duvenaud

6 ms·

1.
by duvenaud 1y ago
This is simply wrong. Backprop has the same asymptotic time complexity as forward.
2.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Which material ongoing issues are we ignoring? The paper is mainly talking about how the mundane problems we're already starting to have could lead to an irrecoverable catastrophe, even without any sudden betrayal or omnipotent AGI. S
3.
by duvenaud 2y ago
One of the authors here. I don't think we anthropomorphize AI as some sort of God. Here's a more prosaic analogy that might be helpful. Imagine tomorrow there's a new country full of billions of extremely conscientious, ski
4.
by duvenaud 2y ago
> as we notice these things, we pass laws against it Well, the claim is that that's the sort of thing that will get harder once humans aren't involved in most important decisions. > which is we created all this stuff, and we
5.
by duvenaud 2y ago
> we have categorized the ways it goes rogue (monopoly, extortion, etc) and responded adequately. This objection is a reasonable one. But the point of the paper is that a lot of the ways we have of addressing these systemic problems wil
6.
by duvenaud 2y ago
> A society whose tagline is "alive and free in some senses" is already dystopian! Haha. Well we might agree about that - that description covers a wide range of possibilities. If you have ideas about what a plausible and goo
7.
by duvenaud 2y ago
I appreciate your engagement, and I don't really have a plan myself to address these problems, but I don't really know what to do with "Socialism" as a recommendation. Care to elaborate what you think I, or anyone shoul
8.
by duvenaud 2y ago
These are all good points about our use of language, thanks for the feedback. Maybe "disempowerment" is a bit of a red herring, or a misleading problem to focus on. The reason we didn't spend more time on clarifying that is
9.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Yep, a major missing piece in this entire problem / discussion is how to characterize how much "power" "humans" have had. My best idea so far is to characterize the sorts of outcomes that can be feasibly steered to
10.
by duvenaud 2y ago
> What incentives do any humans have to so totally delegate the functioning of the core levers of societal power that they're unable to prevent their own extinction? Because it'll be more effective at every step than the altern
11.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Last author here. I agree that states already have little incentive to effectively represent their citizens. But they could have even less! What would it look like to face these issues but more directly? Ending capitalism and competition
12.
by duvenaud 2y ago
In many senses, yes. But the empowered ones still needed to keep most of the rest of the people happy and healthy enough to work, most of the time. That's what we're saying will change. In fact, it'll be worse: Humans are c
13.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Last author here. Good point, I agree that the move to an entirely self-sustaining machine economy would require extra time, and that would drag out the time to extinction even the worst case scenario by this mechanism. And, if caught ear
14.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Update: the code is here: https://github.com/jerryqhyu/distill_bayes_net
15.
by duvenaud 2y ago
I agree that priors over aspects of the world would be more useful, but I don't think that they're important in making natural intelligence powerful. In my experience, the important thing is to make your prior really broad, but c
16.
by duvenaud 2y ago
BNNs certainly have their uses, but I think people in general found that it's a better use of compute to fit a larger model on more data than to try to squeeze more juice from a given small dataset + model. Usually there is more data
17.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Thanks for pointing that out!
18.
by duvenaud 2y ago
This approach characterizes a different type of uncertainty than BNNs do, and the approaches can be combined. The BNN tracks uncertainty about parameters in the NN, and mixture density nets track the noise distribution _conditional on know
19.
by duvenaud 2y ago
I still am excited by Dex ( https://github.com/google-research/dex-lang/ ) and still write code in it! I have a bunch of demos and fixes written, and am just waiting for Dougal to finish his latest re-write before
20.
by duvenaud 2y ago
I think we used a distill.pub template. Also Jerry wrote some custom BNN fitting code in javascript. I'll ask my co-authors to open-source it.
21.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Sure, instead of saying "choose" a prior, you could say "elicit". But I think in this context, focusing on a practitioner's prior knowledge is missing the point. For the sorts of problems we use NNs for, we don&#x
22.
by duvenaud 2y ago
I would argue against the idea that "MLE is just Bayes with a flat prior". The power of Bayes usually comes mainly from keeping around all the hypothesis that are compatible with the data, not from the prior. This is especially
23.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Good point. We wrote this pre-double descent, and a massively overparameterized model would make a nice addition to the tutorial as a baseline. However, if you want a rich predictive distribution, it might still make sense to use a Bayesi
24.
by duvenaud 2y ago
I agree that Bayesian neural networks haven't been worth it in practice for many applications, but I think the main problem is that it's usually better to spend your compute training a single set of weights for a larger model, rat
25.
by duvenaud 2y ago
I agree choosing priors is hard, but choosing ReLU versus LeakyReLU versus sigmoid seems like a problem with using neural nets in general, not Bayesian neural nets in particular. Am I misunderstanding?
26.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Author here! What a surprise. This was an abandoned project from 2019, that we never linked or advertised anywhere as far as I know. Anyways, happy to answer questions.
27.
by duvenaud 2y ago
Right, but the employer they choose is presumably the one offering the best deal in the world from their point of view. Wouldn't it make more sense to be mad at every other employer for not proposing better pay, than the one that&#x27
28.
by duvenaud 3y ago
Sure, but think about how humans drove others extinct. We never decided to "kill all wooly mammoths", we just wanted to use their meat / habitats for other things. The correlation you mention seems noisy enough that I wouldn
29.
by duvenaud 3y ago
Okay, well it seems funny to both claim that there is no good definition of agency, but also be sure that we've never demonstrated any hint of it in theory or practice. Planners, optimizers, and RL agents seem agentic to some degree t
30.
by duvenaud 3y ago
Yes, I agree that initially, AIs will be highly integrated, and their goals will probably at least appear to be somewhat aligned with those of human societies. Similar to human corporations and institutions. But human institutions and gov

More ›