[mindgam3]

Demis Hassabis (true) statements here would be much more credible if DeepMind wasn't currently making a mint by promoting AlphaZero to the masses as a "general purpose artificial intelligence system".

Don't believe me? Check out this series of marketing videos on YouTube by GM Matthew Sadler.

1. “Hi, I’m GM Matthew Sadler, and in this series of videos we’re taking a look at new games between AlphaZero, DeepMind’s general purpose artificial intelligence system, and Stockfish” (1)

2. “Hi, I’m GM Matthew Sadler, and welcome to this review of the World Champinship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana. And it’s a review with a difference, because we are taking a look at the games together with AlphaZero, DeepMind’s general purpose artificial intelligence system...” (2)

3. “Hi, I’m GM Matthew Sadler, and in this video we’ll be taking a look at a game between AlphaZero, DeepMind’s general purpose artificial intelligence system, and Stockfish” (3)

I could go on, but you get my point. Search youtube for "Sadler DeepMind" and you'll see all the rest. This is a script.

But wait, you say, that's just some random unaffiliated independent grandmaster who just happens to be using an inaccurate script on his own, no DeepMind connection at all! And to that I would say, check out this same random GM being quoted directly on DeepMind's blog waxing eloquently and rapturously about AlphaZero's incredible qualities. (4)

Let's be clear. I am in no way dismissing AlphaZero's truy remarkable abilities in both chess and other games like go and shogi. Nor do I have a problem with Demis Hassabis making headlines for stating the obvious about deep learning (that it's good at solving certain limited types of puzzles, but we are a long way from AGI, why is this controversial).

My problem is that Hassabis is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Increasing DeepMind/Google's value by many millions with his marketing message, while acting like he's not doing that. It feels intellectually dishonest.

To solve this, all DeepMind needs to stop instructing its Grandmaster mouthpieces to refer to AlphaZero as a "general articial intelligence system". Let's see how long that takes.

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-wFUdvKTVQ&t=0m10s (2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4T0_IoGQCE&t=0m05s (3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS26Ct34YrQ&t=0m05s (4) https://deepmind.com/blog/alphazero-shedding-new-light-grand...

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Edit: You don't have to go far to see that DeepMind are pushing AlphaZero as "general purpose". This is the title of their Science paper on it:

A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1140

"General" as in what? As opposed to reinforcement learning, in er, general? As opposed to other ANN architectures?

>> I am in no way dismissing AlphaZero's truy remarkable abilities in both chess and other games like go and shogi.

More to the point- it's only chess, go and shogi; not games "like" those.

The AlphaZero architecture has the structure of a chessboard and the range of moves of pieces in chess, go and shogi hard-coded and you can't just take a trained AlphaZero model and apply it to a game that doesn't have either the board or the moves of those three games.

To be blunt, AlphaZero has mastered chess, go and shogi, but it can't play noughts-and-crosses.

[rozim]

I suspect "general purpose artificial intelligence system" means the same architecture applied to 3 games (western Chess, Shogi, Go).

[mindgam3]

Wouldn't that be a "general purpose game-playing intelligence system" at best? (without mentioning that it only applies to certain types of perfect-information games)

Maybe it's just me, but "general purpose artificial intelligence system" sounds like, well, General Artificial Intelligence. Which sounds like Artificial General Intelligence, which is the holy grail.

[balfirevic]

> Maybe it's just me, but "general purpose artificial intelligence system" sounds like, well, General Artificial Intelligence.

Well, it doesn't sound like that at all to me and I think the phrasing is fair. Also, it folds proteins.

[taneq]

I don't think they mean the two in the same way. AlphaZero is "general purpose artificial intelligence" because if you formulate a problem in the right way and then throw a server cluster at it for a few weeks, it often comes back with pretty good performance at solving that problem. It's probably our current best crack at creating AGI, but it's a long way from a machine that can take a very high level goal and figure out the rest for itself, which is what we usually mean by "AGI" - not just a machine that answers multiple questions, but a thing analogous to a human mind which can analyse new things, infer properties and mechanics, generalise those to new contexts, and apply that knowledge to achieve new outcomes.

[mindgam3]

“if you formulate a [very specific type of problem involving perfect information games] in the right way”

[taneq]

Hey, at least it's a type of problem rather than a problem itself.

I haven't studied enough myself yet to know the answer to this one, but what are the differences between AlphaZero and the OpenAI 5 DOTA team's approach? Would it be possible to apply AlphaZero to DOTA?

[sanxiyn]

DOTA is partially observable, so I believe AlphaZero can't be applied, as-is.

[mindgam3]

Agreed. Poker is another interesting case of "partial information" game. There is some discussion of this in the links below. I suspect that AlphaZero could make a decent poker player with a non-trivial amount of tweaking.

1. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601157/could-alphago-bluf...

2. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-alphazeros-artificial-int...

[why_only_15]

I wonder what would happen if you made DOTA totally observable. You could probably reformat it as 5 pieces for a player instead of 5 people on a team or the like. It would probably change the game too much to be recognizable as the same, but I think it would be an interesting experiment if nothing else.