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+WEBVTT
+
+00:00.000 --> 00:03.320
+ The following is a conversation with Ariol Vanialis.
+
+00:03.320 --> 00:05.920
+ He's a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind,
+
+00:05.920 --> 00:09.120
+ and before that, he was at Google Brain and Berkeley.
+
+00:09.120 --> 00:13.320
+ His research has been cited over 39,000 times.
+
+00:13.320 --> 00:16.520
+ He's truly one of the most brilliant and impactful minds
+
+00:16.520 --> 00:18.160
+ in the field of deep learning.
+
+00:18.160 --> 00:20.960
+ He's behind some of the biggest papers and ideas in AI,
+
+00:20.960 --> 00:23.080
+ including sequence to sequence learning,
+
+00:23.080 --> 00:25.480
+ audio generation, image captioning,
+
+00:25.480 --> 00:27.000
+ neural machine translation,
+
+00:27.000 --> 00:29.640
+ and, of course, reinforcement learning.
+
+00:29.640 --> 00:32.800
+ He's a lead researcher of the AlphaStar project,
+
+00:32.800 --> 00:35.760
+ creating an agent that defeated a top professional
+
+00:35.760 --> 00:38.040
+ at the game of StarCraft.
+
+00:38.040 --> 00:39.800
+ This conversation is part
+
+00:39.800 --> 00:41.800
+ of the artificial intelligence podcast.
+
+00:41.800 --> 00:44.920
+ If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes,
+
+00:44.920 --> 00:47.000
+ or simply connect with me on Twitter,
+
+00:47.000 --> 00:51.200
+ at Lex Freedman, spelled F R I D.
+
+00:51.200 --> 00:55.440
+ And now, here's my conversation with Ariol Vanialis.
+
+00:56.520 --> 00:58.480
+ You spearheaded the DeepMind team
+
+00:58.480 --> 01:00.640
+ behind AlphaStar that recently beat
+
+01:00.640 --> 01:02.840
+ a top professional player at StarCraft.
+
+01:04.000 --> 01:07.680
+ So you have an incredible wealth of work
+
+01:07.680 --> 01:09.440
+ and deep learning and a bunch of fields,
+
+01:09.440 --> 01:11.840
+ but let's talk about StarCraft first.
+
+01:11.840 --> 01:13.720
+ Let's go back to the very beginning,
+
+01:13.720 --> 01:16.680
+ even before AlphaStar, before DeepMind,
+
+01:16.680 --> 01:18.800
+ before Deep Learning, first,
+
+01:18.800 --> 01:21.240
+ what came first for you?
+
+01:21.240 --> 01:24.960
+ A love for programming or a love for video games?
+
+01:24.960 --> 01:28.560
+ I think for me, it definitely came first,
+
+01:28.560 --> 01:31.960
+ the drive to play video games.
+
+01:31.960 --> 01:35.280
+ I really liked computers.
+
+01:35.280 --> 01:37.800
+ I didn't really code much,
+
+01:37.800 --> 01:40.680
+ but what I would do is I would just mess with the computer,
+
+01:40.680 --> 01:42.080
+ break it and fix it.
+
+01:42.080 --> 01:43.800
+ That was the level of skills, I guess,
+
+01:43.800 --> 01:46.400
+ that I gained in my very early days,
+
+01:46.400 --> 01:48.520
+ I mean, when I was 10 or 11.
+
+01:48.520 --> 01:51.000
+ And then I really got into video games,
+
+01:51.000 --> 01:53.680
+ especially StarCraft, actually, the first version.
+
+01:53.680 --> 01:55.800
+ I spent most of my time just playing,
+
+01:55.800 --> 01:57.080
+ kind of, pseudo professionally,
+
+01:57.080 --> 02:01.040
+ as professionally as you could play back in 98 in Europe,
+
+02:01.040 --> 02:03.080
+ which was not a very main scene,
+
+02:03.080 --> 02:05.840
+ like what's called nowadays esports.
+
+02:05.840 --> 02:07.400
+ Right, of course, in the 90s.
+
+02:07.400 --> 02:09.920
+ So how'd you get into StarCraft?
+
+02:09.920 --> 02:11.680
+ What was your favorite race?
+
+02:11.680 --> 02:15.080
+ How did you develop your skill?
+
+02:15.080 --> 02:16.880
+ What was your strategy?
+
+02:16.880 --> 02:18.000
+ All that kind of thing.
+
+02:18.000 --> 02:21.520
+ So as a player, I tended to try to play not many games,
+
+02:21.520 --> 02:25.400
+ not to disclose the strategies that I developed.
+
+02:25.400 --> 02:27.560
+ And I like to play random, actually,
+
+02:27.560 --> 02:30.040
+ not in competitions, but just to...
+
+02:30.040 --> 02:33.400
+ I think in StarCraft, there's three main races,
+
+02:33.400 --> 02:36.560
+ and I found it very useful to play with all of them.
+
+02:36.560 --> 02:38.360
+ So I would choose random many times,
+
+02:38.360 --> 02:40.200
+ even sometimes in tournaments,
+
+02:40.200 --> 02:42.360
+ to gain skill on the three races,
+
+02:42.360 --> 02:45.440
+ because it's not how you play against someone,
+
+02:45.440 --> 02:48.760
+ but also if you understand the race because you play it,
+
+02:48.760 --> 02:51.120
+ you also understand what's annoying,
+
+02:51.120 --> 02:52.560
+ then when you're on the other side,
+
+02:52.560 --> 02:54.240
+ what to do to annoy that person,
+
+02:54.240 --> 02:57.360
+ to try to gain advantages here and there and so on.
+
+02:57.360 --> 02:59.160
+ So I actually played random,
+
+02:59.160 --> 03:02.080
+ although I must say in terms of favorite race,
+
+03:02.080 --> 03:03.720
+ I really like Zerk.
+
+03:03.720 --> 03:05.560
+ I was probably best at Zerk,
+
+03:05.560 --> 03:08.400
+ and that's probably what I tend to use
+
+03:08.400 --> 03:11.480
+ towards the end of my career before starting university.
+
+03:11.480 --> 03:13.360
+ So let's step back a little bit.
+
+03:13.360 --> 03:16.080
+ Could you try to describe StarCraft to people
+
+03:16.080 --> 03:18.960
+ that may never have played video games,
+
+03:18.960 --> 03:22.320
+ especially the massively online variety like StarCraft?
+
+03:22.320 --> 03:25.920
+ So StarCraft is a real time strategy game,
+
+03:25.920 --> 03:27.800
+ and the way to think about StarCraft,
+
+03:27.800 --> 03:30.960
+ perhaps if you understand a bit chess,
+
+03:30.960 --> 03:32.920
+ is that there's a board,
+
+03:32.920 --> 03:34.240
+ which is called map,
+
+03:34.240 --> 03:39.120
+ or the map where people play against each other.
+
+03:39.120 --> 03:41.000
+ There's obviously many ways you can play,
+
+03:41.000 --> 03:44.640
+ but the most interesting one is the one versus one setup,
+
+03:44.640 --> 03:47.400
+ where you just play against someone else,
+
+03:47.400 --> 03:48.880
+ or even the build in AI, right?
+
+03:48.880 --> 03:52.600
+ Blizzard put a system that can play the game reasonably well,
+
+03:52.600 --> 03:54.480
+ if you don't know how to play.
+
+03:54.480 --> 03:56.040
+ And then in this board,
+
+03:56.040 --> 03:58.680
+ you have, again, pieces like in chess,
+
+03:58.680 --> 04:01.400
+ but these pieces are not there initially,
+
+04:01.400 --> 04:02.360
+ like they are in chess.
+
+04:02.360 --> 04:05.800
+ You actually need to decide to gather resources,
+
+04:05.800 --> 04:07.920
+ to decide which pieces to build.
+
+04:07.920 --> 04:10.760
+ So in a way, you're starting almost with no pieces.
+
+04:10.760 --> 04:13.400
+ You start gathering resources in StarCraft.
+
+04:13.400 --> 04:16.200
+ There's minerals and gas that you can gather,
+
+04:16.200 --> 04:19.440
+ and then you must decide how much do you wanna focus,
+
+04:19.440 --> 04:21.480
+ for instance, on gathering more resources,
+
+04:21.480 --> 04:24.360
+ or starting to build units or pieces.
+
+04:24.360 --> 04:27.200
+ And then once you have enough pieces,
+
+04:27.200 --> 04:32.120
+ or maybe a good attack composition,
+
+04:32.120 --> 04:35.480
+ then you go and attack the other side of the map.
+
+04:35.480 --> 04:37.800
+ And now the other main difference with chess
+
+04:37.800 --> 04:39.920
+ is that you don't see the other side of the map.
+
+04:39.920 --> 04:43.360
+ So you're not seeing the moves of the enemy.
+
+04:43.360 --> 04:45.440
+ It's what we call partially observable.
+
+04:45.440 --> 04:50.160
+ So as a result, you must not only decide trading off economy
+
+04:50.160 --> 04:52.320
+ versus building your own units,
+
+04:52.320 --> 04:54.960
+ but you also must decide whether you wanna scout
+
+04:54.960 --> 04:56.840
+ to gather information,
+
+04:56.840 --> 04:59.520
+ but also by scouting you might be giving away some information
+
+04:59.520 --> 05:01.960
+ that you might be hiding from the enemy.
+
+05:01.960 --> 05:04.960
+ So there's a lot of complex decision making
+
+05:04.960 --> 05:06.000
+ all in real time.
+
+05:06.000 --> 05:10.120
+ There's also unlike chess, this is not a turn based game.
+
+05:10.120 --> 05:13.680
+ You play basically all the time continuously
+
+05:13.680 --> 05:16.920
+ and thus some skill in terms of speed and accuracy
+
+05:16.920 --> 05:18.960
+ of clicking is also very important.
+
+05:18.960 --> 05:20.520
+ And people that train for this,
+
+05:20.520 --> 05:23.600
+ really play this game at an amazing skill level.
+
+05:23.600 --> 05:25.840
+ I've seen many times these,
+
+05:25.840 --> 05:27.400
+ and if you can witness this life,
+
+05:27.400 --> 05:29.520
+ it's really, really impressive.
+
+05:29.520 --> 05:31.440
+ So in a way it's kind of a chess,
+
+05:31.440 --> 05:33.440
+ where you don't see the other side of the board,
+
+05:33.440 --> 05:35.240
+ you're building your own pieces,
+
+05:35.240 --> 05:37.240
+ and you also need to gather resources
+
+05:37.240 --> 05:40.720
+ to basically get some money to build other buildings,
+
+05:40.720 --> 05:42.920
+ pieces, technology, and so on.
+
+05:42.920 --> 05:45.160
+ From the perspective of the human player,
+
+05:45.160 --> 05:47.240
+ the difference between that and chess,
+
+05:47.240 --> 05:50.800
+ or maybe that and a game like turn based strategy,
+
+05:50.800 --> 05:52.840
+ like Heroes of the Might of Magic,
+
+05:52.840 --> 05:55.200
+ is that there's an anxiety,
+
+05:55.200 --> 05:58.800
+ because you have to make these decisions really quickly.
+
+05:58.800 --> 06:03.800
+ And if you are not actually aware of what decisions work,
+
+06:04.400 --> 06:06.520
+ it's a very stressful balance that you have to,
+
+06:06.520 --> 06:08.920
+ everything you describe is actually quite stressful,
+
+06:08.920 --> 06:11.760
+ difficult to balance for amateur human player.
+
+06:11.760 --> 06:14.200
+ I don't know if it gets easier at the professional level,
+
+06:14.200 --> 06:16.520
+ like if they're fully aware of what they have to do,
+
+06:16.520 --> 06:18.360
+ but at the amateur level,
+
+06:18.360 --> 06:20.520
+ there's this anxiety, oh crap, I'm being attacked,
+
+06:20.520 --> 06:22.840
+ oh crap, I have to build up resources,
+
+06:22.840 --> 06:24.360
+ oh, I have to probably expand,
+
+06:24.360 --> 06:28.600
+ and all these, the real time strategy aspect
+
+06:28.600 --> 06:30.360
+ is really stressful and computational,
+
+06:30.360 --> 06:32.320
+ I'm sure, difficult, we'll get into it.
+
+06:32.320 --> 06:36.040
+ But for me, Battle.net,
+
+06:36.040 --> 06:41.040
+ so StarCraft was released in 98, 20 years ago,
+
+06:42.640 --> 06:44.680
+ which is hard to believe,
+
+06:44.680 --> 06:49.680
+ and Blizzard Battle.net with Diablo 96 came out,
+
+06:50.200 --> 06:52.600
+ and to me, it might be a narrow perspective,
+
+06:52.600 --> 06:54.520
+ but it changed online gaming,
+
+06:54.520 --> 06:57.280
+ and perhaps society forever,
+
+06:57.280 --> 07:00.320
+ but I may have made way too narrow a viewpoint,
+
+07:00.320 --> 07:02.240
+ but from your perspective,
+
+07:03.280 --> 07:05.600
+ can you talk about the history of gaming
+
+07:05.600 --> 07:07.000
+ over the past 20 years?
+
+07:07.000 --> 07:09.640
+ Is this, how transformational,
+
+07:09.640 --> 07:12.760
+ how important is this line of games?
+
+07:12.760 --> 07:16.920
+ Right, so I think I kind of was an active gamer
+
+07:16.920 --> 07:20.560
+ whilst this was developing the internet and online gaming,
+
+07:20.560 --> 07:24.040
+ so for me, the way it came was I played
+
+07:24.040 --> 07:26.400
+ other games strategy related,
+
+07:26.400 --> 07:28.400
+ I played a bit of Common and Conquer,
+
+07:28.400 --> 07:31.840
+ and then I played Warcraft 2, which is from Blizzard,
+
+07:31.840 --> 07:33.040
+ but at the time, I didn't know,
+
+07:33.040 --> 07:36.000
+ I didn't understand about what Blizzard was or anything.
+
+07:36.000 --> 07:37.320
+ Warcraft 2 was just a game,
+
+07:37.320 --> 07:40.240
+ which was actually very similar to StarCraft in many ways.
+
+07:40.240 --> 07:42.480
+ It's also a real time strategy game
+
+07:42.480 --> 07:45.400
+ where there's orcs and humans, so there's only two races.
+
+07:45.400 --> 07:47.960
+ But it was offline, and it was offline, right?
+
+07:47.960 --> 07:51.600
+ So I remember a friend of mine came to school,
+
+07:51.600 --> 07:53.960
+ say, oh, there's this new cool game called StarCraft,
+
+07:53.960 --> 07:55.400
+ and I just said, oh, this sounds like
+
+07:55.400 --> 07:59.720
+ just a copy of Warcraft 2, until I kind of installed it,
+
+07:59.720 --> 08:01.960
+ and at the time, I am from Spain,
+
+08:01.960 --> 08:04.640
+ so we didn't have like very good internet, right?
+
+08:04.640 --> 08:06.160
+ So there was, for us,
+
+08:06.160 --> 08:09.520
+ StarCraft became first kind of an offline experience
+
+08:09.520 --> 08:12.920
+ where you kind of start to play these missions, right?
+
+08:12.920 --> 08:15.440
+ You play against some sort of scripted things
+
+08:15.440 --> 08:18.920
+ to develop the story of the characters in the game,
+
+08:18.920 --> 08:23.480
+ and then later on, I start playing against the built in AI,
+
+08:23.480 --> 08:26.080
+ and I thought it was impossible to defeat it.
+
+08:26.080 --> 08:27.400
+ Then eventually, you defeat one,
+
+08:27.400 --> 08:29.680
+ and you can actually play against seven built in AIs
+
+08:29.680 --> 08:31.040
+ at the same time,
+
+08:31.040 --> 08:32.680
+ which also felt impossible,
+
+08:32.680 --> 08:35.280
+ but actually, it's not that hard to beat
+
+08:35.280 --> 08:36.960
+ seven built in AIs at once.
+
+08:36.960 --> 08:39.160
+ So once we achieved that,
+
+08:39.160 --> 08:42.120
+ also we discovered that we could play,
+
+08:42.120 --> 08:43.840
+ as I said, internet wasn't that great,
+
+08:43.840 --> 08:45.920
+ but we could play with the LAN, right?
+
+08:45.920 --> 08:48.040
+ Like basically against each other
+
+08:48.040 --> 08:49.920
+ if we were in the same place,
+
+08:49.920 --> 08:53.640
+ because you could just connect machines with like cables, right?
+
+08:53.640 --> 08:55.960
+ So we started playing in LAN mode,
+
+08:55.960 --> 08:58.080
+ and against, you know, as a group of friends,
+
+08:58.080 --> 09:00.520
+ and it was really, really like much more entertaining
+
+09:00.520 --> 09:02.280
+ than playing against the AIs.
