On Thu, 2018-07-12 at 18:15 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote: > Compare neural networks: a user who uses a pre-trained neural network > is subordinated to the people who prepared its training data and set > up the training runs.
In Alpha-Zero's case (it is Alpha-Zero the original post was about) there is no training data. It learns by being run against itself. Intel purchased Mobileye (the system Tesla used to use, and maybe still does) with largely the same intent. The training data in that case is labelled videos resembling dash cam footage. Training the neural network requires huge amounts of it, all of which was produced by Mobileye by having human watch the video and label it. This was expensive and eventually unsustainable. Intel said they were going to attempt to train the network with videos produced by game engines. I haven't seen much since the Intel purchased Mobileye however if they succeed we are in the same situation - there is no training data. In both cases is is just computers teaching themselves. The upshot is I don't think focusing on training data or the initial weights is a good way to reason about what is happening here. If Deep Mind released the source code for Alpha-Zero anyone could in principle reproduce their results if you define their result as I'm pretty sure they do: produce an AI capable of beating any other AI on the planet at a particular game. The key words are "in principle" of course, because the other two ingredients they used was 250 MW hour of power (a wild guess on my part) and enough computers to be able to expend that in 3 days. A better way to think about this is the AI they created is just another chess (or Go or whatever) playing game, no different in principle to chess games already in Debian. However, it's move pruning/scoring engine was created by a non human intelligence. The programming language that intelligence uses (the weights on a bunch of interconnected polynomials) and the way it reasons (which is boils down finding the minima of a high dimensional curve using newtons method to slide down the slope) is not something human minds are built to cope with. But even though we can't understand them these weights are the source, as if you give them to a similar AI it can change the program. In principle the DSFG is fulfilled if we don't discriminate again non- human intelligences. Apart from the "non-human" intelligence bit none of this is different to what we _already_ accept into Debian. It's very unlikely I could have sensible contributions to the game engines of the best chess, backgammon or Go programs Debian has now. I have no doubt I could understand the source, but it would take me weeks / months if not years to understand the reasoning that went into their move scoring engines. The move scoring engine happens to be the exact thing Alpha-Zero's AI (another thing I can't modify) replaces. In the case of chess at least they will have a database of end games they rely on, a database generated by brute force simulations generated using quantities of CPU cycles I simply could not afford to do. Nonetheless, cost is an issue. To quantify it I presume they will be able to rent the hardware required from a cloud provider - possibly we could do that even now. But the raw cost of that 250 MW hour of power is $30K, and I could easily imagine it doubling many times as it goes through the supply chain so as another wild guess you are probably looking at $1M to modify the program. $1M is certainly not "free" in any sense of the word, but then the reality no other Debian development is free either. All development requires computers and power which someone has to pay for. The difference is now is merely one of a few added noughts, and those noughts exclude almost all of us from working on the source. But I'd be surprised if there isn't a Debian users out there who *do* have the means to fiddle with these programs if they had the weights and the source used to create them. Which means anyone could work on them if they had the means - but I don't have the means. *shrug* Which is how I reach the opposite conclusion to Ian. If Deep Mind released Aplha-Zero source code under a suitable licence, plus some example neural networks they generated with it (that happen to be bit everyone uses) Debian rejecting the example networks as they "aren't DFSG" free would be a mistake. I view one of our roles as advancing free software, all free software. Rejecting some software because we humans don't understand it doesn't match that goal.
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