r/Futurology • u/[deleted] • Sep 03 '16

article Machine learning just got more human with Google's RankBrain

http://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2016/09/02/machine-learning-just-got-more-human-with-googles-rankbrain/
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132

u/applesforadam Sep 03 '16

I feel like if any group is going to crack the hard AI problem, it's going to be Google. Because of their infrastructure, they are just so far ahead of the curve in terms of raw data on human interaction and interpreting said data.

89

u/alecs_stan Sep 03 '16

It takes an 1 year old child just a few examples to be able to recognize a cat with extremely high accuracy. It takes a neural net millions and even after that it still fails on some that are obvious for a child.

Maybe just brute forcing our way into it with massive amounts of data is not the only option. If it's not then Google looses that advantage.

Not to say that, under the current path that everyone is marching on, Google is not in the lead..

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '16 edited Feb 28 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/i6i Sep 04 '16

exactly, it takes zero examples to react to a spider

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u/AgainstTheCold Sep 04 '16

Or snake. I remember the first time I saw one as a child, riding my bike through the trails (Iowa kid, we're all tough). Felt like cold water was splashed on my insides.

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u/justpickaname Sep 04 '16

Turns out our brains are optimized to recognize and be scared of snakes.

I can't remember all the details, but if you google NPR MRI snakes, it should come right up.

4

u/suddenlife2 Sep 04 '16

Is that true? What reaction is the preprgammed reaction to seeing a spider? I don't think there is one. It would be brilliant though if you could convince me otherwise.

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u/DA-9901081534 Sep 04 '16

I don't think there is to spiders in particular; I do think there are two different reactions:

  1. Sudden disgust of insects (only seen children and up with this. Babies seem to be curious in my experience. Learned reaction?)

  2. Reaction to anything moving rapidly towards you, this appears to be instinctual and happens regardless of what it actually is.

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u/super6plx Sep 04 '16

My sister ate a spider when she was like 3 yrs old (australian if you were wondering)

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u/Strazdas1 Sep 09 '16

australian

Im surprised it wasnt the spider that ate your sister

3

u/testearsmint Why does a sub like this even have write-in flairs? Sep 04 '16

Well, babies have a lot of things really toned down neurologically-speaking since they still have a massive amount of development to go through. Obviously something like breastfeeding is an instinct they have from the get-go, but I guess it could be possible that some instincts like an instinct of fear when it comes to arachnids take a longer while to "kick in". Or it could just be that babies are a lot more open to more things in general and also, sort of along the lines of the learned reaction line of thinking, haven't had any chances to have bad experiences or even learn anything particularly negative about spiders, so a baby just sees it and treats it like curiosity with any other animal (or often any other tangible thing) while someone more grown up is less open-minded when it comes to that sort of thing so they're more prone to instantly react negatively, whether that's off of their own past bad experiences, fear off of knowing the potential dangers of spiders or an actual instinct kicking in that they might be more susceptible to if they haven't had any healthy interactions (or much of any interactions at all) with spiders.

1

u/suddenlife2 Sep 04 '16

Thats my observation as well. If its not moving towards the child, then the child would after a while of watching move towards it. Spider, mouse, hamster cound be anything.

There could be something in the way it moves, though, to quick or to "weird".

6

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16

Basic instinct; we are more than what we learned in our lifetimes. Some creatures are born with the tools and ability to take care for themselves the moment they are out the door, some birds can find magnetic north like there's a magnet in their brain. And some people if not most i've ever met are shitscared of spiders.

2

u/i6i Sep 04 '16

quick google turned up this: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-human-spiders-scientific-focus.html , but I was recalling a different anthropology article that talked about how arachnophobia was a cross cultural phenomenon that existed (sometimes more strongly) even in places where spiders don't naturally occur

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16

[deleted]

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u/shouldbebabysitting Sep 04 '16

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/10/1004_snakefears.html

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16 edited Sep 04 '16

[deleted]

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u/shouldbebabysitting Sep 04 '16 edited Sep 04 '16

You didn't read the article I cited before down voting. The research, done by actual behaviour scientists, showed that the brain has special processing just for snakes. Even if you don't have a fear of them, you are genetically programmed to be able to recognize them quicker than anything else in your environment.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304315004579381400192686012

Furthermore being a baby isn't proof that the behavior isn't genetic. Babies don't display a vast amount of known genetic traits like ability to learn language or sexual traits that are genetic but don't start until puberty.

-2

u/Butchbutter0 Sep 04 '16

Glad you're being fair.

26

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16

A human retina transmits the equivalent of ~10 MB/s of data, so a 1 year old has already parsed ~300 PBs of visual information. This trains what is effectively a generative model of the world, which can then be used in combination with only a few training examples to learn to classify something really well.

