LESSWRONG
LW

Personal Blog

6

Interesting Peter Norvig interview

by xamdam
3rd Mar 2010
1 min read
14

6

Personal Blog

6

Interesting Peter Norvig interview
25Dagon
8SilasBarta
7xamdam
4timtyler
6xamdam
8SarahNibs
7[anonymous]
4sketerpot
2Douglas_Knight
0[anonymous]
1darius
1Kevin
1xamdam
3timtyler
New Comment
14 comments, sorted by
top scoring
Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 8:10 PM
[-]Dagon16y250

Pretty please, everyone - stop having interviews and talks without budgeting for transcription. Video is agonizing.

Reply
[-]SilasBarta16y80

Agreed! And please: no summary, no link.

(In this case, that would mean telling the general pattern of the answers, if there is one, and paraphrasing a few particularly insightful points from the interviewee.)

Reply
[-]xamdam16y70

Transcription is a very good candidate for being crowdsourced - everyone can just to a little bit, especially if you start from speech recognition output.

Reply
[-]timtyler16y40

Google is working on that:

"Speech Recognition in YouTube Lets You Search for Spoken Content"

  • http://www.labnol.org/internet/video/youtube-speech-recognition-search-text-in-videos/3885/
Reply
[-]xamdam16y60

Just pointing out

  • I did not manage the interview, just made the introduction; but I will convey your input to the reddit guys

  • despite lack of transcript the linked reddit thread has some metadata, you can read the question and jump right to the answer. This is not very agonizing.

  • 'stop having interviews' - are you serious? seriously? I mean the reddit guys put a lot of work into this; just ask yourself whether you'd rather have the information available or not. It's like telling any free lecturer to not speak unless they give you the lecture notes first.

Reply
[-]SarahNibs16y80

just ask yourself whether you'd rather have the information available or not

It's a negotiation thing. Wishing you didn't have the information is unreasonable, but preferring probability p of getting no information and probability 1-p of getting the interviews with transcription/summary/whatever over almost-certainly getting the interviews without transcriptions may be quite reasonable.

Reply
[-][anonymous]16y70

It's like minimum wage! You can interpret it as "people who can't earn at least this amount aren't allowed to have jobs", but you can also interpret it as "employers must pay all of their employees at least this amount".

Reply
[-]sketerpot16y40

It would help if Youtube made it possible to play videos at maybe 1.4x or 2x their regular speed. It's still not as fast as reading, but less slow. I yearn for the day when all of Youtube's videos use the HTML5 video tag, and we can do this at the browser level.

Or listen to the interview while you're playing Super Mario World romhacks (or whatever). That's my overly-specific method for enjoying interview videos.

Reply
[-]Douglas_Knight16y20

It would help if Youtube made it possible to play videos at maybe 1.4x or 2x their regular speed. It's still not as fast as reading, but less slow. I yearn for the day when all of Youtube's videos use the HTML5 video tag, and we can do this at the browser level.

I am confused (cf Grice) by that statement, because it's all true about the particular video: if you are in the beta, then it uses the video tag and offers (at least to me) a control to switch to 2x. Even if it is flv, you could download the video and run it in a standalone player. A standalone player also lets you get past the 2x offered by youtube, my chipmunking software (quicktime) doesn't work well past that. I think there are better algorithms, though. (ETA: almost all youtube videos have mp4 downloads, even if they aren't available as html5. I don't actually have a flv codec.)

I used to multitask (and still do with the news in the morning), but I find I get a lot more out of the talk if I pay attention. And running it fast makes that a lot easier, since it's all or nothing.

Reply
[-][anonymous]16y00

I agree. If there's any ambient noise whatsoever, I'm practically deaf.

Reply
[-]darius16y10

Same here. I never watch an interview without a transcript, no matter who it is.

Reply
[-]Kevin16y10

This is a decent article that summarizes Peter Norvig's 2007 Singularity Summit talk, which made it sound like Google is definitely not working on AGI. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9774501-7.html

This interview implies to me that at some point in the future he will assign Google researchers to work on the broad problem of AGI, even though at present Google has no employees dedicated to AGI.

Reply
[-]xamdam16y10

Pretty much, with the addition that they are working on the prerequisites for perhaps other reasons, but I suspect with the AGI potential in mind. Do not remember which one of the 3 CEOs said this, but they know that the ultimate search output is NOT pages of ranked links; it is the answer to your search query. This smacks of an AGI-hard problem.

Reply
[-]timtyler16y30

I think that's probably Larry Page - here:

"Google CEO brags about Google Artificial Intelligence"

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aHz3eMuSKk
Reply
Moderation Log
More from xamdam
View more
Curated and popular this week
14Comments

(Sorry this is mostly a link instead of a post, but I think it will interesting to the FAI folks here)

I helped arrange this interview with Peter Norvig:

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/b8aln/peter_norvig_answers_your_questions_ask_me/

I think the answer to the AGI question 4 is telling, but judge for yourself. (BTW, the 'components' Peter referred to are probabilistic relational learning and hierarchical modeling. He singled these two in his singularity summit talk)