Skynet hasn't yet gained consciousness but it's eyes are open! I came across this article in learning about Yann LeCun who was the inaugural director of the Center for Data Science at NYU. Park Square is now searching for his successor.
What's most fascinating isn't that it found cats and humans on the internet but that it found things that it sees as coherent that fail the capacious English language. Could it be a picture of superintelligence itself?
In the cat experiment, researchers exposed a vast neural net—spread across 1,000 computers—to 10 million unlabeled images randomly taken from YouTube videos, and then just let the software do its thing. When the dust cleared, they checked the neurons of the highest layer and found, sure enough, that one of them responded powerfully to images of cats. “We also found a neuron that responded very strongly to human faces,” says Ng, who led the project while at Google Brain. Yet the results were puzzling too. “We did not find a neuron that responded strongly to cars,” for instance, and “there were a lot of other neurons we couldn’t assign an English word to. So it’s difficult.”
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