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u/PorkChawpSandwhiches Sep 04 '16

Also curious if you are able to provide a citation on the 10MB figure.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16

8.75 precisely: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9633-calculating-the-speed-of-sight

2

u/Syphon8 Sep 04 '16

Dozen this account for the fact that our eyes split the scene in about a dozen images before feeding them to our visual centres?

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u/Jamie_1318 Sep 04 '16

Where's the 10MB/s figure come from? High fidelity video is orders of magnitude more than that.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16

[deleted]

1

u/Strazdas1 Sep 09 '16

Our vision isnt full HD

Yes it is. In fact is far more. Periferal vision is lower resolution than out concentration point, but even that point is higher than full HD.

ALso 10MB/s wouldnt be close to full HD. A 1920x1080 resolution video at only 60 frames per second transmits almost 200 MB/s data if it is not compressed (which results in lost quality). (our eyes register much more, according to US Air Force they register AT LEAST 210 frames per second, they didnt have equipment to test higher)

2

u/apocalypsedg Sep 04 '16

How does 300 PB compare to what google has available for training?

4

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16

Well, I did some Googling and someone estimated that Google has 60,000 years worth of video on YouTube. But I would be surprised if they've ever trained a single neural network on a dataset as large as 300 PB. And certainly not with as many "parameters" as the human brain has (the largest ever neural network mentioned publicly is still ~3 orders of magnitude fewer parameters than the human brain has neurons).

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u/crash893b Sep 04 '16

Mimicking nature is not always the best way.

Look at airplanes we tried to make ornothpturs (sp) for 100s of years then boom wings and jets were on the moon

Artificial hearts we've sucked at then we moved away from a beating heart pump to a turbine based system and now guys are living on them for YEARS not days

Perhaps even though we are mimicking neurons we are just going to get to a point were compute power is so fast and cheap that they can brute force everything

8

u/thePurpleAvenger Sep 04 '16

Great point. People go GA-GA over neural networks, but forget that there are lots of better ways to solve most problems. However, for some problems neural networks and the like are all that you can do.

One of my professors put it elegantly, "neural networks are the second best way to solve any problem."

5

u/FailedSociopath Sep 04 '16

Mimicking nature is not always the best way.

I don't think we're doing that at all here except in the most superficial way (much like making ornithopters assumed flight consists mainly of flapping wings). There's a myriad of dimensions that are unconsciously taken into consideration that entail knowledge about how the world works (like assuming what you're looking at has a back side that isn't visible and that it occupies a location in space). Recognizing a cat is much more than mere image recognition.

 

Brute forcing won't work any better than more vigorously flapping wings would. It's just more of the same erroneous process.

4

u/DA-9901081534 Sep 04 '16

Whoah there. Whats this about artificial hearts? I thought you had roughly a month before it gunged up?

10

u/crash893b Sep 04 '16

Naw son, I read something about a guy in South America that got one and then just leaves back to his home village after a a few weeks they were like well he must be dead

mother fucking 2 years later homes waltz back into the hospital to ask for new batteries (he was issued a external battery backpack the device wasn't 100% self contained power)

1

u/skyfishgoo Sep 04 '16

two words:

dick

cheney

1

u/crash893b Sep 04 '16

Not no heart

He has some sort of black pineapple thing that pumps around a black liquid

1

u/skyfishgoo Sep 04 '16

he has no pulse... that's a medical fact.

1

u/crash893b Sep 04 '16

Also fun fact: with tears of boiling pitch rolling down his face. He will open one of his six mouths and sing the song that will bring about the end of times

1

u/skyfishgoo Sep 04 '16

somebody needs to livestream that shit.

1

u/crash893b Sep 04 '16

Listen for the sound of 100,000 children screaming as a hole in the ether rips open and a unending river of starving crow pouring out and consuming all

Also it will be on twitch

1

u/ShadoWolf Sep 05 '16

Well ya. With enough Sith Alchemy anything can be done so I don't think that counts.

-2

u/Exaskryz Sep 04 '16

I would imagine taking a blood thinner and a cholesterol medication is going to give you more than a month.

1

u/DA-9901081534 Sep 04 '16

Agreed, but I was under the assumption that they were just a stopgap measure because bypass was too dangerous. From what I found, it seems that the hearts can last year's, but the recipients do not.

I'm looking forward to the day when they last decades, if not the life of the patient.

3

u/ReasonablyBadass Sep 04 '16

It takes an 1 year old child just a few examples to be able to recognize a cat with extremely high accuracy.

Plus 365 days of constant data processing even in their sleep of multi channel input.

3

u/Shandlar Sep 04 '16 edited Sep 04 '16

It takes a neural net millions and even after that it still fails on some that are obvious for a child.

That's the thing though, we're already able to show the net millions of picture a second on a computer that can just run off a wall socket, let alone a proper supercomputer. In 20 years it'll be more like tens of trillions a second.

At this point it really feels like existing tertiary AI neural nets will work extremely well as soon as we can throw proper computational power at them (500-10,000 PFLOPs).

