The Evolution of AlphaGo

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The breakthroughs that got everyone's attention in the AI field were with AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and AlphaFold. AlphaGo's success in playing the game of Go demonstrated that traditional methods used for games before could not handle the complexity of Go. AlphaGo used a new suite of methods that scaled with more compute, and it progressively improved its performance. AlphaGo's success led to the development of AlphaZero, which achieved superhuman performance without any prior game knowledge. AlphaZero learned entirely through self-play, spawning instances of itself to play against in simulated environments. This uncoupling from human knowledge allowed AlphaZero to excel in various games, including chess and shogi. The ability to parallelize and scale up these methods, utilizing computing infrastructure and improving models' power and performance, is a crucial advantage.

Sam Harris speaks with Mustafa Suleyman about his new book, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.” They discuss the progress in artificial intelligence made at his company DeepMind, the acquisition of DeepMind by Google, Atari DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaFold, the invention of new knowledge, the risks of our making progress in AI, “superintelligence” as a distraction from more pressing problems, the inevitable spread of general-purpose technology, the nature of intelligence, productivity growth and labor disruptions, “the containment problem,” the importance of scale, Moore’s law, Inflection AI, open-source LLMs, changing the norms of work and leisure, the redistribution of value, introducing friction into the deployment of AI, regulatory capture, a misinformation apocalypse, digital watermarks, asymmetric threats, conflict and cooperation with China, supply-chain monopolies, and other topics.

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Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.