+
+09:02.280 --> 09:05.120
+ And later on, as internet was starting to develop
+
+09:05.120 --> 09:07.400
+ and being a bit faster and more reliable,
+
+09:07.400 --> 09:09.720
+ then it's when I started experiencing Battle.net,
+
+09:09.720 --> 09:11.560
+ which is these amazing universe,
+
+09:11.560 --> 09:13.720
+ not only because of the fact
+
+09:13.720 --> 09:16.440
+ that you can play the game against anyone in the world,
+
+09:16.440 --> 09:20.200
+ but you can also get to know more people.
+
+09:20.200 --> 09:23.080
+ You just get exposed to now like this vast variety of,
+
+09:23.080 --> 09:25.320
+ it's kind of a bit when the chats came about, right?
+
+09:25.320 --> 09:27.320
+ There was a chat system,
+
+09:27.320 --> 09:29.040
+ you could play against people,
+
+09:29.040 --> 09:30.760
+ but you could also chat with people,
+
+09:30.760 --> 09:32.520
+ not only about Stacker, but about anything.
+
+09:32.520 --> 09:36.680
+ And that became a way of life for kind of two years.
+
+09:36.680 --> 09:38.920
+ And obviously then it became like kind of,
+
+09:38.920 --> 09:42.280
+ it exploded in me that I started to play more seriously,
+
+09:42.280 --> 09:44.720
+ going to tournaments and so on and so forth.
+
+09:44.720 --> 09:49.720
+ Do you have a sense on a societal sociological level
+
+09:49.880 --> 09:52.280
+ what's this whole part of society
+
+09:52.280 --> 09:53.840
+ that many of us are not aware of?
+
+09:53.840 --> 09:56.920
+ And it's a huge part of society, which is gamers.
+
+09:56.920 --> 10:01.000
+ I mean, every time I come across that in YouTube
+
+10:01.000 --> 10:03.000
+ or streaming sites,
+
+10:03.000 --> 10:07.640
+ I mean, this is a huge number of people play games religiously.
+
+10:07.640 --> 10:08.920
+ Do you have a sense of those folks,
+
+10:08.920 --> 10:10.880
+ especially now that you've returned to that realm
+
+10:10.880 --> 10:12.600
+ a little bit on the AI side?
+
+10:12.600 --> 10:15.880
+ Yeah, so in fact, even after Stacker,
+
+10:15.880 --> 10:17.640
+ I actually played World of Warcraft,
+
+10:17.640 --> 10:22.320
+ which is maybe the main sort of online world and presence
+
+10:22.320 --> 10:24.640
+ that you get to interact with lots of people.
+
+10:24.640 --> 10:26.400
+ So I played that for a little bit.
+
+10:26.400 --> 10:29.080
+ To me, it was a bit less stressful than Starcraft
+
+10:29.080 --> 10:30.920
+ because winning was kind of a given.
+
+10:30.920 --> 10:32.400
+ You just put in this world
+
+10:32.400 --> 10:35.040
+ and you can always complete missions.
+
+10:35.040 --> 10:38.120
+ But I think it was actually the social aspect
+
+10:38.120 --> 10:40.480
+ of especially Starcraft first
+
+10:40.480 --> 10:43.440
+ and then games like World of Warcraft
+
+10:43.440 --> 10:47.000
+ really shaped me in a very interesting ways
+
+10:47.000 --> 10:48.560
+ because what you get to experience
+
+10:48.560 --> 10:51.680
+ is just people you wouldn't usually interact with, right?
+
+10:51.680 --> 10:55.000
+ So even nowadays, I still have many Facebook friends
+
+10:55.000 --> 10:56.960
+ from the area where I played online
+
+10:56.960 --> 11:00.120
+ and their ways of thinking is even political.
+
+11:00.120 --> 11:01.680
+ They just don't, we don't live in it.
+
+11:01.680 --> 11:03.720
+ Like we don't interact in the real world,
+
+11:03.720 --> 11:06.800
+ but we were connected by basically fiber.
+
+11:06.800 --> 11:10.840
+ And that way I actually get to understand a bit better
+
+11:10.840 --> 11:12.840
+ that we live in a diverse world.
+
+11:12.840 --> 11:15.640
+ And these were just connections that were made by,
+
+11:15.640 --> 11:18.120
+ because I happened to go in a city,
+
+11:18.120 --> 11:20.720
+ in a virtual city as a priest
+
+11:20.720 --> 11:23.680
+ and I met this warrior and we became friends.
+
+11:23.680 --> 11:25.720
+ And then we started like playing together, right?
+
+11:25.720 --> 11:28.800
+ So I think it's transformative
+
+11:28.800 --> 11:31.320
+ and more and more and more people are more aware of it.
+
+11:31.320 --> 11:33.520
+ I mean, it's becoming quite mainstream.
+
+11:33.520 --> 11:35.360
+ But back in the day, as you were saying,
+
+11:35.360 --> 11:40.360
+ in 2005 even it was very, still very strange thing to do
+
+11:42.120 --> 11:45.920
+ especially in Europe, I think there were exceptions
+
+11:45.920 --> 11:47.960
+ like Korea for instance, it was amazing
+
+11:47.960 --> 11:50.600
+ like that everything happened so early
+
+11:50.600 --> 11:52.240
+ in terms of cybercafes.
+
+11:52.240 --> 11:55.120
+ Like it's, if you go to Seoul, it's a city
+
+11:55.120 --> 11:58.400
+ that back in the day, StarCraft was kind of,
+
+11:58.400 --> 12:00.640
+ you could be a celebrity by playing StarCraft
+
+12:00.640 --> 12:03.040
+ but this was like 99, 2000, right?
+
+12:03.040 --> 12:04.160
+ It's not like recently.
+
+12:04.160 --> 12:08.560
+ So yeah, it's quite interesting to look back
+
+12:08.560 --> 12:10.760
+ and yeah, I think it's changing society.
+
+12:10.760 --> 12:13.120
+ The same way of course, like technology
+
+12:13.120 --> 12:16.920
+ and social networks and so on are also transforming things.
+
+12:16.920 --> 12:18.480
+ And a quick tangent, let me ask,
+
+12:18.480 --> 12:21.000
+ you're also one of the most productive people
+
+12:21.000 --> 12:26.000
+ in your particular chosen passion and path in life.
+
+12:26.440 --> 12:29.480
+ And yet you're also appreciate and enjoy video games.
+
+12:29.480 --> 12:34.480
+ Do you think it's possible to enjoy video games in moderation?
+
+12:35.800 --> 12:39.920
+ Someone told me that you could choose two out of three.
+
+12:39.920 --> 12:41.160
+ When I was playing video games,
+
+12:41.160 --> 12:43.680
+ you could choose having a girlfriend,
+
+12:43.680 --> 12:46.240
+ playing video games or studying.
+
+12:46.240 --> 12:50.560
+ And I think for the most part it was relatively true.
+
+12:50.560 --> 12:52.360
+ These things do take time.
+
+12:52.360 --> 12:55.400
+ Games like StarCraft, if you take the game pretty seriously
+
+12:55.400 --> 12:56.520
+ and you wanna study it,
+
+12:56.520 --> 12:59.080
+ then you obviously will dedicate more time to it.
+
+12:59.080 --> 13:01.200
+ And I definitely took gaming
+
+13:01.200 --> 13:03.680
+ and obviously studying very seriously.
+
+13:03.680 --> 13:08.680
+ I love learning science and et cetera.
+
+13:08.720 --> 13:13.120
+ So to me, especially when I started university undergrad,
+
+13:13.120 --> 13:14.920
+ I kind of stepped off StarCraft.
+
+13:14.920 --> 13:16.800
+ I actually fully stopped playing.
+
+13:16.800 --> 13:19.040
+ And then World of Warcraft was a bit more casual.
+
+13:19.040 --> 13:22.920
+ You could just connect online and I mean, it was fun.
+
+13:22.920 --> 13:26.840
+ But as I said, that was not as much time investment
+
+13:26.840 --> 13:29.480
+ as it was for me in StarCraft.
+
+13:29.480 --> 13:31.640
+ Okay, so let's get into AlphaStar.
+
+13:31.640 --> 13:35.200
+ What are the, you're behind the team.
+
+13:35.200 --> 13:37.240
+ So DeepMind has been working on StarCraft
+
+13:37.240 --> 13:39.440
+ and released a bunch of cool open source agents
+
+13:39.440 --> 13:41.320
+ and so on in the past few years.
+
+13:41.320 --> 13:43.240
+ But AlphaStar really is the moment
+
+13:43.240 --> 13:48.240
+ where the first time you beat a world class player.
+
+13:49.160 --> 13:51.600
+ So what are the parameters of the challenge
+
+13:51.600 --> 13:53.480
+ in the way that AlphaStar took it on
+
+13:53.480 --> 13:57.440
+ and how did you and David and the rest of the DeepMind team
+
+13:57.440 --> 13:58.280
+ get into it?
+
+13:58.280 --> 14:00.960
+ Consider that you can even beat the best in the world
+
+14:00.960 --> 14:02.480
+ or top players.
+
+14:02.480 --> 14:07.480
+ I think it all started in, back in 2015, actually I'm lying.
+
+14:07.480 --> 14:12.480
+ I think it was 2014 when DeepMind was acquired by Google
+
+14:12.760 --> 14:14.320
+ and I at the time was at Google Brain,
+
+14:14.320 --> 14:17.600
+ which is it was in California, it's still in California.
+
+14:17.600 --> 14:20.600
+ We had this summit where we got together the two groups.
+
+14:20.600 --> 14:23.400
+ So Google Brain and Google DeepMind got together
+
+14:23.400 --> 14:25.200
+ and we gave a series of talks.
+
+14:25.200 --> 14:28.520
+ And given that they were doing deep reinforcement learning
+
+14:28.520 --> 14:32.200
+ for games, I decided to bring up part of my past
+
+14:32.200 --> 14:35.000
+ which I had developed at Berkeley like this thing
+
+14:35.000 --> 14:36.440
+ which we call Berkeley Overmind
+
+14:36.440 --> 14:39.560
+ which is really just a StarCraft one bot.
+
+14:39.560 --> 14:41.640
+ So I talked about that
+
+14:41.640 --> 14:43.800
+ and I remember them is just came to me and said,
+
+14:43.800 --> 14:46.640
+ well, maybe not now, it's perhaps a bit too early
+
+14:46.640 --> 14:51.080
+ but you should just come to DeepMind and do this again
+
+14:51.080 --> 14:53.240
+ with deep reinforcement learning.
+
+14:53.240 --> 14:56.120
+ And at the time it sounded very science fiction
+
+14:56.120 --> 14:58.280
+ for several reasons.
+
+14:58.280 --> 15:01.000
+ But then in 2016, when I actually moved to London
+
+15:01.000 --> 15:04.280
+ and joined DeepMind transferring from Brain,
+
+15:04.280 --> 15:07.840
+ it became apparent that because of the AlphaGo moment
+
+15:07.840 --> 15:11.280
+ and kind of Blizzard reaching out to us to say,
+
+15:11.280 --> 15:13.000
+ wait, like, do you want the next challenge
+
+15:13.000 --> 15:15.080
+ and also me being full time at DeepMind?
+
+15:15.080 --> 15:17.440
+ So sort of kind of all these came together.
+
+15:17.440 --> 15:21.000
+ And then I went to Irvine in California
+
+15:21.000 --> 15:23.800
+ to the Blizzard headquarters to just chat with them
+
+15:23.800 --> 15:26.320
+ and try to explain how would it all work
+
+15:26.320 --> 15:27.800
+ before you do anything.
+
+15:27.800 --> 15:31.240
+ And the approach has always been about
+
+15:32.120 --> 15:33.680
+ the learning perspective, right?
+
+15:33.680 --> 15:38.680
+ So in Berkeley, we did a lot of rule based conditioning
+
+15:39.200 --> 15:42.560
+ and if you have more than three units, then go attack
+
+15:42.560 --> 15:45.040
+ and if the other has more units than me, I retreat
+
+15:45.040 --> 15:46.400
+ and so on and so forth.
+
+15:46.400 --> 15:48.840
+ And of course, the point of deep reinforcement learning,
+
+15:48.840 --> 15:50.520
+ deep learning, machine learning in general
+
+15:50.520 --> 15:53.480
+ is that all these should be learned behavior.
+
+15:53.480 --> 15:57.000
+ So that kind of was the DNA of the project
+
+15:57.000 --> 15:59.520
+ since its inception in 2016
+
+15:59.520 --> 16:02.920
+ where we just didn't even have an environment to work with.
+
+16:02.920 --> 16:05.840
+ And so that's how it all started really.
+
+16:05.840 --> 16:08.600
+ So if you go back to that conversation with Demis
+
+16:08.600 --> 16:12.200
+ or even in your own head, how far away did you,
+
+16:12.200 --> 16:14.480
+ because we're talking about Atari games,
+
+16:14.480 --> 16:16.720
+ we're talking about Go, which is kind of,
+
+16:16.720 --> 16:19.680
+ if you're honest about it, really far away from StarCraft.
+
+16:21.120 --> 16:22.160
+ Well, now that you've beaten it,
+
+16:22.160 --> 16:23.280
+ maybe you could say it's close,
+
+16:23.280 --> 16:27.160
+ but it seems like StarCraft is way harder than Go,
+
+16:28.040 --> 16:30.840
+ philosophically and mathematically speaking.
+
+16:30.840 --> 16:35.040
+ So how far away did you think you were?
+
+16:35.040 --> 16:38.000
+ Do you think it's 2019 and 18 you could be doing
+
+16:38.000 --> 16:38.840
+ as well as you have?
+
+16:38.840 --> 16:40.880
+ Yeah, when I kind of thought about,
+
+16:40.880 --> 16:44.880
+ okay, I'm gonna dedicate a lot of my time and focus on this.
+
+16:44.880 --> 16:48.080
+ And obviously I do a lot of different research
+
+16:48.080 --> 16:50.400
+ in deep learning, so spending time on it.
+
+16:50.400 --> 16:52.240
+ I mean, I really had to kind of think
+
+16:52.240 --> 16:55.880
+ there's gonna be something good happening out of this.
+
+16:55.880 --> 16:59.120
+ So really I thought, well, this sounds impossible
+
+16:59.120 --> 17:01.600
+ and it probably is impossible to do the full thing,
+
+17:01.600 --> 17:06.600
+ like the full game where you play one versus one
+
+17:06.720 --> 17:09.760
+ and it's only a neural network playing and so on.
+
+17:09.760 --> 17:10.960
+ So it really felt like,
+
+17:10.960 --> 17:14.000
+ I just didn't even think it was possible.
+
+17:14.000 --> 17:14.840
+ But on the other hand,
+
+17:14.840 --> 17:19.080
+ I could see some stepping stones towards that goal.
+
+17:19.080 --> 17:21.600
+ Clearly you could define sub problems in StarCraft
+
+17:21.600 --> 17:23.360
+ and sort of dissect it a bit and say,
+
+17:23.360 --> 17:26.720
+ okay, here is a part of the game, here is another part.
+
+17:26.720 --> 17:29.400
+ And also obviously the fact,
+
+17:29.400 --> 17:31.280
+ so this was really also critical to me,
+
+17:31.280 --> 17:34.400
+ the fact that we could access human replays.
+
+17:34.400 --> 17:35.720
+ So Blizzard was very kind
+
+17:35.720 --> 17:38.560
+ and in fact they open source this for the whole community
+
+17:38.560 --> 17:39.960
+ where you can just go
+
+17:39.960 --> 17:43.040
+ and it's not every single StarCraft game ever played,
+
+17:43.040 --> 17:44.200
+ but it's a lot of them.
+
+17:44.200 --> 17:45.880
+ You can just go and download
+
+17:45.880 --> 17:47.160
+ and every day they will,
+
+17:47.160 --> 17:48.960
+ you can just query a data set and say,
+
+17:48.960 --> 17:51.680
+ well, give me all the games that were played today.
+
+17:51.680 --> 17:55.800
+ And given my kind of experience with language
+
+17:55.800 --> 17:57.920
+ and sequences and supervised learning,
+
+17:57.920 --> 18:00.760
+ I thought, well, that's definitely gonna be very helpful
+
+18:00.760 --> 18:02.400
+ and something quite unique now
+
+18:02.400 --> 18:06.720
+ because ever before we had such a large data set
+
+18:06.720 --> 18:11.000
+ of replays of people playing the game at this scale
+
+18:11.000 --> 18:12.560
+ of such a complex video game, right?
+
+18:12.560 --> 18:15.640
+ So that to me was a precious resource.
+
+18:15.640 --> 18:18.000
+ And as soon as I knew that Blizzard was able
+
+18:18.000 --> 18:20.960
+ to kind of give this to the community,
+
+18:20.960 --> 18:22.280
+ I started to feel positive
+
+18:22.280 --> 18:24.280
+ about something non trivial happening.
