Connectionists: Geoff Hinton, Elon Musk, and a bet at garymarcus.substack.com

[Geoffrey Hinton]

If you make a bet, you need to be very clear about what counts as success
and you need to assume the person who has to pay out will quibble.
You cannot have a real bet that includes phrases like:

"tell you accurately"
"reliably answer questions"
"competent cook"
"reliably construct"

A bet needs to have such clear criteria for whether it has been achieved or
not that even Gary Marcus could not quibble.

Geoff



On Thu, Jun 9, 2022 at 3:41 AM Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu> wrote:

> Dear Connectionists, and especially Geoff Hinton,
>
> It has come to my attention that Geoff Hinton is looking for challenging
> targets. In a just-released episode of The Robot Brains podcast [
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Otcau-C_Yc], he said
>
> *“If any of the people who say [deep learning] is hitting a wall would
> just write down a list of the things it’s not going to be able to do then
> five years later, we’d be able to show we’d done them.”*
>
> Now, as it so happens, I (with the help of Ernie Davis) did just write
> down exactly such a list of things, last weekm and indeed offered Elon Musk
> a $100,000 bet along similar lines.
>
> Precise details are here, towards the end of the essay:
>
> https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things
> <https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things?s=w>
>
> Five are specific milestones, in video and text comprehension, cooking,
> math, etc; the sixth is the proviso that for an intelligence to be deemed
> “general” (which is what Musk was discussing in a remark that prompted my
> proposal), it would need to solve a majority of the problems. We can
> probably all agree that narrow AI for any single problem on its own might
> be less interesting.
>
> Although there is no word yet from Elon, Kevin Kelly offered to host the
> bet at LongNow.Org, and Metaculus.com has transformed the bet into 6
> questions that the community can comment on.  Vivek Wadhwa, cc’d, quickly
> offered to double the bet, and several others followed suit;  the bet to
> Elon (should he choose to take it) currently stands at $500,000.
>
> If you’d like in on the bet, Geoff, please let me know.
>
> More generally, I’d love to hear what the connectionists community thinks
> of six criteria I laid out (as well as the arguments at the top of the
> essay, as to why AGI might not be as imminent as Musk seems to think).
>
> Cheers.
> Gary Marcus
>
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