No, Facebook Did Not Panic and Shut Down an AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart. In recent weeks, a story about experimental Facebook machine learning research has been circulating with increasingly panicky, Skynet- esque headlines.“Facebook engineers panic, pull plug on AI after bots develop their own language,” one site wrote. Facebook shuts down down AI after it invents its own creepy language,” another added. Did we humans just create Frankenstein?” asked yet another.

One British tabloid quoted a robotics professor saying the incident showed “the dangers of deferring to artificial intelligence” and “could be lethal” if similar tech was injected into military robots. References to the coming robot revolution, killer droids, malicious AIs and human extermination abounded, some more or less serious than others. Continually quoted was this passage, in which two Facebook chat bots had learned to talk to each other in what is admittedly a pretty creepy way.

Bob: I can i i everything else. Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to Bob: you i everything else. Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me.

The reality is somewhat more prosaic. A few weeks ago, Fast.

Co Design did report on a Facebook effort to develop a “generative adversarial network” for the purpose of developing negotiation software. The two bots quoted in the above passage were designed, as explained in a Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research unit blog post in June, for the purpose of showing it is “possible for dialog agents with differing goals (implemented as end- to- end- trained neural networks) to engage in start- to- finish negotiations with other bots or people while arriving at common decisions or outcomes.”The bots were never doing anything more nefarious than discussing with each other how to split an array of given items (represented in the user interface as innocuous objects like books, hats, and balls) into a mutually agreeable split. The intent was to develop a chatbot which could learn from human interaction to negotiate deals with an end user so fluently said user would not realize they are talking with a robot, which FAIR said was a success: “The performance of FAIR’s best negotiation agent, which makes use of reinforcement learning and dialog rollouts, matched that of human negotiators .. FAIR’s bots not only can speak English but also think intelligently about what to say.”When Facebook directed two of these semi- intelligent bots to talk to each other, Fast. Co reported, the programmers realized they had made an error by not incentivizing the chatbots to communicate according to human- comprehensible rules of the English language. In their attempts to learn from each other, the bots thus began chatting back and forth in a derived shorthand—but while it might look creepy, that’s all it was.“Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” FAIR visiting researcher Dhruv Batra said.

Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”Facebook did indeed shut down the conversation, but not because they were panicked they had untethered a potential Skynet. FAIR researcher Mike Lewis told Fast. Co they had simply decided “our interest was having bots who could talk to people,” not efficiently to each other, and thus opted to require them to write to each other legibly. But in a game of content telephone not all that different from what the chat bots were doing, this story evolved from a measured look at the potential short- term implications of machine learning technology to thinly veiled doomsaying. There are probably good reasons not to let intelligent machines develop their own language which humans would not be able to meaningfully understand—but again, this is a relatively mundane phenomena which arises when you take two machine learning devices and let them learn off each other. It’s worth noting that when the bot’s shorthand is explained, the resulting conversation was both understandable and not nearly as creepy as it seemed before.

As Fast. Co noted, it’s possible this kind of machine learning could allow smart devices or systems to communicate with each other more efficiently. Those gains might come with some problems—imagine how difficult it might be to debug such a system that goes wrong—but it is quite different from unleashing machine intelligence from human control. In this case, the only thing the chatbots were capable of doing was coming up with a more efficient way to trade each others’ balls.

There are good uses of machine learning technology, like improved medical diagnostics, and potentially very bad ones, like riot prediction software police could use to justify cracking down on protests. All of them are essentially ways to compile and analyze large amounts of data, and so far the risks mainly have to do with how humans choose to distribute and wield that power.

Hopefully humans will also be smart enough not to plug experimental machine learning programs into something very dangerous, like an army of laser- toting androids or a nuclear reactor. But if someone does and a disaster ensues, it would be the result of human negligence and stupidity, not because the robots had a philosophical revelation about how bad humans are. At least not yet. Machine learning is nowhere close to true AI, just humanity’s initial fumbling with the technology. If anyone should be panicking about this news in 2.