+
+18:24.280 --> 18:27.120
+ But I also thought the full thing,
+
+18:27.120 --> 18:30.400
+ like really no rules, no single line of code
+
+18:30.400 --> 18:31.680
+ that tries to say, well, I mean,
+
+18:31.680 --> 18:33.320
+ if you see this unit build a detector,
+
+18:33.320 --> 18:36.680
+ all these, not having any of these specializations
+
+18:36.680 --> 18:39.160
+ seemed really, really, really difficult to me.
+
+18:39.160 --> 18:40.000
+ Intuitively.
+
+18:40.000 --> 18:42.680
+ I do also like that Blizzard was teasing
+
+18:42.680 --> 18:43.960
+ or even trolling you,
+
+18:45.480 --> 18:48.560
+ sort of almost pulling you in
+
+18:48.560 --> 18:50.280
+ into this really difficult challenge.
+
+18:50.280 --> 18:51.840
+ Do they have any awareness?
+
+18:51.840 --> 18:55.640
+ What's the interest from the perspective of Blizzard
+
+18:55.640 --> 18:57.280
+ except just curiosity?
+
+18:57.280 --> 18:59.400
+ Yeah, I think Blizzard has really understood
+
+18:59.400 --> 19:03.240
+ and really bring forward this competitiveness
+
+19:03.240 --> 19:04.800
+ of eSports in games.
+
+19:04.800 --> 19:07.840
+ The StarCraft really kind of sparked a lot of,
+
+19:07.840 --> 19:10.720
+ like something that almost was never seen,
+
+19:10.720 --> 19:13.960
+ especially as I was saying, back in Korea.
+
+19:13.960 --> 19:16.480
+ So they just probably thought, well,
+
+19:16.480 --> 19:18.880
+ this is such a pure one versus one setup
+
+19:18.880 --> 19:21.160
+ that it would be great to see
+
+19:21.160 --> 19:24.840
+ if something that can play Atari or go
+
+19:24.840 --> 19:27.920
+ and then later on chess could even tackle
+
+19:27.920 --> 19:30.600
+ these kind of complex real time strategy game, right?
+
+19:30.600 --> 19:33.880
+ So for them, they wanted to see first, obviously,
+
+19:33.880 --> 19:36.440
+ whether it was possible,
+
+19:36.440 --> 19:39.760
+ if the game they created was in a way solvable,
+
+19:39.760 --> 19:40.840
+ to some extent.
+
+19:40.840 --> 19:42.200
+ And I think on the other hand,
+
+19:42.200 --> 19:45.760
+ they also are a pretty modern company that innovates a lot.
+
+19:45.760 --> 19:48.520
+ So just starting to understand AI for them
+
+19:48.520 --> 19:50.240
+ to how to bring AI into games,
+
+19:50.240 --> 19:54.320
+ is not AI for games, but games for AI, right?
+
+19:54.320 --> 19:56.120
+ I mean, both ways, I think, can work.
+
+19:56.120 --> 20:00.040
+ And we obviously had the manuse games for AI, right?
+
+20:00.040 --> 20:01.280
+ To drive AI progress,
+
+20:01.280 --> 20:03.680
+ but Blizzard might actually be able to do,
+
+20:03.680 --> 20:04.760
+ and many other companies,
+
+20:04.760 --> 20:06.800
+ to start to understand and do the opposite.
+
+20:06.800 --> 20:09.800
+ So I think that is also something they can get out of this.
+
+20:09.800 --> 20:11.320
+ And they definitely,
+
+20:11.320 --> 20:13.720
+ we have brainstormed a lot about this, right?
+
+20:13.720 --> 20:16.080
+ But one of the interesting things to me about StarCraft
+
+20:16.080 --> 20:19.400
+ and Diablo and these games that Blizzard has created
+
+20:19.400 --> 20:23.560
+ is the task of balancing classes, for example,
+
+20:23.560 --> 20:27.480
+ sort of making the game fair from the starting point,
+
+20:27.480 --> 20:29.920
+ and then let skill determine the outcome.
+
+20:30.960 --> 20:33.600
+ Is there, I mean, can you first comment?
+
+20:33.600 --> 20:36.760
+ There's three races, Zerg, Protoss, and Terran.
+
+20:36.760 --> 20:38.960
+ I don't know if I've ever said that out loud.
+
+20:38.960 --> 20:40.600
+ Is that how you pronounce it, Terran?
+
+20:40.600 --> 20:41.600
+ Yeah, Terran.
+
+20:41.600 --> 20:42.440
+ Yeah.
+
+20:42.440 --> 20:45.200
+ Yeah, I don't think I've ever,
+
+20:45.200 --> 20:47.680
+ in person, interacted with anybody about StarCraft.
+
+20:47.680 --> 20:51.760
+ That's funny. So they seem to be pretty balanced.
+
+20:51.760 --> 20:56.240
+ I wonder if the AI, the work that you're doing
+
+20:56.240 --> 20:59.160
+ with AlphaStar would help balance them even further.
+
+20:59.160 --> 21:00.520
+ Is that something you think about?
+
+21:00.520 --> 21:03.280
+ Is that something that Blizzard is thinking about?
+
+21:03.280 --> 21:06.400
+ Right, so balancing when you add a new unit
+
+21:06.400 --> 21:09.120
+ or a new spell type is obviously possible,
+
+21:09.120 --> 21:13.160
+ given that you can always train or pre train at scale,
+
+21:13.160 --> 21:16.680
+ some agent that might start using that in unintended ways.
+
+21:16.680 --> 21:19.120
+ But I think actually, if you understand
+
+21:19.120 --> 21:22.200
+ how StarCraft has kind of co evolved with players,
+
+21:22.200 --> 21:24.280
+ in a way, I think it's actually very cool,
+
+21:24.280 --> 21:27.400
+ the ways that many of the things and strategies
+
+21:27.400 --> 21:28.680
+ that people came up with, right?
+
+21:28.680 --> 21:32.280
+ So I think it's, we've seen it over and over in StarCraft
+
+21:32.280 --> 21:34.920
+ that Blizzard comes up with maybe a new unit,
+
+21:34.920 --> 21:37.240
+ and then some players get creative
+
+21:37.240 --> 21:39.080
+ and do something kind of unintentional
+
+21:39.080 --> 21:40.840
+ or something that Blizzard designers
+
+21:40.840 --> 21:43.560
+ that just simply didn't test or think about.
+
+21:43.560 --> 21:46.960
+ And then after that becomes kind of mainstream in the community,
+
+21:46.960 --> 21:48.240
+ Blizzard patches the game,
+
+21:48.240 --> 21:51.880
+ and then they kind of maybe weaken that strategy
+
+21:51.880 --> 21:53.880
+ or make it actually more interesting,
+
+21:53.880 --> 21:55.400
+ but a bit more balanced.
+
+21:55.400 --> 21:58.280
+ So this kind of continual talk between players and Blizzard
+
+21:58.280 --> 22:01.680
+ is kind of what has defined them actually,
+
+22:01.680 --> 22:04.040
+ in actually most games, like in StarCraft,
+
+22:04.040 --> 22:05.760
+ but also in World of Warcraft,
+
+22:05.760 --> 22:07.440
+ they would do that, there are several classes
+
+22:07.440 --> 22:10.800
+ and it would be not good that everyone plays
+
+22:10.800 --> 22:13.200
+ absolutely the same race and so on, right?
+
+22:13.200 --> 22:17.280
+ So I think they do care about balancing, of course,
+
+22:17.280 --> 22:19.640
+ and they do a fair amount of testing,
+
+22:19.640 --> 22:22.160
+ but it's also beautiful to also see
+
+22:22.160 --> 22:24.520
+ how players get creative anyways.
+
+22:24.520 --> 22:27.440
+ And I mean, whether AI can be more creative at this point,
+
+22:27.440 --> 22:28.680
+ I don't think so, right?
+
+22:28.680 --> 22:31.600
+ I mean, it's just sometimes something so amazing happens,
+
+22:31.600 --> 22:33.720
+ like I remember back in the days,
+
+22:33.720 --> 22:36.920
+ like you have these drop ships that could drop the rivers,
+
+22:36.920 --> 22:39.600
+ and that was actually not thought about,
+
+22:39.600 --> 22:41.280
+ that you could drop this unit
+
+22:41.280 --> 22:43.200
+ that has this what's called splash damage
+
+22:43.200 --> 22:47.800
+ that would basically eliminate all the enemy's workers at once.
+
+22:47.800 --> 22:50.080
+ No one thought that you could actually put them
+
+22:50.080 --> 22:53.040
+ in really early game, do that kind of damage,
+
+22:53.040 --> 22:55.400
+ and then things change in the game,
+
+22:55.400 --> 22:58.000
+ but I don't know, I think it's quite an amazing
+
+22:58.000 --> 23:00.280
+ exploration process from both sides,
+
+23:00.280 --> 23:01.840
+ players and Blizzard alike.
+
+23:01.840 --> 23:05.000
+ Well, it's almost like a reinforcement learning exploration,
+
+23:05.000 --> 23:10.000
+ but the scale of humans that play Blizzard games
+
+23:10.000 --> 23:13.680
+ is almost on the scale of a large scale,
+
+23:13.680 --> 23:15.360
+ deep mind RL experiment.
+
+23:15.360 --> 23:17.200
+ I mean, if you look at the numbers,
+
+23:17.200 --> 23:18.720
+ that's, I mean, you're talking about,
+
+23:18.720 --> 23:19.560
+ I don't know how many games,
+
+23:19.560 --> 23:22.080
+ but hundreds of thousands of games, probably a month.
+
+23:22.080 --> 23:23.880
+ Yeah, I mean, so you could,
+
+23:23.880 --> 23:28.800
+ it's almost the same as running RL agents.
+
+23:28.800 --> 23:31.240
+ What aspect of the problem of Starcraft,
+
+23:31.240 --> 23:32.160
+ do you think is the hardest?
+
+23:32.160 --> 23:35.400
+ Is it the, like you said, the imperfect information?
+
+23:35.400 --> 23:38.160
+ Is it the fact they have to do longterm planning?
+
+23:38.160 --> 23:40.280
+ Is it the real time aspect?
+
+23:40.280 --> 23:42.240
+ So you have to do stuff really quickly?
+
+23:42.240 --> 23:44.760
+ Is it the fact that large action space,
+
+23:44.760 --> 23:47.640
+ so you can do so many possible things?
+
+23:47.640 --> 23:51.120
+ Or is it, you know, in the game theoretic sense,
+
+23:51.120 --> 23:52.440
+ there is no Nash equilibrium.
+
+23:52.440 --> 23:54.240
+ At least you don't know what the optimal strategy is,
+
+23:54.240 --> 23:56.520
+ because there's way too many options.
+
+23:56.520 --> 23:57.360
+ Right.
+
+23:57.360 --> 23:58.360
+ Is there something that stands out
+
+23:58.360 --> 24:01.000
+ as just like the hardest, the most annoying thing?
+
+24:01.000 --> 24:04.200
+ So when we sort of looked at the problem
+
+24:04.200 --> 24:07.640
+ and start to define the parameters of it, right?
+
+24:07.640 --> 24:08.800
+ What are the observations?
+
+24:08.800 --> 24:10.520
+ What are the actions?
+
+24:10.520 --> 24:13.920
+ It became very apparent that, you know,
+
+24:13.920 --> 24:17.160
+ the very first barrier that one would hit in Starcraft
+
+24:17.160 --> 24:20.720
+ would be because of the action space being so large
+
+24:20.720 --> 24:24.880
+ and as not being able to search like you could in chess
+
+24:24.880 --> 24:27.320
+ or go even though the search space is vast.
+
+24:28.640 --> 24:30.600
+ The main problem that we identified
+
+24:30.600 --> 24:32.440
+ was that of exploration, right?
+
+24:32.440 --> 24:36.720
+ So without any sort of human knowledge or human prior,
+
+24:36.720 --> 24:38.040
+ if you think about Starcraft
+
+24:38.040 --> 24:41.440
+ and you know how deep reinforcement learning algorithm works,
+
+24:41.440 --> 24:45.360
+ work, which is essentially by issuing random actions
+
+24:45.360 --> 24:47.800
+ and hoping that they will get some wins sometimes
+
+24:47.800 --> 24:49.200
+ so they could learn.
+
+24:49.200 --> 24:52.800
+ So if you think of the action space in Starcraft,
+
+24:52.800 --> 24:55.880
+ almost anything you can do in the early game is bad
+
+24:55.880 --> 24:58.720
+ because any action involves taking workers
+
+24:58.720 --> 25:01.360
+ which are mining minerals for free.
+
+25:01.360 --> 25:03.560
+ That's something that the game does automatically,
+
+25:03.560 --> 25:04.920
+ sends them to mine
+
+25:04.920 --> 25:07.720
+ and you would immediately just take them out of mining
+
+25:07.720 --> 25:09.080
+ and send them around.
+
+25:09.080 --> 25:13.640
+ So just thinking how is it gonna be possible
+
+25:13.640 --> 25:16.880
+ to get to understand these concepts
+
+25:16.880 --> 25:19.280
+ but even more like expanding, right?
+
+25:19.280 --> 25:21.080
+ There's these buildings you can place
+
+25:21.080 --> 25:24.160
+ in other locations in the map to gather more resources
+
+25:24.160 --> 25:26.840
+ but the location of the building is important
+
+25:26.840 --> 25:28.920
+ and you have to select a worker,
+
+25:28.920 --> 25:32.680
+ send it walking to that location, build the building,
+
+25:32.680 --> 25:34.160
+ wait for the building to be built
+
+25:34.160 --> 25:37.840
+ and then put extra workers there so they start mining.
+
+25:37.840 --> 25:40.200
+ That just, that feels like impossible
+
+25:40.200 --> 25:43.680
+ if you just randomly click to produce that state,
+
+25:43.680 --> 25:47.000
+ desirable state that then you could hope to learn from
+
+25:47.000 --> 25:49.880
+ because eventually that may yield to an extra win, right?
+
+25:49.880 --> 25:51.840
+ So for me, the exploration problem
+
+25:51.840 --> 25:53.840
+ and due to the action space
+
+25:53.840 --> 25:56.160
+ and the fact that there's not really turns,
+
+25:56.160 --> 25:57.000
+ there's so many turns
+
+25:57.000 --> 26:01.440
+ because the game essentially ticks at 22 times per second.
+
+26:01.440 --> 26:05.560
+ If you, I mean, that's how they discretize sort of time.
+
+26:05.560 --> 26:07.320
+ Obviously, you always have to discretize time
+
+26:07.320 --> 26:09.640
+ where there's no such thing as real time
+
+26:09.640 --> 26:12.560
+ but it's really a lot of time steps
+
+26:12.560 --> 26:14.280
+ of things that could go wrong
+
+26:14.280 --> 26:17.960
+ and that definitely felt a priori like the hardest.
+
+26:17.960 --> 26:19.360
+ You mentioned many good ones,
+
+26:19.360 --> 26:21.360
+ I think partial observability,
+
+26:21.360 --> 26:23.440
+ the fact that there is no perfect strategy
+
+26:23.440 --> 26:25.560
+ because of the partial observability,
+
+26:25.560 --> 26:26.880
+ those are very interesting problems.
+
+26:26.880 --> 26:29.400
+ We start seeing more and more now in terms of
+
+26:29.400 --> 26:31.080
+ as we saw of the previous ones
+
+26:31.080 --> 26:34.320
+ but the core problem to me was exploration
+
+26:34.320 --> 26:37.800
+ and solving it has been basically kind of the focus
+
+26:37.800 --> 26:39.840
+ and how we saw the first breakthroughs.
+
+26:39.840 --> 26:43.720
+ So exploration in a multi hierarchical way.
+
+26:43.720 --> 26:46.640
+ So like 22 times a second exploration
+
+26:46.640 --> 26:48.680
+ has a very different meaning than it does
+
+26:48.680 --> 26:51.520
+ in terms of should I gather resources early
+
+26:51.520 --> 26:53.200
+ or should I wait or so on.
+
+26:53.200 --> 26:56.240
+ So how do you solve the long term?
+
+26:56.240 --> 26:58.120
+ Let's talk about the internals of Alpha Star.
+
+26:58.120 --> 27:02.520
+ So first of all, how do you represent the state
+
+27:02.520 --> 27:05.160
+ of the game as an input?
+
+27:05.160 --> 27:08.840
+ How do you then do the long term sequence modeling?
+
+27:08.840 --> 27:10.480
+ How do you build a policy?
+
+27:10.480 --> 27:12.600
+ What's the architecture like?
+
+27:12.600 --> 27:16.880
+ So Alpha Star has obviously several components
+
+27:16.880 --> 27:20.920
+ but everything passes through what we call the policy
+
+27:20.920 --> 27:22.320
+ which is a neural network
+
+27:22.320 --> 27:24.320
+ and that's kind of the beauty of it.
+
+27:24.320 --> 27:27.200
+ There is, I could just now give you a neural network
+
+27:27.200 --> 27:30.480
+ and some weights and if you fed the right observations
+
+27:30.480 --> 27:32.600
+ and you understood the actions the same way we do
+
+27:32.600 --> 27:35.160
+ you would have basically the agent playing the game.
