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by anigbrowl 4016 days ago
It's a tricky ethical area. The Google post cites several research papers that seemt o provide more than enough information to replicate these results or get similar ones, which is good, because I think everyone should be able to explore these tools - I stick by my view from yesterday that this may be a scientific breakthrough.

At the same time, I can see the basis for some anxiety, because it's not hard to imagine proprietary research going a few steps farther and developing some sort of general intelligence or even a limited but extremely high-powered intelligence that would confer an overwhelming commercial advantage, and/or a political one. Suppose, as an exercise, that one developed an algorithm to maximize persuasiveness by first leading readers/listeners into a quiescent, semi-hypnotic state and then making your commercial or political pitch. There's certainly a potential for abuse.

In Europe this sort of thing tends to bring up the precautionary principle, the idea that you shouldn't do something without oversight and demonstrated minimization of risk. I think that's highly limiting, but expect some pushback against Google over this. Of course, I don't think democracy is all that wonderful either but then I'm a bit of a misanthrope.

1 comments

> The Google post cites several research papers that seem to provide more than enough information to replicate these results or get similar ones, which is good

I agree that it is good, but even though the scientific theories and algorithms seem to be "open", having access to both the computing power and data-sets of Google, is not.

So one could replicate these experiments, but not quite on the scale that Google does. I'm not at all sure if it's practically possible for a single (really clever) person with a high-end CPU/GPU machine (and possibly some $$$ for Cloud Computing instances), to replicate something similar to the results in this blogpost.

The recognition nets used in the blogpost seem to be trained on a tremendously high number of training examples, to give the ability to "hallucinate" (or classify) such a great variety of animal species, for instance.

I'm not at all sure if it's practically possible for a single (really clever) person with a high-end CPU/GPU machine (and possibly some $$$ for Cloud Computing instances), to replicate something similar to the results in this blogpost.

It's very possible.

GoogLeNet[1] is an example in Caffe: BVLC GoogLeNet in models/bvlc_googlenet: GoogLeNet trained on ILSVRC 2012, almost exactly as described in Going Deeper with Convolutions by Szegedy et al. in ILSVRC 2014. (Trained by Sergio Guadarrama @sguada)

[1] http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/model_zoo.html