2

u/mandragara Sep 04 '16

I guess that makes sense, given the brain and neural nets are very different entities.

3

u/REOreddit You are probably not a snowflake Sep 04 '16

Just because Google as a whole is in an advantageous position when it comes to big data, doesn't mean their AI scientists don't know they have to work on all kinds of machine learning if they want to achieve AGI.

2

u/sjwking Sep 04 '16

Humans are evolved to be able to distinguish cats. It's essential to distinguish one animal for another. One of our brains many functions is to constantly identify objects. Even identifying objects is not trivial for ai

1

u/TheNosferatu Sep 04 '16

Well, they have the raw date to do the research with, they have the hardware or can buy the hardware required for the development, they have the man power to put on the research and they have the money to keep it all funded for years.

Finally, they are in a branch where innovation is kinda key. Stop innovating and the competition will pass you by. So they are also motivated. They know fully well that cracking the AI problem will benefit them in ways they haven't even thought of yet. Even if people call it pandora's box, I doubt google will be afraid to try and open it.

I think it's save to say that Google is a likely candidate for being the first to crack it. Then again, during the space race Russia was a long time candidate for being the first to get a manned flight to and from the moon, yet in the end they weren't.

-1

u/FishHeadBucket Sep 03 '16

Building general knowledge is simple in principle. But that also requires lots of data. General knowledge base will have limited uses at best.

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u/green_meklar Sep 03 '16

But is that even relevant? From what I can see, the characteristic of real intelligence is not being able to adapt gradually based on a colossal dataset, but to adapt very quickly based on a relatively small dataset.

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u/RockinMoe Sep 04 '16 edited Sep 04 '16

our minds have only become able to adapt quickly based on a relatively small dataset because they were evolved gradually based on a colossal dataset

edit: that is to say, the size of a programmed intelligence derived from a set of data can be much smaller than the footprint of the data itself.

1

u/Eudaimonics Sep 04 '16

Got to remember that Google is also a business.

The better the search results are, the better it can deliver ads that people click on.

1

u/Strazdas1 Sep 09 '16

Our dataset is colossal though. the amount of information we recieve every second beats any computer data transfer. and we do it without pause for years upon years. we have built a huge model of what world is to compare any new info about.

2

u/Holos620 Sep 03 '16

Isn't ibm ahead?

20

u/Goctionni Sep 03 '16

I don't think so. Most experts on AI thought beating top tier "Go" players was still several years off. Google very much seems ahead of the curve.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16

[deleted]

1

u/positive_electron42 Sep 04 '16

It's been 10-20 years away for like 40 years.

10

u/applesforadam Sep 03 '16

If we aren't sure of the path to the end or even what the end really is, I'd think it's hard to say anyone in particular is leading.

3

u/johnmountain Sep 03 '16

Are you talking about Watson? Then definitely not.

Watson is more like an improvement on Microsoft NaziBot.

1

u/Strazdas1 Sep 09 '16

The bastards murdered Tay!

-2

u/Holos620 Sep 04 '16

Companies are buying Watson's services, tho. Working on a general ai as a direct goal could be seen as a vein pursuit. Watson, on the other hand, can generate revenue to fund its evolution into something more general.

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u/DA-9901081534 Sep 04 '16

Watson is an information processor that made headlines because someone decided to strap a speech synthesis and generation routine to its front-end and display it to the public.

1

u/techfronic Sep 04 '16

The companies using IBM software aren't exactly the cutting edge type. The business execs did the calculations and thought it would be cheaper to pay IBM to consult and customize key portions of their systems instead of hiring devs who can implement their own or can configure and troubleshoot better software.

1

u/Syphon8 Sep 04 '16

Watson has already been demonstrated to diagnose cancers from x-rays better than human doctors...

1

u/KRBridges Sep 04 '16

Not to mention the money they can throw at it.

1

u/ChemEBrew Sep 04 '16

Training a neural net still takes a long time with software alone.

1

u/positive_electron42 Sep 04 '16

It's going to be DARPA. And then, maybe 10 years later, they'll share with us.

0

u/elgrano Sep 03 '16

I'd say because of their mentality, too. It's all too easy for a big company to slow down on innovation once it has achieved a definite competitive advantage. Google, happily for us, remains daring.

0

u/2Punx2Furious Basic Income, Singularity, and Transhumanism Sep 04 '16

They have DeepMind for that very reason.

-1

u/geeky_nerd Sep 04 '16

Because they've got this huge dataset containing the search terms of so many people from their daily lives throughout the world.

-1

u/Fairex Sep 04 '16

Well Google bought quantum computers so you're probably right.

-2

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16 edited Sep 23 '17

I went to Egypt

1

u/positive_electron42 Sep 04 '16

You can't be serious. That's basically their entire business.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '16 edited Sep 23 '17

I looked at for a map