+
+27:35.160 --> 27:37.280
+ There's absolutely nothing else needed
+
+27:37.280 --> 27:40.360
+ other than those weights that were trained.
+
+27:40.360 --> 27:43.400
+ Now, the first step is observing the game
+
+27:43.400 --> 27:46.680
+ and we've experimented with a few alternatives.
+
+27:46.680 --> 27:48.800
+ The one that we currently use
+
+27:48.800 --> 27:51.440
+ mixes both spatial sort of images
+
+27:51.440 --> 27:53.840
+ that you would process from the game
+
+27:53.840 --> 27:56.440
+ that is the zoomed out version of the map
+
+27:56.440 --> 27:58.960
+ and also a zoomed in version of the camera
+
+27:58.960 --> 28:00.880
+ or the screen as we call it.
+
+28:00.880 --> 28:04.840
+ But also we give to the agent the list of units
+
+28:04.840 --> 28:09.000
+ that it sees more of as a set of objects
+
+28:09.000 --> 28:11.040
+ that it can operate on.
+
+28:11.040 --> 28:14.760
+ That is not necessarily required to use it
+
+28:14.760 --> 28:16.840
+ and we have versions of the game that play well
+
+28:16.840 --> 28:19.080
+ without this set vision that is a bit
+
+28:19.080 --> 28:21.680
+ not like how humans perceive the game
+
+28:21.680 --> 28:23.640
+ but it certainly helps a lot
+
+28:23.640 --> 28:25.040
+ because it's a very natural way
+
+28:25.040 --> 28:28.480
+ to encode the game is by just looking at all the units
+
+28:28.480 --> 28:32.960
+ that they have properties like health, position,
+
+28:32.960 --> 28:36.200
+ type of unit, whether it's my unit or the enemy's
+
+28:36.200 --> 28:40.800
+ and that sort of is kind of the summary
+
+28:40.800 --> 28:42.880
+ of the state of the game,
+
+28:42.880 --> 28:45.520
+ not that list of units or set of units
+
+28:45.520 --> 28:47.400
+ that you see all the time.
+
+28:47.400 --> 28:49.600
+ But that's pretty close to the way humans see the game.
+
+28:49.600 --> 28:51.440
+ Why do you say it's not,
+
+28:51.440 --> 28:53.240
+ you're saying the exactness of it
+
+28:53.240 --> 28:55.080
+ is not similar to humans?
+
+28:55.080 --> 28:57.200
+ The exactness of it is perhaps not the problem.
+
+28:57.200 --> 28:59.840
+ I guess maybe the problem if you look at it
+
+28:59.840 --> 29:02.320
+ from how actually humans play the game
+
+29:02.320 --> 29:05.760
+ is that they play with a mouse and a keyboard and a screen
+
+29:05.760 --> 29:08.760
+ and they don't see sort of a structured object
+
+29:08.760 --> 29:09.600
+ with all the units,
+
+29:09.600 --> 29:12.240
+ what they see is what they see on the screen, right?
+
+29:12.240 --> 29:14.400
+ So you remember that there's a certain interrupt,
+
+29:14.400 --> 29:17.000
+ there's a plot that you showed with camera base
+
+29:17.000 --> 29:19.680
+ where you do exactly that, right, you move around
+
+29:19.680 --> 29:22.280
+ and that seems to converge to similar performance.
+
+29:22.280 --> 29:24.760
+ Yeah, I think that's what we're kind of experimenting
+
+29:24.760 --> 29:28.720
+ with what's necessary or not, but using the set.
+
+29:28.720 --> 29:32.360
+ So actually if you look at research in computer vision
+
+29:32.360 --> 29:36.000
+ where it makes a lot of sense to treat images
+
+29:36.000 --> 29:38.160
+ as two dimensional arrays,
+
+29:38.160 --> 29:40.360
+ there's actually a very nice paper from Facebook.
+
+29:40.360 --> 29:42.720
+ I think, I forgot who the authors are,
+
+29:42.720 --> 29:46.360
+ but I think it's part of Kmings has group.
+
+29:46.360 --> 29:49.520
+ And what they do is they take an image,
+
+29:49.520 --> 29:51.960
+ which is this two dimensional signal
+
+29:51.960 --> 29:54.320
+ and they actually take pixel by pixel
+
+29:54.320 --> 29:59.160
+ and scramble the image as if it was just a list of pixels.
+
+29:59.160 --> 30:01.800
+ Crucially, they encode the position of the pixels
+
+30:01.800 --> 30:03.720
+ with the XY coordinates.
+
+30:03.720 --> 30:06.160
+ And this is just kind of a new architecture
+
+30:06.160 --> 30:08.520
+ which we incidentally also use in stack graph
+
+30:08.520 --> 30:09.880
+ called the transformer,
+
+30:09.880 --> 30:12.000
+ which is a very popular paper from last year,
+
+30:12.000 --> 30:15.600
+ which yielded very nice result in machine translation.
+
+30:15.600 --> 30:18.040
+ And if you actually believe in this kind of,
+
+30:18.040 --> 30:20.320
+ oh, it's actually a set of pixels
+
+30:20.320 --> 30:22.520
+ as long as you encode XY, it's okay.
+
+30:22.520 --> 30:25.560
+ Then you could argue that the list of units
+
+30:25.560 --> 30:26.960
+ that we see is precisely that
+
+30:26.960 --> 30:31.480
+ because we have each unit as a kind of pixel, if you will,
+
+30:31.480 --> 30:33.240
+ and then their XY coordinates.
+
+30:33.240 --> 30:36.360
+ So in that perspective, without knowing it,
+
+30:36.360 --> 30:37.680
+ we use the same architecture
+
+30:37.680 --> 30:39.680
+ that was shown to work very well
+
+30:39.680 --> 30:41.400
+ on Pascal and ImageNet and so on.
+
+30:41.400 --> 30:45.440
+ So the interesting thing here is putting it in that way,
+
+30:45.440 --> 30:47.000
+ it starts to move it towards
+
+30:47.000 --> 30:49.480
+ the way you usually work with language.
+
+30:49.480 --> 30:52.760
+ So what, and especially with your expertise
+
+30:52.760 --> 30:57.000
+ and work in language, it seems like there's echoes
+
+30:57.000 --> 31:00.720
+ of a lot of the way you would work with natural language
+
+31:00.720 --> 31:02.440
+ in the way you've approached AlphaStar.
+
+31:02.440 --> 31:05.080
+ Right, does that help
+
+31:05.080 --> 31:08.200
+ with the longterm sequence modeling there somehow?
+
+31:08.200 --> 31:11.200
+ Exactly, so now that we understand what an observation
+
+31:11.200 --> 31:14.680
+ for a given time step is, we need to move on to say,
+
+31:14.680 --> 31:17.760
+ well, there's gonna be a sequence of such observations
+
+31:17.760 --> 31:21.120
+ and an agent will need to, given all that it's seen,
+
+31:21.120 --> 31:23.720
+ not only the current time step, but all that it's seen,
+
+31:23.720 --> 31:25.920
+ why, because there is partial observability.
+
+31:25.920 --> 31:28.400
+ We must remember whether we saw a worker
+
+31:28.400 --> 31:30.120
+ going somewhere, for instance, right?
+
+31:30.120 --> 31:31.720
+ Because then there might be an expansion
+
+31:31.720 --> 31:33.640
+ on the top right of the map.
+
+31:33.640 --> 31:37.840
+ So given that, what you must then think about
+
+31:37.840 --> 31:40.400
+ is there is the problem of, given all the observations,
+
+31:40.400 --> 31:42.640
+ you have to predict the next action.
+
+31:42.640 --> 31:44.520
+ And not only given all the observations,
+
+31:44.520 --> 31:45.920
+ but given all the observations
+
+31:45.920 --> 31:47.920
+ and given all the actions you've taken,
+
+31:47.920 --> 31:49.360
+ predict the next action.
+
+31:49.360 --> 31:52.480
+ And that sounds exactly like machine translation,
+
+31:52.480 --> 31:57.160
+ where, and that's exactly how kind of I saw the problem,
+
+31:57.160 --> 31:59.960
+ especially when you are given supervised data
+
+31:59.960 --> 32:01.760
+ or replaced from humans,
+
+32:01.760 --> 32:03.600
+ because the problem is exactly the same.
+
+32:03.600 --> 32:06.680
+ You're translating essentially a prefix
+
+32:06.680 --> 32:08.240
+ of observations and actions
+
+32:08.240 --> 32:10.160
+ onto what's gonna happen next,
+
+32:10.160 --> 32:13.000
+ which is exactly how you would train a model to translate
+
+32:13.000 --> 32:14.760
+ or to generate language as well, right?
+
+32:14.760 --> 32:16.640
+ You have a certain prefix.
+
+32:16.640 --> 32:19.000
+ You must remember everything that comes in the past,
+
+32:19.000 --> 32:20.080
+ because otherwise,
+
+32:20.080 --> 32:22.640
+ you might start having non coherent text.
+
+32:22.640 --> 32:25.120
+ And the same architectures,
+
+32:25.120 --> 32:27.760
+ we're using LSTMs and transformers
+
+32:27.760 --> 32:29.760
+ to operate on across time
+
+32:29.760 --> 32:33.080
+ to kind of integrate all that's happened in the past.
+
+32:33.080 --> 32:35.000
+ Those architectures that work so well
+
+32:35.000 --> 32:36.880
+ in translation or language modeling
+
+32:36.880 --> 32:40.640
+ are exactly the same than what the agent is using
+
+32:40.640 --> 32:42.360
+ to issue actions in the game.
+
+32:42.360 --> 32:43.880
+ And the way we train it, moreover,
+
+32:43.880 --> 32:47.120
+ for imitation, which is step one of alpha studies,
+
+32:47.120 --> 32:49.880
+ take all the human experience and try to imitate it,
+
+32:49.880 --> 32:52.920
+ much like you try to imitate translators
+
+32:52.920 --> 32:55.360
+ that translated many pairs of sentences
+
+32:55.360 --> 32:57.280
+ from French to English say,
+
+32:57.280 --> 33:00.200
+ that sort of principle applies exactly the same.
+
+33:00.200 --> 33:02.760
+ It's almost the same code,
+
+33:02.760 --> 33:04.520
+ except that instead of words,
+
+33:04.520 --> 33:06.680
+ you have a slightly more complicated objects,
+
+33:06.680 --> 33:08.280
+ which are the observations
+
+33:08.280 --> 33:10.240
+ and the actions are also a bit more complicated
+
+33:10.240 --> 33:11.760
+ than a word.
+
+33:11.760 --> 33:13.920
+ Is there a self play component then too?
+
+33:13.920 --> 33:16.480
+ So once you run out of imitation?
+
+33:16.480 --> 33:21.480
+ Right, so indeed you can bootstrap from human replays,
+
+33:22.240 --> 33:25.960
+ but then the agents you get are actually not as good
+
+33:25.960 --> 33:28.160
+ as the humans you imitated, right?
+
+33:28.160 --> 33:30.440
+ So how do we imitate?
+
+33:30.440 --> 33:34.240
+ Well, we take humans from 3000 MMR and higher.
+
+33:34.240 --> 33:37.960
+ 3000 MMR is just a metric of human skill.
+
+33:37.960 --> 33:41.880
+ And 3000 MMR might be like 50% percentile, right?
+
+33:41.880 --> 33:43.760
+ So it's just average human.
+
+33:43.760 --> 33:44.600
+ What's that?
+
+33:44.600 --> 33:45.440
+ So maybe a quick pause.
+
+33:45.440 --> 33:47.760
+ MMR is a ranking scale,
+
+33:47.760 --> 33:50.320
+ the matchmaking rating for players.
+
+33:50.320 --> 33:52.320
+ So it's 3000, I remember there's like a master
+
+33:52.320 --> 33:54.120
+ and a grandmaster, what's 3000?
+
+33:54.120 --> 33:56.720
+ So 3000 is pretty bad.
+
+33:56.720 --> 33:58.440
+ I think it's kind of gold level.
+
+33:58.440 --> 34:00.680
+ It just sounds really good relative to chess, I think.
+
+34:00.680 --> 34:02.440
+ Oh yeah, yeah, no, the ratings,
+
+34:02.440 --> 34:04.480
+ the best in the world are at 7000 MMR.
+
+34:04.480 --> 34:05.320
+ 7000.
+
+34:05.320 --> 34:07.840
+ So 3000, it's a bit like Elo indeed, right?
+
+34:07.840 --> 34:12.840
+ So 3500 just allows us to not filter a lot of the data.
+
+34:13.200 --> 34:15.680
+ So we like to have a lot of data in deep learning
+
+34:15.680 --> 34:17.320
+ as you probably know.
+
+34:17.320 --> 34:20.640
+ So we take these kind of 3500 and above,
+
+34:20.640 --> 34:22.720
+ but then we do a very interesting trick,
+
+34:22.720 --> 34:25.000
+ which is we tell the neural network
+
+34:25.000 --> 34:27.560
+ what level they are imitating.
+
+34:27.560 --> 34:30.800
+ So we say these replay you're gonna try to imitate
+
+34:30.800 --> 34:33.040
+ to predict the next action for all the actions
+
+34:33.040 --> 34:36.120
+ that you're gonna see is a 4000 MMR replay.
+
+34:36.120 --> 34:38.800
+ This one is a 6000 MMR replay.
+
+34:38.800 --> 34:42.480
+ And what's cool about this is then we take this policy
+
+34:42.480 --> 34:44.280
+ that is being trained from human
+
+34:44.280 --> 34:47.400
+ and then we can ask it to play like a 3000 MMR player
+
+34:47.400 --> 34:49.600
+ by setting a bit saying, well, okay,
+
+34:49.600 --> 34:53.680
+ play like a 3000 MMR player or play like a 6000 MMR player.
+
+34:53.680 --> 34:57.320
+ And you actually see how the policy behaves differently.
+
+34:57.320 --> 35:01.520
+ It gets worse economy if you play like a gold level player.
+
+35:01.520 --> 35:03.000
+ It does less actions per minute,
+
+35:03.000 --> 35:05.320
+ which is the number of clicks or number of actions
+
+35:05.320 --> 35:07.760
+ that you will issue in a whole minute.
+
+35:07.760 --> 35:09.200
+ And it's very interesting to see
+
+35:09.200 --> 35:12.360
+ that it kind of imitates the skill level quite well.
+
+35:12.360 --> 35:15.480
+ But if we ask it to play like a 6000 MMR player,
+
+35:15.480 --> 35:18.600
+ we tested of course these policies to see how well they do.
+
+35:18.600 --> 35:20.600
+ They actually beat all the built in AIs
+
+35:20.600 --> 35:22.400
+ that Blizzard put in the game,
+
+35:22.400 --> 35:24.960
+ but they're nowhere near 6000 MMR players, right?
+
+35:24.960 --> 35:29.240
+ They might be maybe around gold level, platinum perhaps.
+
+35:29.240 --> 35:32.200
+ So there's still a lot of work to be done for the policy
+
+35:32.200 --> 35:34.960
+ to truly understand what it means to win.
+
+35:34.960 --> 35:38.160
+ So far we only ask them, okay, here is the screen
+
+35:38.160 --> 35:41.600
+ and that's what's happened on the game until this point.
+
+35:41.600 --> 35:46.080
+ What would the next action be if we ask a pro to now say,
+
+35:46.080 --> 35:49.120
+ oh, you're gonna click here or here or there?
+
+35:49.120 --> 35:53.680
+ And the point is experiencing wins and losses
+
+35:53.680 --> 35:56.320
+ is very important to then start to refine.
+
+35:56.320 --> 35:58.360
+ Otherwise the policy can get loose,
+
+35:58.360 --> 36:00.440
+ can just go off policy as we call it.
+
+36:00.440 --> 36:03.400
+ That's so interesting that you can at least hope eventually
+
+36:03.400 --> 36:06.760
+ to be able to control a policy
+
+36:06.760 --> 36:09.960
+ approximately to be at some MMR level.
+
+36:09.960 --> 36:12.240
+ That's so interesting, especially given
+
+36:12.240 --> 36:15.000
+ that you have ground truth for a lot of these cases.
+
+36:15.000 --> 36:17.520
+ Can I ask you a personal question?
+
+36:17.520 --> 36:19.200
+ What's your MMR?
+
+36:19.200 --> 36:23.600
+ Well, I haven't played Starcraft 2, so I am unranked,
+
+36:23.600 --> 36:25.360
+ which is the kind of lowest league.
+
+36:25.360 --> 36:26.200
+ Okay.
+
+36:26.200 --> 36:28.360
+ So I used to play Starcraft 1.
+
+36:28.360 --> 36:29.560
+ The first one and...
+
+36:29.560 --> 36:31.280
+ But you haven't seriously played Starcraft 2?