Update 8/5/17 7:25pm ET: Google’s new Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance Danielle Brown has issued her own memo to Google employees in response to. After Real Madrid’s appeal of Cristiano Ronaldo’s five-match suspension for shoving a referee was denied today, the Portuguese star whined about the decision on. Tickets for Concerts, Sports, Theatre and More Online at TicketsInventory.com.

My Five Favorite Moments From The Yankees- Tigers Brawl. Yesterday saw the weirdest and most interesting game of the season, a 1. Tigers win over the Yankees that saw eight ejections, four batters hit by pitches, three bench clearings, and a whole bunch of legitimate punches. Some people will tell you this was bad for baseball. One Week Job Full Movie In English. That it was ugly and dangerous and shameful. Those people are wrong.

• “Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” FAIR visiting researcher Dhruv Batra said. “Like if I say ‘the’ five.
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Basebrawls are just about the most compelling thing that can happen in a baseball game—perhaps because they are so rare—and should be treasured. Here are my five favorite moments from yesterday’s donnybrook: 5) Gary Sanchez becomes a heel. Every brawl needs a villain. Gary Sanchez is the Yankees’ best slugger, and that apparently extends to slugging defenseless opponents. Sanchez had every reason to be mad—it was his plunking after homering against Detroit for the fourth time in three games that set the table for this mess—but these sucker punches were something else. Sanchez punched Miguel Cabrera in the pile, then after being pulled away by Tigers manager Brad Ausmus, came back to punch a similarly prone Nick Castellanos: When the suspensions are doled out, it’ll be games missed for Cabrera, for Alex Wilson, and likely some others, but no one is going to have as much unpaid time off as Gary Sanchez.

His reputation will last even longer than that. Sanchez is going to wear it,” Pedro Martinez said. Cheap shots will stay around the league for ever.”4) The Tigers’ internecine beef Sanchez’s rogue punchfest led to one of the weirder aftershocks of this mess. During the cooldown from the brawl, the Tigers’ Victor Martinez tried to play peacemaker and had what looked like a relatively friendly chat with Sanchez. That didn’t sit well with Castellanos or with Justin Verlander, who let Martinez know exactly what they thought.

After the game, Castellanos and Verlander declined to comment, and Martinez wasn’t in the clubhouse. Alex Wilson says Yeah, I did it. An inevitable part of all brawls is the pitchers denying that their beanballs were purposeful. They’re usually lying, but it’s clear why they do: There’s little to be gained by fessing up, and much to lose, since they can be suspended for longer now that their intention is no longer hazy. Alex Wilson wants everyone to know he was definitely throwing at Todd Frazier.

It was pretty obvious,” Wilson said. You’ve gotta take care of your teammates sometimes. At some point, you’ve gotta make a stand for yourself.”The Yankees had hit two Tigers batters in the seventh, both probably unintentionally—the game was tied and there were no outs and indeed, both runners came around to score—but Wilson’s retaliation in the eighth was a no- doubter.“(Frazier) basically said, ‘You did it on purpose,’ and I said, ‘Hey man, no hard feelings, but you’ve gotta understand the way this game’s going,’ and he told me, basically, ‘I got you or whatever,’ and I said, ‘OK.’ I said, ‘It could’ve been way worse,’” Wilson said. Love the honesty. The bullpen sprint. A reliably excellent part of every basebrawl is the long sprint in from the bullpen, as the relievers—and the bullpen catcher, usually still in full gear—charge toward the action like a wrestler making a run- in.

Gotta have your teammates’ backs! Even if it’s 4. 00 feet away and things will probably be wrapping up by the time you get there.

It was David Robertson leading the charge yesterday, reminding me of Graeme Lloyd’s charge in to murder Armando Benitez during the 1. Yankees- Orioles brawl, the best brawl of my lifetime. CC Sabathia laughs at chaos. The eighth- inning dustup looked like it’d be relatively calm, until Brett Gardner lost his mind (on his birthday, no less).

What made him so angry? Watch Secret Past Online Hitfix. Joe Girardi claimed that Brad Ausmus said “fuck you” to Gardner, an allegation that Ausmus denied. Whatever happened, CC Sabathia was enjoying it. Yeah, that’s how I feel too.