Artificial Intelligence
| Speaking recently at Google's Zeitgeist event DeepMind's co-founder Demis Hassabis described his personal journey in exploring artificial intelligence and building general purpose learning machines. |
According to Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, in order to find the theory of everything, we must first solve the question of intelligence. He spoke recently at Google's Zeitgeist event.
Hassabis is the man behind DeepMind Technologies, a neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence company which was recently acquired by Google.
Hassabis was a chess master at the age of 12 who graduated with a double first from Cambridge before founding the pioneering videogames company Elixir Studios, producing award-winning games for Microsoft and Universal.
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, which he created at age 17 all featured an element of artificial intelligence, and he ascribes his ambition to unravel intelligence as a choice between, "the only two subjects really worth studying: physics and neuroscience." Physics, he points out, is the study of the outside world and neuroscience is the study of the internal world of our minds."When I thought about this more, I came the conclusion that the mind was more important, because that is the way we actually interpret the external world out there," says Hassabis. This philosophy echoes Emmanuel Kant's phrase, "the mind interprets the world."
After he sold his games company, Hassabis returned to school to obtain his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from University College London and then continued his neuroscience and artificial intelligence research for a period. He focused on imagination, memory and the function of the hippocampus, because "these are two of the capabilities that we don't know how to do very well in AI." He wanted to use the study of neuroscience to inspire work in artificial intelligence.
In 2010 he co-founded DeepMind, a company with a lofty goal of being an "Apollo program mission for AI." The company how has over a hundred researchers working on neuroscience-inspired artificial general intelligence.
The company intends to create a general purpose learning machine, or artificial general intelligence (AGI). Hassabis refers to them as, "AI Scientists." They plan to do this by 1) solving intelligence and 2) using the AI Scientists to solve everything else. Going back to Hassabis' initial decision, he hopes solving intelligence will help solve the problems of physics.
All of DeepMind's work involves creating learning algorithms. Famously, the company has recently showcased this general purpose learning algorithm in a paper in Nature where they created a system that has taught itself to play Atari video games, and become super-human in ability to do so.
The conceptual model Hassabis and the DeepMind team came up with for developing their learning algorithms is called Reinforcement Learning Framework. In the video above the way the system plays games like Space Invaders and Breakout is really astonishing.
Now the company is progressing and moving to work on other capabilities of intelligence like concepts and memory. These are also based on a deep understanding of neuroscience as inspiration. "One way to think about artificial general intelligence is that it is a process that automatically converts unstructured information into actionable knowledge.
DeepMind is also working on learning systems beyond simple video games. This includes 3D games, Go (considered to be a much harder game for AI compared to chess), simulations and even eventually robotics. The system is also being adapted in the near term for recommendation systems on YouTube and for predictive healthcare applications (look out Watson!)
Hassabis claims in the talk that human-level AI is still several decades away, but we need to start the debate about it now. He is a signer of the recent open letter on the safety of artificial intelligence, and made the creation of an ethics board a central part of his deal with Google.
Two things emerge from this talk. First DeepMind's work points to the soon-to-arrive future of artificial intelligence and the importance of the subject. Second, the lecture really demonstrates the intelligence of Hassabis himself. Some may consider naming your lecture after a movie about arguably the most brilliant minds of our time, as a pure act of ego.
Considering the accomplishments this man has already achieved at his young age though, he is deserving of being mentioned in the same breath as Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking. As DeepMind continues to build their general purpose learning machine, his personal recognition is sure to escalate until he too is a house-hold name.
Now the company is progressing and moving to work on other capabilities of intelligence like concepts and memory. These are also based on a deep understanding of neuroscience as inspiration. "One way to think about artificial general intelligence is that it is a process that automatically converts unstructured information into actionable knowledge.
"By trying to distill intelligence into an algorithmic construct and comparing it to the human mind, that might help us to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of the mind, like consciousness, creativity and even dreams." |
DeepMind is also working on learning systems beyond simple video games. This includes 3D games, Go (considered to be a much harder game for AI compared to chess), simulations and even eventually robotics. The system is also being adapted in the near term for recommendation systems on YouTube and for predictive healthcare applications (look out Watson!)Hassabis claims in the talk that human-level AI is still several decades away, but we need to start the debate about it now. He is a signer of the recent open letter on the safety of artificial intelligence, and made the creation of an ethics board a central part of his deal with Google.
Two things emerge from this talk. First DeepMind's work points to the soon-to-arrive future of artificial intelligence and the importance of the subject. Second, the lecture really demonstrates the intelligence of Hassabis himself. Some may consider naming your lecture after a movie about arguably the most brilliant minds of our time, as a pure act of ego.
Considering the accomplishments this man has already achieved at his young age though, he is deserving of being mentioned in the same breath as Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking. As DeepMind continues to build their general purpose learning machine, his personal recognition is sure to escalate until he too is a house-hold name.
"I think that by trying to distill intelligence into an algorithmic construct and comparing it to the human mind, that might help us to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of the mind, like consciousness, creativity and even dreams," Hassabis concludes.
SOURCE ZeitgeistMinds
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