+
+36:31.280 --> 36:32.640
+ No, not Starcraft 2.
+
+36:32.640 --> 36:37.720
+ So the best player we have at DeepMind is about 5,000 MMR,
+
+36:37.720 --> 36:39.560
+ which is high masters.
+
+36:39.560 --> 36:42.040
+ It's not at the Grand Master level.
+
+36:42.040 --> 36:44.640
+ Grand Master level would be the top 200 players
+
+36:44.640 --> 36:49.120
+ in a certain region, like Europe or America or Asia.
+
+36:49.120 --> 36:51.560
+ But for me, it would be hard to say.
+
+36:51.560 --> 36:53.680
+ I am very bad at the game.
+
+36:53.680 --> 36:56.600
+ I actually played Alpha Star a bit too late and it beat me.
+
+36:56.600 --> 36:59.720
+ I remember the whole team was, oh, Oreo, you should play.
+
+36:59.720 --> 37:02.160
+ And I was, oh, it looks like it's not so good yet.
+
+37:02.160 --> 37:06.600
+ And then I remember I kind of got busy and waited an extra week
+
+37:06.600 --> 37:09.640
+ and I played and it really beat me very badly.
+
+37:09.640 --> 37:11.160
+ How did that feel?
+
+37:11.160 --> 37:12.600
+ Isn't that an amazing feeling?
+
+37:12.600 --> 37:13.560
+ That's amazing, yeah.
+
+37:13.560 --> 37:17.920
+ I mean, obviously, I tried my best and I tried to also impress
+
+37:17.920 --> 37:19.720
+ because I actually played the first game,
+
+37:19.720 --> 37:23.040
+ so I'm still pretty good at micro management.
+
+37:23.040 --> 37:25.200
+ The problem is I just don't understand Starcraft 2.
+
+37:25.200 --> 37:27.200
+ I understand Starcraft.
+
+37:27.200 --> 37:28.440
+ And when I played Starcraft,
+
+37:28.440 --> 37:32.640
+ I probably was consistently like for a couple of years,
+
+37:32.640 --> 37:34.600
+ top 32 in Europe.
+
+37:34.600 --> 37:36.440
+ So I was decent, but at the time,
+
+37:36.440 --> 37:40.280
+ we didn't have this kind of MMR system as well established.
+
+37:40.280 --> 37:43.120
+ So it would be hard to know what it was back then.
+
+37:43.120 --> 37:45.760
+ So what's the difference in interface between Alpha Star
+
+37:45.760 --> 37:49.600
+ and Starcraft and a human player in Starcraft?
+
+37:49.600 --> 37:52.000
+ Is there any significant differences
+
+37:52.000 --> 37:54.080
+ between the way they both see the game?
+
+37:54.080 --> 37:55.960
+ I would say the way they see the game,
+
+37:55.960 --> 37:59.720
+ there's a few things that are just very hard to simulate.
+
+38:01.000 --> 38:02.640
+ The main one, perhaps,
+
+38:02.640 --> 38:05.200
+ which is obvious in hindsight,
+
+38:05.200 --> 38:08.440
+ is what's called clocked units,
+
+38:08.440 --> 38:10.560
+ which are invisible units.
+
+38:10.560 --> 38:13.240
+ So in Starcraft, you can make some units
+
+38:13.240 --> 38:18.040
+ that you need to have a particular kind of unit to detect it.
+
+38:18.040 --> 38:20.560
+ So these units are invisible.
+
+38:20.560 --> 38:22.720
+ If you cannot detect them, you cannot target them.
+
+38:22.720 --> 38:25.720
+ So they would just destroy your buildings
+
+38:25.720 --> 38:27.720
+ or kill your workers.
+
+38:27.720 --> 38:31.640
+ But despite the fact you cannot target the unit,
+
+38:31.640 --> 38:34.600
+ there's a shimmer that as a human you observe.
+
+38:34.600 --> 38:35.920
+ I mean, you need to train a little bit.
+
+38:35.920 --> 38:37.400
+ You need to pay attention,
+
+38:37.400 --> 38:41.840
+ but you would see this kind of space time distortion
+
+38:41.840 --> 38:44.800
+ and you wouldn't know, okay, there are, yeah.
+
+38:44.800 --> 38:46.040
+ Yeah, there's like a wave thing.
+
+38:46.040 --> 38:47.840
+ Yeah, it's called shimmer.
+
+38:47.840 --> 38:49.120
+ Space time distortion, I like it.
+
+38:49.120 --> 38:52.440
+ That's really like the blizzard term is shimmer.
+
+38:52.440 --> 38:56.040
+ And so these shimmer professional players actually
+
+38:56.040 --> 38:57.160
+ can see it immediately.
+
+38:57.160 --> 38:59.480
+ They understand it very well,
+
+38:59.480 --> 39:01.400
+ but it's still something that requires
+
+39:01.400 --> 39:02.720
+ certain amount of attention
+
+39:02.720 --> 39:05.640
+ and it's kind of a bit annoying to deal with.
+
+39:05.640 --> 39:08.640
+ Whereas for Alpha Star, in terms of vision,
+
+39:08.640 --> 39:11.120
+ it's very hard for us to simulate sort of,
+
+39:11.120 --> 39:14.160
+ oh, are you looking at this pixel in the screen and so on?
+
+39:14.160 --> 39:17.520
+ So the only thing we can do is
+
+39:17.520 --> 39:19.720
+ there is a unit that's invisible over there.
+
+39:19.720 --> 39:22.520
+ So Alpha Star would know that immediately.
+
+39:22.520 --> 39:24.040
+ Obviously still obeys the rules.
+
+39:24.040 --> 39:25.200
+ You cannot attack the unit.
+
+39:25.200 --> 39:27.400
+ You must have a detector and so on,
+
+39:27.400 --> 39:29.320
+ but it's kind of one of the main things
+
+39:29.320 --> 39:32.680
+ that it just doesn't feel there's a very proper way.
+
+39:32.680 --> 39:35.480
+ I mean, you could imagine, oh, you don't have hypers.
+
+39:35.480 --> 39:36.960
+ Maybe you don't know exactly what it is,
+
+39:36.960 --> 39:39.240
+ or sometimes you see it, sometimes you don't.
+
+39:39.240 --> 39:43.040
+ But it's just really, really complicated to get it
+
+39:43.040 --> 39:44.280
+ so that everyone would agree,
+
+39:44.280 --> 39:47.120
+ oh, that's the best way to simulate this, right?
+
+39:47.120 --> 39:49.280
+ You know, it seems like a perception problem.
+
+39:49.280 --> 39:50.600
+ It is a perception problem.
+
+39:50.600 --> 39:54.240
+ So the only problem is people, you ask,
+
+39:54.240 --> 39:56.760
+ oh, what's the difference between how humans perceive the game?
+
+39:56.760 --> 39:59.960
+ I would say they wouldn't be able to tell a shimmer
+
+39:59.960 --> 40:02.240
+ immediately as it appears on the screen,
+
+40:02.240 --> 40:04.320
+ whereas Alpha Star, in principle,
+
+40:04.320 --> 40:05.640
+ sees it very sharply, right?
+
+40:05.640 --> 40:08.680
+ It sees that the bit turned from zero to one,
+
+40:08.680 --> 40:10.520
+ meaning there's now a unit there,
+
+40:10.520 --> 40:11.960
+ although you don't know the unit,
+
+40:11.960 --> 40:15.840
+ or you know that you cannot attack it and so on.
+
+40:15.840 --> 40:18.080
+ So from a vision standpoint,
+
+40:18.080 --> 40:23.000
+ that probably is the one that is kind of the most obvious one.
+
+40:23.000 --> 40:25.200
+ Then there are things humans cannot do perfectly,
+
+40:25.200 --> 40:28.120
+ even professionals, which is they might miss a detail
+
+40:28.120 --> 40:30.640
+ or they might have not seen a unit.
+
+40:30.640 --> 40:32.320
+ And obviously, as a computer,
+
+40:32.320 --> 40:35.040
+ if there's a corner of the screen that turns green
+
+40:35.040 --> 40:37.720
+ because a unit enters the field of view,
+
+40:37.720 --> 40:41.120
+ that can go into the memory of the agent, the LSTM,
+
+40:41.120 --> 40:42.560
+ and persists there for a while,
+
+40:42.560 --> 40:45.720
+ and for however long is relevant, right?
+
+40:45.720 --> 40:49.920
+ And in terms of action, it seems like the rate of action
+
+40:49.920 --> 40:51.640
+ from Alpha Star is comparative,
+
+40:51.640 --> 40:54.280
+ if not slower than professional players,
+
+40:54.280 --> 40:57.160
+ but it's more precise is what I heard.
+
+40:57.160 --> 40:59.760
+ So that's really probably the one
+
+40:59.760 --> 41:04.760
+ that is causing us more issues for a couple of reasons, right?
+
+41:05.040 --> 41:08.440
+ The first one is StarCraft has been an AI environment
+
+41:08.440 --> 41:09.960
+ for quite a few years.
+
+41:09.960 --> 41:14.000
+ In fact, I was participating in the very first competition
+
+41:14.000 --> 41:15.920
+ back in 2010.
+
+41:15.920 --> 41:19.920
+ And there's really not been a kind of a very clear set
+
+41:19.920 --> 41:22.320
+ of rules, how the actions per minute,
+
+41:22.320 --> 41:24.720
+ the rate of actions that you can issue is.
+
+41:24.720 --> 41:29.280
+ And as a result, these agents or bots that people build
+
+41:29.280 --> 41:31.080
+ in a kind of almost very cool way,
+
+41:31.080 --> 41:35.400
+ they do like 20,000, 40,000 actions per minute.
+
+41:35.400 --> 41:37.200
+ Now, to put this in perspective,
+
+41:37.200 --> 41:41.640
+ a very good professional human might do 300
+
+41:41.640 --> 41:45.480
+ to 800 actions per minute, they might not be as precise.
+
+41:45.480 --> 41:49.040
+ That's why the range is a bit tricky to identify exactly.
+
+41:49.040 --> 41:51.640
+ I mean, 300 actions per minute precisely
+
+41:51.640 --> 41:54.600
+ is probably realistic, 800 is probably not,
+
+41:54.600 --> 41:57.000
+ but you see humans doing a lot of actions
+
+41:57.000 --> 41:59.480
+ because they warm up and they kind of select things
+
+41:59.480 --> 42:02.240
+ and spam and so on, just so that when they need,
+
+42:02.240 --> 42:04.240
+ they have the accuracy.
+
+42:04.240 --> 42:09.240
+ So we came into this by not having kind of a standard way
+
+42:09.240 --> 42:12.480
+ to say, well, how do we measure whether an agent
+
+42:12.480 --> 42:14.360
+ is at human level or not?
+
+42:15.400 --> 42:17.760
+ On the other hand, we had a huge advantage,
+
+42:17.760 --> 42:20.960
+ which is because we do imitation learning,
+
+42:20.960 --> 42:24.040
+ agents turned out to act like humans
+
+42:24.040 --> 42:26.520
+ in terms of rate of actions, even precision
+
+42:26.520 --> 42:28.320
+ and in precision of actions.
+
+42:28.320 --> 42:30.600
+ In the supervised policy, you could see all these.
+
+42:30.600 --> 42:34.280
+ You could see how agents like to spam click to move here.
+
+42:34.280 --> 42:36.440
+ If you played, especially Diablo, you would know what I mean.
+
+42:36.440 --> 42:39.840
+ I mean, you just like spam, oh, move here, move here, move here.
+
+42:39.840 --> 42:43.680
+ You're doing literally like maybe five actions in two seconds,
+
+42:43.680 --> 42:46.360
+ but these actions are not very meaningful.
+
+42:46.360 --> 42:48.280
+ One would have sufficed.
+
+42:48.280 --> 42:51.640
+ So on the one hand, we start from this imitation policy
+
+42:51.640 --> 42:55.160
+ that is at the ballpark of the actions per minute of humans
+
+42:55.160 --> 42:58.440
+ because it's actually statistically trying to imitate humans.
+
+42:58.440 --> 43:00.560
+ So we see this very nicely in the curves
+
+43:00.560 --> 43:01.840
+ that we showed in the blog post.
+
+43:01.840 --> 43:04.120
+ Like there's these actions per minute
+
+43:04.120 --> 43:07.240
+ and the distribution looks very human like.
+
+43:07.240 --> 43:10.560
+ But then of course, as self play kicks in,
+
+43:10.560 --> 43:12.800
+ and that's the part we haven't talked too much yet,
+
+43:12.800 --> 43:16.760
+ but of course the agent must play against himself to improve,
+
+43:16.760 --> 43:19.200
+ then there's almost no guarantees
+
+43:19.200 --> 43:22.000
+ that these actions will not become more precise
+
+43:22.000 --> 43:25.600
+ or even the rate of actions is gonna increase over time.
+
+43:25.600 --> 43:29.440
+ So what we did, and this is probably kind of the first attempt
+
+43:29.440 --> 43:30.760
+ that we thought was reasonable,
+
+43:30.760 --> 43:33.800
+ is we looked at the distribution of actions for humans
+
+43:33.800 --> 43:36.440
+ for certain windows of time.
+
+43:36.440 --> 43:37.800
+ And just to give a perspective,
+
+43:37.800 --> 43:40.760
+ because I guess I mentioned that some of these agents
+
+43:40.760 --> 43:42.360
+ that are programmatic, let's call them,
+
+43:42.360 --> 43:44.640
+ they do 40,000 actions per minute.
+
+43:44.640 --> 43:47.400
+ Professionals, as I said, do 300 to 800.
+
+43:47.400 --> 43:49.440
+ So what we looked is we look at the distribution
+
+43:49.440 --> 43:51.000
+ over professional gamers
+
+43:51.000 --> 43:54.160
+ and we took reasonably high actions per minute,
+
+43:54.160 --> 43:57.520
+ but we kind of identify certain cutoffs
+
+43:57.520 --> 44:00.600
+ after which even if the agent wanted to act,
+
+44:00.600 --> 44:02.000
+ these actions would be dropped.
+
+44:02.000 --> 44:06.440
+ But the problem is this cutoff is probably set a bit too high
+
+44:06.440 --> 44:09.360
+ and what ends up happening, even though the games,
+
+44:09.360 --> 44:11.400
+ and when we ask the professionals and the gamers,
+
+44:11.400 --> 44:15.040
+ by and large, they feel like it's playing human like.
+
+44:15.040 --> 44:17.240
+ There are some agents that developed
+
+44:18.440 --> 44:21.320
+ maybe slightly too high APMs,
+
+44:22.040 --> 44:23.520
+ which is actions per minute,
+
+44:23.520 --> 44:25.680
+ combined with the precision,
+
+44:25.680 --> 44:28.720
+ which made people sort of start discussing
+
+44:28.720 --> 44:29.680
+ a very interesting issue,
+
+44:29.680 --> 44:31.200
+ which is should we have limited
+
+44:31.200 --> 44:34.000
+ this, should we just let it loose
+
+44:34.000 --> 44:37.520
+ and see what cool things it can come up with, right?
+
+44:37.520 --> 44:38.360
+ Interesting.
+
+44:38.360 --> 44:41.960
+ So this is in itself an extremely interesting question,
+
+44:41.960 --> 44:43.920
+ but the same way that modeling the shimmer
+
+44:43.920 --> 44:45.440
+ would be so difficult,
+
+44:45.440 --> 44:48.800
+ modeling absolutely all the details about muscles
+
+44:48.800 --> 44:51.600
+ and precision and tiredness of humans
+
+44:51.600 --> 44:52.880
+ would be quite difficult, right?
+
+44:52.880 --> 44:56.760
+ So we're really here in kind of innovating in this sense
+
+44:56.760 --> 45:00.040
+ of, okay, what could be maybe the next iteration
+
+45:00.040 --> 45:01.720
+ of putting more rules
+
+45:01.720 --> 45:05.040
+ that makes the agents more human like
+
+45:05.040 --> 45:06.240
+ in terms of restrictions.
+
+45:06.240 --> 45:08.040
+ So yeah, putting constraints that.
+
+45:08.040 --> 45:09.240
+ More constraints, yeah.
+
+45:09.240 --> 45:11.040
+ That's really interesting, that's really innovative.
+
+45:11.040 --> 45:15.400
+ So one of the constraints you put on yourself
+
+45:15.400 --> 45:18.000
+ or at least focused in is on the Protoss race,
+
+45:18.000 --> 45:19.880
+ as far as I understand.
+
+45:19.880 --> 45:21.880
+ Can you tell me about the different races
+
+45:21.880 --> 45:26.000
+ and how they, so Protoss, Terran and Zerg,
+
+45:26.000 --> 45:27.040
+ how do they compare?
+
+45:27.040 --> 45:28.120
+ How do they interact?
+
+45:28.120 --> 45:29.960
+ Why did you choose Protoss?
+
+45:29.960 --> 45:33.600
+ In the dynamics of the game
+
+45:33.600 --> 45:35.680
+ seen from a strategic perspective.
