

Facebook's Yann LeCunn Discusses Digital Companions and AI - xenophon
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/facebooks-yann-lecun-discusses-digital-companions-and-artificial-intelligence/

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compbio
I now think Facebook is going to give us Artificial Facebook friends. Modeled
on your interactions with your Facebook contacts, combined with the data of a
million other connections, it will be more attentive, always available, knows
just how to cheer up your mood, or find you things that interest you when they
are going viral. This may be many years out, but Zuckerberg needs to think
about this future too.

Something fell into place for me when I read this interview. Like when Google
bought YouTube, it took me a while to realize that Google would own internet
video. Facebook is sitting on a huge pile of social data. With social graphs
and tagged faces the more obvious ones, they also have a huge corpus of
natural language and personal likes. With this one could create AI that is
much more down to earth and friendly to communicate with. It may posses a form
of emotional intelligence. It may have knowledge on social interactions,
status, moods, human relationships etc. it knows what makes us tick.

Contrast with Google which basically indexed the entire internet. I expect an
advanced future interaction with Google AI to be more factual. The kid you
want to do your homework for you, not the kid you hang out with later, who
suggests new Jazz songs for you to listen to when it starts to rain outside.

~~~
prawn
I had a similar reaction. Many of us who spend a lot of time online interact
frequently with people we've never met as it is. In 3-5 years, we could have
digital followers on social networks who are indistinguishable from real
people.

Imagine that they're more attractive, more flattering and more interesting -
what happens next?

I can see us becoming like the animal that dry humps some false approximation
of its mate, unable to tell that it's stepped away from reality and is just
fulfilling its desires without procreation.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>Imagine that they're more attractive, more flattering and more interesting -
what happens next?

Nothing, really. A voice in a chatbox is still only in a chatbox, and this
whole prospect will creep people out sufficiently to make them leave Facebook.

(My mother apparently has something called "Google Cards" on her phone that
creeped her out by reading her email and giving her reminders of things.
Facebook false-friends that imitate living people without _being_ living
people are going to creep her out _even more_.)

On the other hand, the scientist in me notes that if you're actually trying to
make my Facebook False Friend more _interesting_ than a real person, you're
going to have to teach it to fluently and accurately discuss research-level
science and mathematics, teach me analytic philosophy, and then argue about
which anime characters are best. That's really asking quite a lot! I don't
think Facebook will accomplish anything quite that "scifi" in the next few
years.

~~~
prawn
You're judging a product now. I'm telling you to judge it in a few years when
it is more convincing, more subtle, etc. People already "fall in love" online
with people they've never met, partly because someone showed some interest in
them. Many are scammed easily online because their greed has them look past
telltale signs.

You've just interacted with me on some level, but what's to say I exist?
Pretend I only have social network profiles online for you to background
check. Those would be easy to dynamically and convincingly generate.

And don't just imagine your reaction, but the reaction of multitudes of people
who aren't skeptical about religion, about crystal healing, who are
superstitious, who watch whatever is put in front of them, etc.

I bet someone could scan my body of online work and design an array of
profiles that might pique my interest.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
The hard part isn't generating the profiles -- that's dead easy. It's making
the programs generate fluent conversation in natural language with interesting
domain knowledge -- that's still believed to be AI-complete.

~~~
prawn
Half the population struggles with fluent conversation!

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blake_himself
> When you are playing chess, at some point you make a mistake, you may go
> back several steps that were “correct” to find the one that was wrong. When
> you fall off a bicycle, you think of when you lost your balance. Deep
> learning does that. The credit assignment in a deep learning exercise can be
> tens, even hundreds, of levels deep.

This sounds like reinforcement learning. Anyone know what he's talking about,
some RNN with 'tens, even hundreds' of levels of feedback that hasn't died
away?

~~~
jamiis
Pretty sure he's just referring to backprop[0] correcting weights more
dramatically at one layer vs. another layer

[0][http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation)

