Meet Clippy 9000: Microsoft brags about building Earth's largest AI language model, refuses to let it out of the lab There’s a new giant AI language model in town: enter Microsoft’s Turing-NLG system, which apparently contains a whopping 17 billion parameters, making it the largest publicly known model of its class yet. Turing-NLG joins the growing list of massive text-generating machine-learning systems. Google’s BERT model contains 340 …
You might care the next time you want to use the Desktop CleanUp wizard; Clippy 9000 is going to ask you which kind of soap you have preference for and would you mind if the special offer for Product X might actually interest you for your personal usage : <click on this link to visit a sponsor>.
Artificial Intelligence will always be artificial for one simple reason. We don't even know how we work so how the hell can we expect to create something in our image...
If you eschew ALL of their spyware ridden offerings you will be safe for a while but I'm certain that they are looking at ways to infiltrate each and every computer on the planet. They aren't alone btw but I have grown to dislike their every move in recent years.
I threw in the towel a few years ago and have not regretted it one bit.
It’s possible that Redmond won’t release the model at all, but it hinted that the state of the art results provided “new opportunities for Microsoft and our customers. "We don’t have any details to share about future plans,” a spokesperson told us.
So, another Manhattan type Project to try and extraordinarily render Microsoft and some of their customers an overwhelming but invariably only fleeting advantage, for such is always the case in such matters.
Such Neuro-Linguistic Programming and SuperNatural Language Generation makes for a very interesting future in deed, indeed, and that is a colossal understatement of pertinent fact for massive misunderestimation with impertinent fiction.
Do you think there be other secret stealthy operational missions in comparatively/relatively similar fields from competing and/or opposing peers groups/wannabe cloaked emperor types to the North, South and East of the West fully cognisant of both the cost and price of success in the genre?
DrBobK,
I think you will find both are akin to an AI Generational Brainwashing hence the particular and peculiarly fervent interest of certain sections of the mass of humanity ...... for excellent results in the field lead everything and everyone in applied micromanaged macros, and that has more than just a few feeling really uncomfortable with/in such developments/experiments.
I expect its "working" but in ways that were not expected or desirable for public consumption.
People generally don't behave the same way, use the same terms or language in corporate worlds and are far more guarded then people in perhaps a book, or bar conversations.
I am therefore not surprised...
I can't help but be reminded of Tay, whose dataset was rapidly influenced by the internet - including but not limited to 4chan - and began to reflect back some pretty racist ideas.
Unless Microsoft have done a very serious filtering of the inputs (which given the database size seems improbable) then there's a fair chance that this model has also picked up the internet being... well, the internet.
So no intelligence involved just a probability engine?
This is possibly ready for Instagram or Whatsapp chats because they are vaccuous and mostly content free, a white noise generator of the written word
No intelligence here, nothing to see, move along please.
As one who has heaped scorn on Clippy over the years, I am uneasy. The marriage of machine learning, a bullied and scorned Clippy, social media, and the Internet of Things can only result in the oft-foretold, dreaded cyborg death machine. Think of something on the order of Carrie at the prom or Rambo being busted for vagrancy. This cannot end well for the human race, and all because we couldn't accept the assistance of a well-intentioned, albeit incredibly annoying, helpful animated paperclip.
I can't recall ever writing a letter before that irritating bit of bent wire popped up and said that I was. To be honest I can't recall the bloody thing ever suggesting anything else before it was binned.
Clippy managed to put to death any suggestions of user assistance in any format and in all applications from that period hence. So on reflection it was a good thing :-)
“Microsoft is introducing Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG), the largest model ever published at 17 billion parameters, which outperforms the state of the art on a variety of language modeling benchmarks and also excels when applied to numerous practical tasks, including summarization and question answering,” Microsoft claimed."
Are you not a greater computer than the Milliard Gargantubrain at Maximegalon which can count all the atoms in a star in a milisecond?
Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff. I talk only of the computer that is to come after me, whose mearest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate....
DNA
When reading a text in Italian, can it tell the difference between a fruit salad and the country to the north of Greece, both called "Macedonia"?
Similarly, when reading a text in English, can it tell the difference between an christmas-hating edible bird and the country to the east of Greece, both called "Turkey"?
I don't think you can program a Turing machine to be intelligent, no matter how fast it is or how big its memory capacity is. I've been saying this for the past 25 years. Nothing in the intervening period has changed my mind. I don't think we are any closer to AI now than we were when Unix first came out in 1969.
I am not saying it will never happen, but I am saying that it will never happen on the current design of computers.
"I love turkey" could be about the food or the country.
"Adoro la macedonia" likewise.
You need to go further back in the conversation to see what prompted me to say that. You might have said you bought/saw some for sale in Tesco or Esselunga or wherever. Then it is probably going to be the food.
You might have said that you or someone else is from those parts or visiting there. Then it is probably going to be the country.
Unlike many here I am not automatically negative about any AI project but on this one I'm left scratching my head. If I understand it right, people are putting huge amounts of resources into platforms whose entire purpose is to generate text that is banal but not immediately computer-generated?
There must be a useful point to this because they wouldn't do it otherwise, but this just seems like a glorified chat-bot - fun academically but not in the same realm as IBM's Watson or other AI projects which can actually retrieve or even generate useful information.
Are there details I've missed or some application to this, or is it "just" an academic curiosity?
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