+
+45:35.680 --> 45:39.680
+ So Protoss, so in Starcraft, there are three races.
+
+45:39.680 --> 45:41.320
+ Indeed, in the demonstration,
+
+45:41.320 --> 45:43.880
+ we saw only the Protoss race.
+
+45:43.880 --> 45:45.560
+ So maybe let's start with that one.
+
+45:45.560 --> 45:49.440
+ Protoss is kind of the most technologically advanced race.
+
+45:49.440 --> 45:53.800
+ It has units that are expensive, but powerful, right?
+
+45:53.800 --> 45:57.840
+ So in general, you wanna kind of conserve your units
+
+45:57.840 --> 45:58.640
+ as you go attack.
+
+45:58.640 --> 46:01.840
+ So you wanna, and then you wanna utilize
+
+46:01.840 --> 46:05.120
+ these tactical advantages of very fancy spells
+
+46:05.120 --> 46:07.240
+ and so on, so forth.
+
+46:07.240 --> 46:10.320
+ And at the same time, they're kind of,
+
+46:11.280 --> 46:15.040
+ people say like they're a bit easier to play perhaps, right?
+
+46:15.040 --> 46:17.160
+ But that I actually didn't know.
+
+46:17.160 --> 46:20.120
+ I mean, I just talked to now a lot to the players
+
+46:20.120 --> 46:22.520
+ that we work with, TLO and Mana.
+
+46:22.520 --> 46:24.120
+ And they said, oh yeah, Protoss is actually,
+
+46:24.120 --> 46:26.320
+ people think is actually one of the easiest races.
+
+46:26.320 --> 46:29.360
+ So perhaps the easier, that doesn't mean
+
+46:29.360 --> 46:32.760
+ that it's obviously professional players
+
+46:32.760 --> 46:34.080
+ excel at the three races.
+
+46:34.080 --> 46:37.600
+ And there's never like a race that dominates
+
+46:37.600 --> 46:38.800
+ for a very long time anyway.
+
+46:38.800 --> 46:41.760
+ So if you look at the top, I don't know, 100 in the world,
+
+46:41.760 --> 46:44.360
+ is there one race that dominates that list?
+
+46:44.360 --> 46:46.840
+ It would be hard to know because it depends on the regions.
+
+46:46.840 --> 46:50.600
+ I think it's pretty equal in terms of distribution.
+
+46:50.600 --> 46:52.840
+ And Blizzard wants it to be equal, right?
+
+46:52.840 --> 46:56.320
+ They wouldn't want one race like Protoss
+
+46:56.320 --> 46:59.960
+ to not be representative in the top place.
+
+46:59.960 --> 47:03.880
+ So definitely like they tried it to be like the balance, right?
+
+47:03.880 --> 47:07.320
+ So then maybe the opposite race of Protoss is Zerg.
+
+47:07.320 --> 47:10.600
+ Zerg is a race where you just kind of expand
+
+47:10.600 --> 47:13.840
+ and take over as many resources as you can.
+
+47:13.840 --> 47:15.720
+ And they have a very high capacity
+
+47:15.720 --> 47:17.680
+ to regenerate their units.
+
+47:17.680 --> 47:20.520
+ So if you have an army, it's not that valuable
+
+47:20.520 --> 47:23.960
+ in terms of losing the whole army is not a big deal as Zerg
+
+47:23.960 --> 47:25.960
+ because you can then rebuild it.
+
+47:25.960 --> 47:28.320
+ And given that you generally accumulate
+
+47:28.320 --> 47:32.000
+ a huge bank of resources, Zerg's typically play
+
+47:32.000 --> 47:34.240
+ by applying a lot of pressure,
+
+47:34.240 --> 47:36.160
+ maybe losing their whole army,
+
+47:36.160 --> 47:37.880
+ but then rebuilding it quickly.
+
+47:37.880 --> 47:40.480
+ So although of course every race,
+
+47:40.480 --> 47:43.960
+ I mean, there's never, I mean, they're pretty diverse.
+
+47:43.960 --> 47:45.160
+ I mean, there are some units in Zerg
+
+47:45.160 --> 47:46.600
+ that are technologically advanced
+
+47:46.600 --> 47:48.880
+ and they do some very interesting spells.
+
+47:48.880 --> 47:51.360
+ And there's some units in Protoss that are less valuable
+
+47:51.360 --> 47:53.360
+ and you could lose a lot of them and rebuild them
+
+47:53.360 --> 47:55.160
+ and it wouldn't be a big deal.
+
+47:55.160 --> 47:57.840
+ All right, so maybe I'm missing out.
+
+47:57.840 --> 47:59.280
+ Maybe I'm gonna say some dumb stuff,
+
+47:59.280 --> 48:02.480
+ but just summary of strategy.
+
+48:02.480 --> 48:05.720
+ So first there's collection of a lot of resources.
+
+48:05.720 --> 48:06.560
+ That's one option.
+
+48:06.560 --> 48:11.560
+ The other one is expanding, so building other bases.
+
+48:11.920 --> 48:15.640
+ Then the other is obviously building units
+
+48:15.640 --> 48:17.200
+ and attacking with those units.
+
+48:17.200 --> 48:20.640
+ And then I don't know what else there is.
+
+48:20.640 --> 48:24.080
+ Maybe there's the different timing of attacks.
+
+48:24.080 --> 48:26.000
+ Like do attack early, attack late.
+
+48:26.000 --> 48:28.000
+ What are the different strategies that emerged
+
+48:28.000 --> 48:29.120
+ that you've learned about?
+
+48:29.120 --> 48:31.360
+ I've read that a bunch of people are super happy
+
+48:31.360 --> 48:33.000
+ that you guys have apparently,
+
+48:33.000 --> 48:35.000
+ that Alpha Star apparently has discovered
+
+48:35.000 --> 48:38.000
+ that it's really good to, what is it, saturate.
+
+48:38.000 --> 48:39.600
+ Oh yeah, the mineral line.
+
+48:39.600 --> 48:41.360
+ Yeah, the mineral line.
+
+48:41.360 --> 48:42.200
+ Yeah, yeah.
+
+48:42.200 --> 48:45.600
+ And that's for greedy amateur players like myself.
+
+48:45.600 --> 48:47.480
+ That's always been a good strategy.
+
+48:47.480 --> 48:49.000
+ You just build up a lot of money
+
+48:49.000 --> 48:53.280
+ and it just feels good to just accumulate and accumulate.
+
+48:53.280 --> 48:56.720
+ So thank you for discovering that and validating all of us.
+
+48:56.720 --> 48:59.200
+ But is there other strategies that you discovered
+
+48:59.200 --> 49:01.880
+ interesting and unique to this game?
+
+49:01.880 --> 49:05.080
+ Yeah, so if you look at the kind of,
+
+49:05.080 --> 49:06.480
+ not being a Starcraft 2 player,
+
+49:06.480 --> 49:08.120
+ but of course Starcraft and Starcraft 2
+
+49:08.120 --> 49:11.120
+ and real time strategy games in general are very similar.
+
+49:11.120 --> 49:16.120
+ I would classify perhaps the openings of the game.
+
+49:17.560 --> 49:18.760
+ They're very important.
+
+49:18.760 --> 49:21.760
+ And generally I would say there's two kinds of openings.
+
+49:21.760 --> 49:23.400
+ One that's a standard opening,
+
+49:23.400 --> 49:28.400
+ that's generally how players find sort of a balance
+
+49:28.840 --> 49:31.520
+ between risk and economy
+
+49:31.520 --> 49:33.400
+ and building some units early on
+
+49:33.400 --> 49:34.600
+ so that they could defend,
+
+49:34.600 --> 49:36.800
+ but they're not too exposed basically,
+
+49:36.800 --> 49:39.480
+ but also expanding quite quickly.
+
+49:39.480 --> 49:42.040
+ So this would be kind of a standard opening.
+
+49:42.040 --> 49:43.680
+ And within a standard opening,
+
+49:43.680 --> 49:45.480
+ then what you do choose generally
+
+49:45.480 --> 49:48.400
+ is what technology are you aiming towards?
+
+49:48.400 --> 49:50.280
+ So there's a bit of rock, paper, scissors
+
+49:50.280 --> 49:52.920
+ of you could go for spaceships
+
+49:52.920 --> 49:55.080
+ or you could go for invisible units
+
+49:55.080 --> 49:56.400
+ or you could go for, I don't know,
+
+49:56.400 --> 50:00.080
+ like massive units that attack against certain kinds of units
+
+50:00.080 --> 50:01.640
+ but they're weak against others.
+
+50:01.640 --> 50:05.760
+ So standard openings themselves have some choices
+
+50:05.760 --> 50:07.480
+ like rock, paper, scissors style.
+
+50:07.480 --> 50:09.640
+ Of course, if you scout and you're good at guessing
+
+50:09.640 --> 50:11.080
+ what the opponent is doing,
+
+50:11.080 --> 50:12.800
+ then you can play as an advantage
+
+50:12.800 --> 50:14.480
+ because if you know you're gonna play rock,
+
+50:14.480 --> 50:16.480
+ I mean, I'm gonna play paper obviously.
+
+50:16.480 --> 50:19.120
+ So you can imagine that normal standard games
+
+50:19.120 --> 50:22.920
+ in Starcraft looks like a continuous rock, paper,
+
+50:22.920 --> 50:26.600
+ scissors game where you guess what the distribution
+
+50:26.600 --> 50:29.920
+ of rock, paper, and scissors is from the enemy
+
+50:29.920 --> 50:33.360
+ and reacting accordingly to try to beat it
+
+50:33.360 --> 50:37.000
+ or put the paper out before he kind of changes
+
+50:37.000 --> 50:38.880
+ his mind from rock to scissors
+
+50:38.880 --> 50:40.480
+ and then you would be in a weak position.
+
+50:40.480 --> 50:42.120
+ So sorry to pause on that.
+
+50:42.120 --> 50:43.320
+ I didn't realize this element
+
+50:43.320 --> 50:44.880
+ because I know it's true with poker.
+
+50:44.880 --> 50:46.440
+ I looked at Leprata's.
+
+50:47.640 --> 50:52.200
+ You're also estimating, trying to guess the distribution,
+
+50:52.200 --> 50:54.160
+ trying to better and better estimate the distribution
+
+50:54.160 --> 50:56.040
+ what the opponent is likely to be doing.
+
+50:56.040 --> 50:57.440
+ Yeah, I mean, as a player,
+
+50:57.440 --> 50:59.840
+ you definitely wanna have a belief state
+
+50:59.840 --> 51:03.000
+ over what's up on the other side of the map
+
+51:03.000 --> 51:05.600
+ and when your belief state becomes inaccurate
+
+51:05.600 --> 51:08.040
+ when you start having serious doubts
+
+51:08.040 --> 51:11.320
+ whether he's gonna play something that you must know,
+
+51:11.320 --> 51:12.440
+ that's when you scout.
+
+51:12.440 --> 51:14.560
+ You wanna then gather information, right?
+
+51:14.560 --> 51:16.440
+ Is improving the accuracy of the belief
+
+51:16.440 --> 51:19.880
+ or improving the belief state part of the loss
+
+51:19.880 --> 51:21.040
+ that you're trying to optimize?
+
+51:21.040 --> 51:22.720
+ Or is it just an side effect?
+
+51:22.720 --> 51:24.040
+ It's implicit, but implicit.
+
+51:24.040 --> 51:25.840
+ You could explicitly model it
+
+51:25.840 --> 51:28.280
+ and it would be quite good at probably predicting
+
+51:28.280 --> 51:30.360
+ what's on the other side of the map,
+
+51:30.360 --> 51:32.880
+ but so far it's all implicit.
+
+51:32.880 --> 51:36.680
+ There's no additional reward for predicting the enemy.
+
+51:36.680 --> 51:38.800
+ So there's these standard openings
+
+51:38.800 --> 51:41.640
+ and then there's what people call cheese,
+
+51:41.640 --> 51:42.800
+ which is very interesting
+
+51:42.800 --> 51:46.760
+ and Alpha Star sometimes really likes this kind of cheese.
+
+51:46.760 --> 51:51.120
+ These cheeses, what they are is kind of an all in strategy.
+
+51:51.120 --> 51:53.240
+ You're gonna do something sneaky.
+
+51:53.240 --> 51:56.680
+ You're gonna hide your own buildings
+
+51:56.680 --> 51:58.200
+ close to the enemy base
+
+51:58.200 --> 52:01.600
+ or you're gonna go for hiding your technological buildings
+
+52:01.600 --> 52:03.040
+ so that you do invisible units
+
+52:03.040 --> 52:06.040
+ and the enemy just cannot react to detect it
+
+52:06.040 --> 52:08.000
+ and thus lose the game.
+
+52:08.000 --> 52:10.000
+ And there's quite a few of these cheeses
+
+52:10.000 --> 52:11.800
+ and variants of them.
+
+52:11.800 --> 52:14.480
+ And there it's where actually the belief state
+
+52:14.480 --> 52:16.360
+ becomes even more important
+
+52:16.360 --> 52:18.520
+ because if I scout your base
+
+52:18.520 --> 52:20.200
+ and I see no buildings at all,
+
+52:20.200 --> 52:22.480
+ any human player knows some things up.
+
+52:22.480 --> 52:23.320
+ They might know, well,
+
+52:23.320 --> 52:25.640
+ you're hiding something close to my base.
+
+52:25.640 --> 52:28.200
+ Should I build suddenly a lot of units to defense?
+
+52:28.200 --> 52:31.000
+ Should I actually block my ramp with workers
+
+52:31.000 --> 52:33.520
+ so that you cannot come and destroy my base?
+
+52:33.520 --> 52:35.680
+ So there's all this is happening
+
+52:35.680 --> 52:39.440
+ and defending against cheeses is extremely important.
+
+52:39.440 --> 52:40.760
+ And in the Alpha Star League,
+
+52:40.760 --> 52:45.080
+ many agents actually develop some cheesy strategies.
+
+52:45.080 --> 52:48.000
+ And in the games we saw against TLO and Mana,
+
+52:48.000 --> 52:49.240
+ two out of the 10 agents
+
+52:49.240 --> 52:51.760
+ were actually doing these kind of strategies
+
+52:51.760 --> 52:53.640
+ which are cheesy strategies.
+
+52:53.640 --> 52:55.600
+ And then there's a variant of cheesy strategy
+
+52:55.600 --> 52:57.360
+ which is called all in.
+
+52:57.360 --> 53:00.280
+ So an all in strategy is not perhaps as drastic
+
+53:00.280 --> 53:02.560
+ as oh, I'm gonna build cannons on your base
+
+53:02.560 --> 53:03.880
+ and then bring all my workers
+
+53:03.880 --> 53:06.840
+ and try to just disrupt your base and game over
+
+53:06.840 --> 53:08.800
+ or GG as we say in StarCraft.
+
+53:09.840 --> 53:12.000
+ There's these kind of very cool things
+
+53:12.000 --> 53:14.760
+ that you can align precisely at a certain time mark.
+
+53:14.760 --> 53:17.400
+ So for instance, you can generate
+
+53:17.400 --> 53:20.280
+ exactly 10 unit composition that is perfect.
+
+53:20.280 --> 53:22.960
+ Like five of this type, five of these other type
+
+53:22.960 --> 53:26.240
+ and align the upgrade so that at four minutes and a half,
+
+53:26.240 --> 53:28.680
+ let's say you have these 10 units
+
+53:28.680 --> 53:30.640
+ and the upgrade just finished.
+
+53:30.640 --> 53:34.000
+ And at that point, that army is really scary.
+
+53:34.000 --> 53:36.440
+ And unless the enemy really knows what's going on,
+
+53:36.440 --> 53:40.280
+ if you push, you might then have an advantage
+
+53:40.280 --> 53:42.480
+ because maybe the enemy is doing something more standard,
+
+53:42.480 --> 53:45.800
+ it expanded too much, it developed too much economy
+
+53:45.800 --> 53:49.760
+ and it trade off badly against having defenses
+
+53:49.760 --> 53:51.120
+ and the enemy will lose.
+
+53:51.120 --> 53:53.680
+ But it's called all in because if you don't win,
+
+53:53.680 --> 53:55.080
+ then you're gonna lose.
+
+53:55.080 --> 53:57.960
+ So you see players that do these kind of strategies,
+
+53:57.960 --> 54:00.000
+ if they don't succeed, game is not over.
+
+54:00.000 --> 54:01.240
+ I mean, they still have a base
+
+54:01.240 --> 54:02.880
+ and they still gathering minerals,
+
+54:02.880 --> 54:04.800
+ but they will just GG out of the game
+
+54:04.800 --> 54:06.800
+ because they know, well, game is over.
+
+54:06.800 --> 54:08.880
+ I gambled and I failed.
