zd.net/2VYP0oj
As a salesman or an ambassador for artificial intelligence, one could do worse than Demis Hassabis. The 42-year-old co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 for several hundred million dollars, Hassabis comes across as a warm, open, good-humored, and relentlessly curious fellow.
At a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, on Saturday, he addressed a packed auditorium with a lightning summary of where AI has been and where it’s going.
Hassabis peppered his responses to questions with frequent exclamations of “good question,” or “that’s a great question,” and went into depth in several of his responses to somewhat technical queries.
He offered a view about AI ethics, too: Just say “no” to bad projects.
“The best thing AI researchers can do is vote with their feet, not work with companies that have outcomes you don’t agree with,” he said.
“We have committed to not ever working on any military or surveillance applications, no matter what,” he said of DeepMind.
Demis Hassabis, center, chats on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton following his talk on artificial intelligence.
Tiernan Ray for ZDNet.
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“There aren’t enough researchers to go around, and attracting enough talent is quite important, so actually researchers individually have quite a lot of power,” he observed. “So through soft influence, you can influence a lot.”
Hassabis punctuated his talk about “reinforcement learning,” the variety of AI that DeepMind focuses on, with knowing humor. When DeepMind was founded, in 2010, “we thought that step one would be, if we can fundamentally understand the nature of intelligence, and if we can recreate it artificially, it should be possible to use that to solve everything else,” he said.
Also: Google’s DeepMind asks what it means for AI to fail
“Imagine trying to make that pitch to a venture capitalist in 2010!” he said, to much laughter from the audience.
“One thing I see confronting society today is the overload of information we are generating, and just the scale of the complexity of the problems we are confronting, things like climate change,” he said.
“You know, the buzzword today is AI, but for years it was big data,” he observed. “I think it’s still about data. I think actually big data is the problem,” he continued, “AI is the answer to finding the structure in the data,” he added, because “intelligence is a process that converts unstructured information into useful knowledge.”
Hassabis ended his talk with a slide showing late Caltech physicist Richard Feynmann, saying he was in agreement with Feynmann’s motto: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
During a reception of punch and cookies, Hassabis was mobbed outside the Institute’s Fuld Hall. He seemed to be enjoying fielding questions, pausing to look into the distance, or down at the ground, to listen to the question and then to reflect.
An older gentleman, with a twinkle in his eye, Martin Rees, the Institute trustee and Astronomer Royal, walked up beside a reporter. Looking at the crowd around Hassabis, he smiled and nodded approvingly, remarking, “He’s attracting the young people.”
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