Author: Byron Reese / Source: Gigaom
Today’s leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese
About this Episode
Episode 85 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and Ilya Sutskever of Open AI talk about the future of general intelligence and the ramifications of building a computer smarter than us.
Transcript Excerpt
Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm and I’m Byron Reese. Today my guest is Ilya Sutskever. He is the co-founder and the chief scientist at OpenAI, one of the most fascinating institutions on the face of this planet. Welcome to the show Ilya.
Ilya Sutskever: Great to be here.
Just to bring the listeners up to speed, talk a little bit about what OpenAI is, what its mission is, and kind of where it’s at. Set the scene for us of what OpenAI does.
Great, for sure. The best way to describe OpenAI is this: so at OpenAI we take the long term view that eventually computers will become as smart or smarter than humans in every single way. We don’t know when it’s going to happen, — some number of years, something [like] tens of years, it’s unknown. And the goal of OpenAI is to make sure that when this does happen, when computers which are smarter than humans are built, when AGI is built, then its benefits will be widely distributed. We want it to be a beneficial event, and that’s the goal of OpenAI.
And so we were founded three years ago, and since then we’ve been doing a lot of work in three different areas. We’ve done a lot of work in AI capabilities and over the past three years we’ve done a lot of work we are very proud of. Some of the notable highlights are: our Dota results where we had the first and very convincing demonstration of an agent playing a real time strategy game, trained the reinforcement learning with no human data.
We’ve trained robots to record, robot hands to re-orientate the block. This was really cool, it was cool to see it transfer.And recently we’ve released the GPT-2 — a very large language model which can generate very realistic text as well as solve lots of different energy problems [with] a very high level of accuracy. And so this has been our working capabilities.
Another thrust to the work that we are doing is AI safety, which at [its] core is the problem of finding ways of communicating a very complicated reward function to an agent so that the agent that we build, can achieve goals and great competence. It will do so while taking human values and preferences into account. And so we’ve done some significant amount of work there as well.
And the third line of work we’re doing is AI policy, where we basically have a number of really good people thinking hard about what kind of policies should be designed and how should governments and other institutions respond to the fact that AI is improving pretty rapidly. But overall our goal, eventually the end game of the field, is that AGI will be built. The goal of OpenAI is to make sure that the development of AGI will be a positive event and that its benefits are widely distributed.
So 99.9% of…
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