+
+54:08.880 --> 54:11.600
+ So if we start entering the game
+
+54:11.600 --> 54:14.520
+ theoretic aspects of the game, it's really rich
+
+54:14.520 --> 54:18.000
+ and that's why it also makes it quite entertaining to watch.
+
+54:18.000 --> 54:21.800
+ Even if I don't play, I still enjoy watching the game.
+
+54:21.800 --> 54:26.800
+ But the agents are trying to do this mostly implicitly,
+
+54:26.800 --> 54:29.320
+ but one element that we improved in self plays
+
+54:29.320 --> 54:31.320
+ creating the Alpha Star League.
+
+54:31.320 --> 54:34.600
+ And the Alpha Star League is not pure self play.
+
+54:34.600 --> 54:37.880
+ It's trying to create different personalities of agents
+
+54:37.880 --> 54:41.480
+ so that some of them will become cheesy agents.
+
+54:41.480 --> 54:44.360
+ Some of them might become very economical, very greedy,
+
+54:44.360 --> 54:46.160
+ like getting all the resources,
+
+54:46.160 --> 54:48.760
+ but then maybe early on they're gonna be weak,
+
+54:48.760 --> 54:51.040
+ but later on they're gonna be very strong.
+
+54:51.040 --> 54:53.400
+ And by creating this personality of agents,
+
+54:53.400 --> 54:55.400
+ which sometimes it just happens naturally
+
+54:55.400 --> 54:58.240
+ that you can see kind of an evolution of agents
+
+54:58.240 --> 55:00.760
+ that given the previous generation,
+
+55:00.760 --> 55:01.920
+ they train against all of them
+
+55:01.920 --> 55:04.320
+ and then they generate kind of the perfect counter
+
+55:04.320 --> 55:05.760
+ to that distribution.
+
+55:05.760 --> 55:09.280
+ But these agents, you must have them in the populations
+
+55:09.280 --> 55:11.280
+ because if you don't have them,
+
+55:11.280 --> 55:13.040
+ you're not covered against these things, right?
+
+55:13.040 --> 55:17.080
+ It's kind of, you wanna create all sorts of the opponents
+
+55:17.080 --> 55:18.640
+ that you will find in the wild.
+
+55:18.640 --> 55:21.800
+ So you can be exposed to these cheeses,
+
+55:21.800 --> 55:25.720
+ early aggression, later aggression, more expansions,
+
+55:25.720 --> 55:29.560
+ dropping units in your base from the side, all these things.
+
+55:29.560 --> 55:32.760
+ And pure self play is getting a bit stuck
+
+55:32.760 --> 55:36.200
+ at finding some subset of these, but not all of these.
+
+55:36.200 --> 55:39.480
+ So the Alpha Star League is a way to kind of
+
+55:39.480 --> 55:41.560
+ do an ensemble of agents
+
+55:41.560 --> 55:43.480
+ that they're all playing in a league
+
+55:43.480 --> 55:45.520
+ much like people play on Battle.net, right?
+
+55:45.520 --> 55:47.440
+ They play, you play against someone
+
+55:47.440 --> 55:50.240
+ who does a new cool strategy and you immediately,
+
+55:50.240 --> 55:53.040
+ oh my God, I wanna try it, I wanna play again.
+
+55:53.040 --> 55:55.960
+ And these to me was another critical part
+
+55:55.960 --> 55:58.520
+ of the problem which was,
+
+55:58.520 --> 56:01.240
+ can we create a Battle.net for agents?
+
+56:01.240 --> 56:02.080
+ Yeah.
+
+56:02.080 --> 56:03.400
+ And that's kind of what the Alpha Star League really.
+
+56:03.400 --> 56:04.240
+ That's fascinating.
+
+56:04.240 --> 56:06.920
+ And where they stick to their different strategies.
+
+56:06.920 --> 56:09.960
+ Yeah, wow, that's really, really interesting.
+
+56:09.960 --> 56:13.240
+ But that said, you were fortunate enough
+
+56:13.240 --> 56:16.280
+ or just skilled enough to win 5.0.
+
+56:17.320 --> 56:19.280
+ And so how hard is it to win?
+
+56:19.280 --> 56:20.320
+ I mean, that's not the goal.
+
+56:20.320 --> 56:21.920
+ I guess, I don't know what the goal is.
+
+56:21.920 --> 56:25.400
+ The goal should be to win majority, not 5.0,
+
+56:25.400 --> 56:29.360
+ but how hard is it in general to win all matchups?
+
+56:29.360 --> 56:31.080
+ I don't want V1.
+
+56:31.080 --> 56:33.600
+ So that's a very interesting question
+
+56:33.600 --> 56:37.240
+ because once you see Alpha Star
+
+56:37.240 --> 56:39.520
+ and superficially you think, well, okay,
+
+56:39.520 --> 56:42.960
+ it won, if you sum all the games like 10 to one, right?
+
+56:42.960 --> 56:46.280
+ It lost the game that it played with the camera interface.
+
+56:46.280 --> 56:48.480
+ You might think, well, that's done, right?
+
+56:48.480 --> 56:50.840
+ It's super human at the game.
+
+56:50.840 --> 56:54.800
+ And that's not really the claim we really can make, actually.
+
+56:56.000 --> 56:58.840
+ The claim is we beat a professional gamer
+
+56:58.840 --> 57:00.120
+ for the first time.
+
+57:00.120 --> 57:02.480
+ Starcraft has really been a thing
+
+57:02.480 --> 57:04.120
+ that has been going on for a few years,
+
+57:04.120 --> 57:09.120
+ but a moment like this had not occurred before yet.
+
+57:09.520 --> 57:12.400
+ But are these agents impossible to beat?
+
+57:12.400 --> 57:13.440
+ Absolutely not, right?
+
+57:13.440 --> 57:17.360
+ So that's a bit what's kind of the difference is
+
+57:17.360 --> 57:19.560
+ the agents play at grandmaster level.
+
+57:19.560 --> 57:21.520
+ They definitely understand the game enough
+
+57:21.520 --> 57:24.960
+ to play extremely well, but are they unbeatable?
+
+57:24.960 --> 57:26.600
+ Do they play perfect?
+
+57:27.920 --> 57:30.320
+ No, and actually in Starcraft,
+
+57:30.320 --> 57:33.240
+ because of these sneaky strategies,
+
+57:33.240 --> 57:36.680
+ it's always possible that you might take a huge risk sometimes,
+
+57:36.680 --> 57:39.200
+ but you might get wins, right, out of this.
+
+57:39.200 --> 57:44.200
+ So I think as a domain, it still has a lot of opportunities,
+
+57:44.200 --> 57:47.760
+ not only because of course we wanna learn with less experience,
+
+57:47.760 --> 57:50.480
+ we would like to, I mean, if I learn to play Protoss,
+
+57:50.480 --> 57:53.280
+ I can play Terran and learn it much quicker
+
+57:53.280 --> 57:54.480
+ than Alpha Star can, right?
+
+57:54.480 --> 57:58.440
+ So there are obvious interesting research challenges as well.
+
+57:58.440 --> 58:03.080
+ But even as the raw performance goes,
+
+58:03.080 --> 58:05.960
+ really the claim here can be we are at pro level
+
+58:05.960 --> 58:09.080
+ or at high grandmaster level,
+
+58:09.080 --> 58:14.080
+ but obviously the players also did not know what to expect,
+
+58:14.360 --> 58:17.000
+ right, their prior distribution was a bit off
+
+58:17.000 --> 58:20.400
+ because they played this kind of new alien brain
+
+58:20.400 --> 58:22.080
+ as they like to say it, right?
+
+58:22.080 --> 58:25.080
+ And that's what makes it exciting for them,
+
+58:25.080 --> 58:28.040
+ but also I think if you look at the games closely,
+
+58:28.040 --> 58:31.520
+ you see there were weaknesses in some points,
+
+58:31.520 --> 58:33.320
+ maybe Alpha Star did not scout
+
+58:33.320 --> 58:36.080
+ or if it had got invisible units going against
+
+58:36.080 --> 58:38.200
+ at certain points, it wouldn't have known
+
+58:38.200 --> 58:39.600
+ and it would have been bad.
+
+58:39.600 --> 58:42.920
+ So there's still quite a lot of work to do,
+
+58:42.920 --> 58:45.440
+ but it's really a very exciting moment for us
+
+58:45.440 --> 58:49.120
+ to be seeing, wow, a single neural net on a GPU
+
+58:49.120 --> 58:52.080
+ is actually playing against these guys who are amazing.
+
+58:52.080 --> 58:53.760
+ I mean, you have to see them play in life.
+
+58:53.760 --> 58:55.800
+ They're really, really amazing players.
+
+58:55.800 --> 59:00.440
+ Yeah, I'm sure there must be a guy in Poland somewhere
+
+59:00.440 --> 59:02.680
+ right now training his butt off
+
+59:02.680 --> 59:06.600
+ to make sure that this never happens again with Alpha Star.
+
+59:06.600 --> 59:09.720
+ So that's really exciting in terms of Alpha Star
+
+59:09.720 --> 59:12.200
+ having some holes to exploit, which is great.
+
+59:12.200 --> 59:14.320
+ And then you build on top of each other
+
+59:14.320 --> 59:18.920
+ and it feels like Starcraft on let go, even if you win,
+
+59:18.920 --> 59:21.640
+ it's still not, it's still not,
+
+59:21.640 --> 59:23.120
+ there's so many different dimensions
+
+59:23.120 --> 59:24.200
+ in which you can explore.
+
+59:24.200 --> 59:25.560
+ So that's really, really interesting.
+
+59:25.560 --> 59:28.520
+ Do you think there's a ceiling to Alpha Star?
+
+59:28.520 --> 59:32.840
+ You've said that it hasn't reached, this is a big,
+
+59:33.960 --> 59:35.520
+ let me actually just pause for a second.
+
+59:35.520 --> 59:40.200
+ How did it feel to come here to this point,
+
+59:40.200 --> 59:42.240
+ to beat a top professional player?
+
+59:42.240 --> 59:44.600
+ Like that night, I mean, you know,
+
+59:44.600 --> 59:47.160
+ Olympic athletes have their gold medal, right?
+
+59:47.160 --> 59:48.840
+ This is your gold medal in a sense.
+
+59:48.840 --> 59:50.400
+ Sure, you're cited a lot,
+
+59:50.400 --> 59:53.120
+ you've published a lot of prestigious papers, whatever,
+
+59:53.120 --> 59:55.280
+ but this is like a win.
+
+59:55.280 --> 59:56.480
+ How did it feel?
+
+59:56.480 --> 59:59.440
+ I mean, it was, for me, it was unbelievable
+
+59:59.440 --> 1:00:04.440
+ because first the win itself, I mean, it was so exciting.
+
+1:00:04.440 --> 1:00:09.440
+ I mean, so looking back to those last days of 2018,
+
+1:00:09.840 --> 1:00:12.040
+ really, that's when the games were played,
+
+1:00:12.040 --> 1:00:14.560
+ I'm sure I'll look back at that moment and say,
+
+1:00:14.560 --> 1:00:17.280
+ oh my God, I wanna be in a project like that.
+
+1:00:17.280 --> 1:00:20.440
+ It's like, I already feel the nostalgia of like,
+
+1:00:20.440 --> 1:00:23.560
+ yeah, that was huge in terms of the energy
+
+1:00:23.560 --> 1:00:25.720
+ and the team effort that went into it.
+
+1:00:25.720 --> 1:00:28.520
+ And so in that sense, as soon as it happened,
+
+1:00:28.520 --> 1:00:30.640
+ I already knew it was kind of,
+
+1:00:30.640 --> 1:00:32.320
+ I was losing it a little bit.
+
+1:00:32.320 --> 1:00:35.440
+ So it is almost like sad that it happened and oh my God,
+
+1:00:35.440 --> 1:00:40.440
+ like, but on the other hand, it also verifies the approach.
+
+1:00:40.600 --> 1:00:43.160
+ But to me also, there's so many challenges
+
+1:00:43.160 --> 1:00:45.400
+ and interesting aspects of intelligence
+
+1:00:45.400 --> 1:00:49.240
+ that even though we can train a neural network
+
+1:00:49.240 --> 1:00:52.040
+ to play at the level of the best humans,
+
+1:00:52.040 --> 1:00:53.600
+ there's still so many challenges.
+
+1:00:53.600 --> 1:00:54.800
+ So for me, it's also like,
+
+1:00:54.800 --> 1:00:56.800
+ well, this is really an amazing achievement,
+
+1:00:56.800 --> 1:00:59.280
+ but I already was also thinking about next steps.
+
+1:00:59.280 --> 1:01:01.720
+ I mean, as I said, these Asians play Protos,
+
+1:01:01.720 --> 1:01:04.080
+ they play Protos versus Protos,
+
+1:01:04.080 --> 1:01:07.240
+ but they should be able to play a different race
+
+1:01:07.240 --> 1:01:08.160
+ much quicker, right?
+
+1:01:08.160 --> 1:01:10.640
+ So that would be an amazing achievement.
+
+1:01:10.640 --> 1:01:13.360
+ Some people call this meta reinforcement learning,
+
+1:01:13.360 --> 1:01:15.200
+ meta learning and so on, right?
+
+1:01:15.200 --> 1:01:18.960
+ So there's so many possibilities after that moment,
+
+1:01:18.960 --> 1:01:22.240
+ but the moment itself, it really felt great.
+
+1:01:22.240 --> 1:01:24.520
+ It's, we had this bet.
+
+1:01:24.520 --> 1:01:27.720
+ So I'm kind of a pessimist in general.
+
+1:01:27.720 --> 1:01:30.120
+ So I kind of send an email to the team and I said,
+
+1:01:30.120 --> 1:01:33.680
+ okay, let's, against TLO first, right?
+
+1:01:33.680 --> 1:01:35.120
+ Like what's going to be the result?
+
+1:01:35.120 --> 1:01:38.680
+ And I really thought we would lose like five zero, right?
+
+1:01:38.680 --> 1:01:41.480
+ I, I, we had some calibration made
+
+1:01:41.480 --> 1:01:44.080
+ against the 5,000 MMR player.
+
+1:01:44.080 --> 1:01:47.360
+ TLO was much stronger than that player.
+
+1:01:47.360 --> 1:01:50.040
+ Even if he played Protos, which is his off race,
+
+1:01:51.040 --> 1:01:53.120
+ but yeah, it was not imagining we would win.
+
+1:01:53.120 --> 1:01:55.600
+ So for me, that was just kind of a test run or something.
+
+1:01:55.600 --> 1:01:59.000
+ And then it really kind of, he was really surprised.
+
+1:01:59.000 --> 1:02:02.360
+ And unbelievably, we went to this,
+
+1:02:02.360 --> 1:02:04.560
+ to this bar to celebrate.
+
+1:02:04.560 --> 1:02:08.360
+ And Dave tells me, well, why don't we invite someone
+
+1:02:08.360 --> 1:02:11.000
+ who is a thousand MMR stronger in Protos?
+
+1:02:11.000 --> 1:02:13.040
+ Like an actual Protos player, like,
+
+1:02:13.040 --> 1:02:16.200
+ like that it turned out being mana, right?
+
+1:02:16.200 --> 1:02:19.400
+ And, you know, we had some drinks and I said, sure, why not?
+
+1:02:19.400 --> 1:02:20.240
+ But then I thought, well,
+
+1:02:20.240 --> 1:02:22.080
+ that's really going to be impossible to beat.
+
+1:02:22.080 --> 1:02:24.600
+ I mean, even because it's so much ahead.
+
+1:02:24.600 --> 1:02:28.440
+ A thousand MMR is really like 99% probability
+
+1:02:28.440 --> 1:02:33.080
+ that mana would beat TLO as Protos versus Protos, right?
+
+1:02:33.080 --> 1:02:34.240
+ So we did that.
+
+1:02:34.240 --> 1:02:39.000
+ And to me, the second game was much more important,
+
+1:02:39.000 --> 1:02:42.120
+ even though a lot of uncertainty kind of disappeared
+
+1:02:42.120 --> 1:02:43.680
+ after we kind of beat TLO.
+
+1:02:43.680 --> 1:02:45.680
+ I mean, he is a professional player.
+
+1:02:45.680 --> 1:02:48.000
+ So that was kind of, oh, but that's really
+
+1:02:48.000 --> 1:02:49.760
+ a very nice achievement.
+
+1:02:49.760 --> 1:02:51.800
+ But mana really was at the top.
+
+1:02:51.800 --> 1:02:53.880
+ And you could see he played much better,
+
+1:02:53.880 --> 1:02:55.400
+ but our agents got much better too.
+
+1:02:55.400 --> 1:02:57.440
+ So it's like, ah.
+
+1:02:57.440 --> 1:02:59.800
+ And then after the first game, I said,
+
+1:02:59.800 --> 1:03:02.760
+ if we take a single game, at least we can say we beat A game.
+
+1:03:02.760 --> 1:03:04.320
+ I mean, even if we don't beat the series,
+
+1:03:04.320 --> 1:03:06.960
+ for me, that was a huge relief.
