深度学习奏效了

大家好，我是章北海

向大家推荐一篇昨日OpenAI创始人Sam的新文章：《智能时代》

以下是英中对照翻译版

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.在接下来的几十年里，我们将能够做一些在祖父母看来不可思议的事情。

This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.这一现象并不新鲜，但会加速。随着时间的推移，人们的能力已经大大提高；我们现在已经可以完成前人认为不可能完成的事情。

We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.我们更有能力不是因为基因变化，而是因为我们受益于社会基础设施比我们任何人都更聪明、更有能力；在一个重要意义上，社会本身就是一种先进智能的形式。我们的祖父母——以及他们之前的几代人——建造并取得了伟大的成就。他们为人类进步的脚手架做出了贡献，我们都从中受益。人工智能将为人们提供解决难题的工具，并帮助我们在脚手架上添加我们自己无法解决的新支柱。进步的故事将继续，我们的孩子将能够做我们做不到的事情。

It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.这不会一蹴而就，但我们很快就能与人工智能合作，帮助我们完成比没有人工智能更大的成就；最终，我们每个人都可以拥有一个个人人工智能团队，由不同领域的虚拟专家组成，共同创造几乎任何我们能想象到的东西。我们的孩子将有虚拟导师，他们可以用任何科目、任何语言、以任何他们需要的速度提供个性化指导。我们可以想象类似的想法，比如更好的医疗保健、创造人们能想象到的任何类型软件的能力，等等。

With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.有了这些新能力，我们可以实现共同繁荣，其程度在今天看来是不可想象的。未来，每个人的生活都可能比现在更好。仅仅繁荣不一定会让人幸福——有很多悲惨的富人——但它会有意义地改善世界各地人民的生活。

Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence.用一种狭隘的方式来看待人类历史：经过几千年的科学发现和技术进步，我们已经弄清楚了如何融化沙子，添加一些杂质，以惊人的精度以极小的尺寸排列成计算机芯片，通过它运行能量，最终形成能够创造越来越强大的人工智能的系统。

This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.这可能是迄今为止历史上最重要的事实。我们有可能在几千天内拥有超级智能 (!) ; 可能需要更长的时间，但我相信我们会到达那里。

How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?我们是如何迈向下一次繁荣飞跃的？

三个字：深度学习奏效了。

In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.用15个词来说：深度学习奏效了，随着规模的扩大，可以预见地变得更好了，我们投入了越来越多的资源。

That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.真的是这样。人类发现了一种算法，可以真正学习任何数据分布（或者实际上，产生任何数据分布的潜在“规则”）。令人震惊的是，可用的计算和数据越多，它在帮助人们解决难题方面就越好。我发现无论我花多少时间思考这个问题，我都无法真正理解它的后果有多严重。

There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.我们还有很多细节需要弄清楚，但被任何特定的挑战分散注意力是错误的。深度学习有效，我们将解决剩余的问题。关于接下来可能发生的事情，我们可以说很多，但最主要的是人工智能会随着规模的扩大而变得更好，这将给世界各地人们的生活带来有意义的改善。

AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.人工智能模型将很快充当自主个人助理，代表我们执行特定任务，比如代表你协调医疗保健。在未来的某个时候，人工智能系统会变得如此出色，以至于它们帮助我们制造更好的下一代系统，并全面取得科学进步。

Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.科技把我们从石器时代带到农业时代，再到工业时代。从这里开始，通往智能时代的道路是由计算、能源和人类意志铺成的。

If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.如果我们想让尽可能多的人掌握人工智能，我们需要降低计算成本，让它变得丰富（这需要大量的能源和芯片）。如果我们不建立足够的基础设施，人工智能将是一个非常有限的资源，战争会争夺它，它将主要成为富人的工具。

We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.我们需要明智而坚定地行动。智能时代的到来是一个重大的发展，伴随着非常复杂和极其高风险的挑战。这不会是一个完全积极的故事，但好处是如此巨大，以至于我们应该为自己和未来想出如何驾驭我们面前的风险。

I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.我相信未来将是如此光明，以至于没有人能通过现在写它来公正地对待它；智能时代的一个决定性特征将是巨大的繁荣。

Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.尽管这将逐步发生，但令人震惊的胜利——修复气候、建立太空殖民地和发现所有物理学——最终将变得司空见惯。凭借近乎无限的智慧和丰富的能量——产生伟大想法的能力，以及实现这些想法的能力——我们可以做很多事情。

As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.正如我们在其他技术上所看到的那样，也会有缺点，我们需要现在就开始工作，以最大限度地发挥AI的好处，同时将其危害降至最低。作为一个例子，我们预计这项技术可以在未来几年内导致劳动力市场（好的和坏的）发生重大变化，但大多数工作的变化将比大多数人想象的要慢，我也不担心我们会无事可做（即使它们在今天的我们看来并不像“真正的工作”）。人们有与生俱来的创造和对彼此有用的愿望，而AI将让我们以前所未有的方式放大自己的能力。作为一个社会，我们将回到一个不断扩大的世界，我们可以再次专注于玩正和游戏。

Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.我们今天所做的许多工作在几百年前的人们看来都是微不足道的浪费时间，但是没有人回顾过去，希望自己是一个点灯人。如果点灯人能看到今天的世界，他会认为他周围的繁荣是不可想象的。如果我们能从今天快进一百年，我们周围的繁荣也会同样难以想象。