+
+1:03:06.960 --> 1:03:09.200
+ And I mean, I remember the hacking them is.
+
+1:03:09.200 --> 1:03:11.600
+ And I mean, it was really like this moment,
+
+1:03:11.600 --> 1:03:14.200
+ for me, will resonate forever as a researcher.
+
+1:03:14.200 --> 1:03:15.880
+ And I mean, as a person, and yeah,
+
+1:03:15.880 --> 1:03:18.280
+ it's a really like great accomplishment.
+
+1:03:18.280 --> 1:03:21.360
+ And it was great also to be there with the team in the room.
+
+1:03:21.360 --> 1:03:23.080
+ I don't know if you saw like this.
+
+1:03:23.080 --> 1:03:24.760
+ So it was really like.
+
+1:03:24.760 --> 1:03:26.000
+ I mean, from my perspective,
+
+1:03:26.000 --> 1:03:29.720
+ the other interesting thing is just like watching Kasparov,
+
+1:03:29.720 --> 1:03:33.760
+ now watching mana was also interesting
+
+1:03:33.760 --> 1:03:36.160
+ because he is kind of at a loss of words.
+
+1:03:36.160 --> 1:03:38.400
+ I mean, whenever you lose, I've done a lot of sports.
+
+1:03:38.400 --> 1:03:43.560
+ You sometimes say excuses, you look for reasons.
+
+1:03:43.560 --> 1:03:46.280
+ And he couldn't really come up with reasons.
+
+1:03:46.280 --> 1:03:50.040
+ I mean, so with the off race for Protoss,
+
+1:03:50.040 --> 1:03:52.320
+ you could say, well, it felt awkward, it wasn't,
+
+1:03:52.320 --> 1:03:55.200
+ but here it was just beaten.
+
+1:03:55.200 --> 1:03:57.960
+ And it was beautiful to look at a human being
+
+1:03:57.960 --> 1:04:00.320
+ being superseded by an AI system.
+
+1:04:00.320 --> 1:04:04.480
+ I mean, it's a beautiful moment for researchers.
+
+1:04:04.480 --> 1:04:05.920
+ Yeah, for sure it was.
+
+1:04:05.920 --> 1:04:09.960
+ I mean, probably the highlight of my career so far
+
+1:04:09.960 --> 1:04:11.760
+ because of its uniqueness and coolness.
+
+1:04:11.760 --> 1:04:14.280
+ And I don't know, I mean, it's obviously, as you said,
+
+1:04:14.280 --> 1:04:16.240
+ you can look at paper citations and so on.
+
+1:04:16.240 --> 1:04:19.280
+ But this really is like a testament
+
+1:04:19.280 --> 1:04:22.400
+ of the whole machine learning approach
+
+1:04:22.400 --> 1:04:24.640
+ and using games to advance technology.
+
+1:04:24.640 --> 1:04:27.880
+ I mean, it really was, everything came together
+
+1:04:27.880 --> 1:04:29.840
+ at that moment, that's really the summary.
+
+1:04:29.840 --> 1:04:34.040
+ Also, on the other side, it's a popularization of AI too
+
+1:04:34.040 --> 1:04:38.200
+ because it's just like traveling to the moon and so on.
+
+1:04:38.200 --> 1:04:41.000
+ I mean, this is where a very large community of people
+
+1:04:41.000 --> 1:04:45.080
+ that don't really know AI, they get to really interact with it.
+
+1:04:45.080 --> 1:04:46.000
+ Which is very important.
+
+1:04:46.000 --> 1:04:50.800
+ I mean, we must, you know, writing papers helps our peers,
+
+1:04:50.800 --> 1:04:52.520
+ researchers to understand what we're doing.
+
+1:04:52.520 --> 1:04:55.880
+ But I think AI is becoming mature enough
+
+1:04:55.880 --> 1:04:59.000
+ that we must sort of try to explain what it is.
+
+1:04:59.000 --> 1:05:01.440
+ And perhaps through games is an obvious way
+
+1:05:01.440 --> 1:05:03.640
+ because these games always had built in AI.
+
+1:05:03.640 --> 1:05:07.680
+ So it may be everyone experienced an AI playing a video game
+
+1:05:07.680 --> 1:05:08.520
+ even if they don't know.
+
+1:05:08.520 --> 1:05:10.240
+ Because there's always some scripted element
+
+1:05:10.240 --> 1:05:13.880
+ and some people might even call that AI already, right?
+
+1:05:13.880 --> 1:05:16.320
+ So what are other applications
+
+1:05:16.320 --> 1:05:20.280
+ of the approaches underlying Alpha Star that you see happening?
+
+1:05:20.280 --> 1:05:23.120
+ There's a lot of echoes of, you said, transformer
+
+1:05:23.120 --> 1:05:25.680
+ of language modeling and so on.
+
+1:05:25.680 --> 1:05:29.480
+ Have you already started thinking where the breakthroughs
+
+1:05:29.480 --> 1:05:32.280
+ in Alpha Star get expanded to other applications?
+
+1:05:32.280 --> 1:05:34.640
+ Right, so I thought about a few things
+
+1:05:34.640 --> 1:05:37.280
+ for like kind of next months, next years.
+
+1:05:38.440 --> 1:05:40.520
+ The main thing I'm thinking about actually is
+
+1:05:40.520 --> 1:05:43.160
+ what's next as a kind of a grand challenge
+
+1:05:43.160 --> 1:05:47.120
+ because for me, like we've seen Atari
+
+1:05:47.120 --> 1:05:50.280
+ and then there's like the sort of three dimensional walls
+
+1:05:50.280 --> 1:05:52.520
+ that we've seen also like pretty good performance
+
+1:05:52.520 --> 1:05:54.160
+ from this capture the flag agents
+
+1:05:54.160 --> 1:05:57.600
+ that also some people at DeepMind and elsewhere are working on.
+
+1:05:57.600 --> 1:05:59.600
+ We've also seen some amazing results on like,
+
+1:05:59.600 --> 1:06:03.280
+ for instance, Dota 2, which is also a very complicated game.
+
+1:06:03.280 --> 1:06:05.960
+ So for me, like the main thing I'm thinking about
+
+1:06:05.960 --> 1:06:07.960
+ is what's next in terms of challenge.
+
+1:06:07.960 --> 1:06:12.960
+ So as a researcher, I see sort of two tensions
+
+1:06:12.960 --> 1:06:16.760
+ between research and then applications or areas
+
+1:06:16.760 --> 1:06:18.480
+ or domains where you apply them.
+
+1:06:18.480 --> 1:06:20.480
+ So on the one hand, we've done,
+
+1:06:20.480 --> 1:06:23.320
+ thanks to the application of StarCraft is very hard.
+
+1:06:23.320 --> 1:06:25.600
+ We developed some techniques, some new research
+
+1:06:25.600 --> 1:06:27.480
+ that now we could look at elsewhere,
+
+1:06:27.480 --> 1:06:30.520
+ like are there other applications where we can apply this?
+
+1:06:30.520 --> 1:06:32.880
+ And the obvious ones, absolutely,
+
+1:06:32.880 --> 1:06:37.480
+ you can think of feeding back to sort of the community
+
+1:06:37.480 --> 1:06:40.240
+ we took from, which was mostly sequence modeling
+
+1:06:40.240 --> 1:06:41.680
+ or natural language processing.
+
+1:06:41.680 --> 1:06:46.120
+ So we've developed an extended things from the transformer
+
+1:06:46.120 --> 1:06:48.120
+ and we use pointer networks.
+
+1:06:48.120 --> 1:06:51.280
+ We combine LSTM and transformers in interesting ways.
+
+1:06:51.280 --> 1:06:54.200
+ So that's perhaps the kind of lowest hanging fruit
+
+1:06:54.200 --> 1:06:58.840
+ of feeding back to now a different field of machine learning
+
+1:06:58.840 --> 1:07:00.880
+ that's not playing video games.
+
+1:07:00.880 --> 1:07:05.680
+ Let me go old school and jump to Mr. Alan Turing.
+
+1:07:05.680 --> 1:07:09.880
+ So the Turing test is a natural language test,
+
+1:07:09.880 --> 1:07:11.560
+ a conversational test.
+
+1:07:11.560 --> 1:07:15.760
+ What's your thought of it as a test for intelligence?
+
+1:07:15.760 --> 1:07:17.360
+ Do you think it is a grand challenge
+
+1:07:17.360 --> 1:07:18.920
+ that's worthy of undertaking?
+
+1:07:18.920 --> 1:07:21.960
+ Maybe if it is, would you reformulate it
+
+1:07:21.960 --> 1:07:23.720
+ or phrase it somehow differently?
+
+1:07:23.720 --> 1:07:25.640
+ Right, so I really love the Turing test
+
+1:07:25.640 --> 1:07:29.600
+ because I also like sequences and language understanding.
+
+1:07:29.600 --> 1:07:32.160
+ And in fact, some of the early work
+
+1:07:32.160 --> 1:07:33.520
+ we did in machine translation,
+
+1:07:33.520 --> 1:07:37.320
+ we tried to apply to kind of a neural chat bot,
+
+1:07:37.320 --> 1:07:40.200
+ which obviously would never pass the Turing test
+
+1:07:40.200 --> 1:07:42.320
+ because it was very limited.
+
+1:07:42.320 --> 1:07:45.200
+ But it is a very fascinating idea
+
+1:07:45.200 --> 1:07:49.440
+ that you could really have an AI
+
+1:07:49.440 --> 1:07:51.800
+ that would be indistinguishable from humans
+
+1:07:51.800 --> 1:07:56.040
+ in terms of asking or conversing with it, right?
+
+1:07:56.040 --> 1:08:00.720
+ So I think the test itself seems very nice
+
+1:08:00.720 --> 1:08:02.600
+ and it's kind of well defined actually,
+
+1:08:02.600 --> 1:08:05.000
+ like the passing it or not.
+
+1:08:05.000 --> 1:08:06.560
+ I think there's quite a few rules
+
+1:08:06.560 --> 1:08:11.560
+ that feel like pretty simple and you could really have,
+
+1:08:12.520 --> 1:08:14.800
+ I mean, I think they have these competitions every year.
+
+1:08:14.800 --> 1:08:15.920
+ Yeah, so the Leibniz Prize,
+
+1:08:15.920 --> 1:08:20.920
+ but I don't know if you've seen the kind of bots
+
+1:08:22.240 --> 1:08:24.160
+ that emerge from that competition.
+
+1:08:24.160 --> 1:08:28.000
+ They're not quite as what you would,
+
+1:08:28.000 --> 1:08:29.920
+ so it feels like that there's weaknesses
+
+1:08:29.920 --> 1:08:31.400
+ with the way Turing formulated it.
+
+1:08:31.400 --> 1:08:35.000
+ It needs to be that the definition
+
+1:08:35.000 --> 1:08:40.000
+ of a genuine, rich, fulfilling human conversation
+
+1:08:40.000 --> 1:08:41.640
+ it needs to be something else.
+
+1:08:41.640 --> 1:08:43.000
+ Like the Alexa Prize,
+
+1:08:43.000 --> 1:08:44.880
+ which I'm not as well familiar with,
+
+1:08:44.880 --> 1:08:46.200
+ has tried to define that more.
+
+1:08:46.200 --> 1:08:48.240
+ I think by saying you have to continue
+
+1:08:48.240 --> 1:08:50.680
+ keeping a conversation for 30 minutes,
+
+1:08:50.680 --> 1:08:52.240
+ something like that.
+
+1:08:52.240 --> 1:08:55.520
+ So basically forcing the agent not to just fool,
+
+1:08:55.520 --> 1:08:58.000
+ but to have an engaging conversation kind of thing,
+
+1:08:58.000 --> 1:09:03.000
+ is that, I mean, have you thought
+
+1:09:03.720 --> 1:09:06.400
+ about this problem richly?
+
+1:09:06.400 --> 1:09:10.680
+ And if you have in general, how far away are we from,
+
+1:09:10.680 --> 1:09:14.160
+ you worked a lot on language understanding,
+
+1:09:14.160 --> 1:09:16.640
+ language generation, but the full dialogue,
+
+1:09:16.640 --> 1:09:19.920
+ the conversation, just sitting at the bar,
+
+1:09:19.920 --> 1:09:21.760
+ having a cup of beers for an hour,
+
+1:09:21.760 --> 1:09:22.960
+ that kind of conversation.
+
+1:09:22.960 --> 1:09:23.800
+ Have you thought about it?
+
+1:09:23.800 --> 1:09:26.440
+ Yeah, so I think you touched here on the critical point,
+
+1:09:26.440 --> 1:09:28.640
+ which is feasibility, right?
+
+1:09:28.640 --> 1:09:32.880
+ So there's a great sort of essay by Hamming,
+
+1:09:32.880 --> 1:09:37.400
+ which describes sort of grand challenges of physics.
+
+1:09:37.400 --> 1:09:41.080
+ And he argues that, well, okay, for instance,
+
+1:09:41.080 --> 1:09:44.720
+ teleportation or time travel are great grand challenges
+
+1:09:44.720 --> 1:09:46.600
+ of physics, but there's no attacks.
+
+1:09:46.600 --> 1:09:50.360
+ We really don't know or cannot kind of make any progress.
+
+1:09:50.360 --> 1:09:53.360
+ So that's why most physicists and so on,
+
+1:09:53.360 --> 1:09:55.360
+ they don't work on these in their PhDs
+
+1:09:55.360 --> 1:09:57.920
+ and as part of their careers.
+
+1:09:57.920 --> 1:10:01.000
+ So I see the Turing test as, in the full Turing test,
+
+1:10:01.000 --> 1:10:02.760
+ as a bit still too early.
+
+1:10:02.760 --> 1:10:06.760
+ Like I am, I think we're, especially with the current trend
+
+1:10:06.760 --> 1:10:10.080
+ of deep learning language models,
+
+1:10:10.080 --> 1:10:11.640
+ we've seen some amazing examples,
+
+1:10:11.640 --> 1:10:14.160
+ I think GPT2 being the most recent one,
+
+1:10:14.160 --> 1:10:15.840
+ which is very impressive,
+
+1:10:15.840 --> 1:10:20.840
+ but to understand to fully solve passing or fooling a human
+
+1:10:21.080 --> 1:10:23.480
+ to think that there's a human on the other side,
+
+1:10:23.480 --> 1:10:24.960
+ I think we're quite far.
+
+1:10:24.960 --> 1:10:27.360
+ So as a result, I don't see myself
+
+1:10:27.360 --> 1:10:30.520
+ and I probably would not recommend people doing a PhD
+
+1:10:30.520 --> 1:10:31.680
+ on solving the Turing test,
+
+1:10:31.680 --> 1:10:34.120
+ because it just feels it's kind of too early
+
+1:10:34.120 --> 1:10:35.520
+ or too hard of a problem.
+
+1:10:35.520 --> 1:10:37.840
+ Yeah, but that said, you said the exact same thing
+
+1:10:37.840 --> 1:10:40.480
+ about StarCraft about a few years ago.
+
+1:10:40.480 --> 1:10:42.600
+ So to demo, so I pre...
+
+1:10:42.600 --> 1:10:43.920
+ Yes.
+
+1:10:43.920 --> 1:10:45.600
+ You'll probably also be the person
+
+1:10:45.600 --> 1:10:48.240
+ who passes the Turing test in three years.
+
+1:10:48.240 --> 1:10:51.040
+ I mean, I think the, yeah, so...
+
+1:10:51.040 --> 1:10:52.720
+ So we have this on record, this is nice.
+
+1:10:52.720 --> 1:10:53.560
+ It's true.
+
+1:10:53.560 --> 1:10:56.600
+ I mean, it's true that progress sometimes
+
+1:10:56.600 --> 1:10:57.840
+ is a bit unpredictable.
+
+1:10:57.840 --> 1:11:00.840
+ I really wouldn't have not, even six months ago,
+
+1:11:00.840 --> 1:11:02.520
+ I would not have predicted the level
+
+1:11:02.520 --> 1:11:05.480
+ that we see that these agents can deliver.
+
+1:11:05.480 --> 1:11:10.120
+ At grandmaster level, but I have worked on language enough.
+
+1:11:10.120 --> 1:11:13.640
+ And basically my concern is not that something could happen,
+
+1:11:13.640 --> 1:11:16.440
+ a breakthrough could happen that would bring us to solving
+
+1:11:16.440 --> 1:11:18.440
+ or passing the Turing test,
+
+1:11:18.440 --> 1:11:21.680
+ is that I just think the statistical approach to it,
+
+1:11:21.680 --> 1:11:24.160
+ like this is not gonna cut it.
+
+1:11:24.160 --> 1:11:25.960
+ So we need a breakthrough,
+
+1:11:25.960 --> 1:11:28.320
+ which is great for the community.
+
+1:11:28.320 --> 1:11:31.840
+ But given that, I think there's quite a more uncertainty.
+
+1:11:31.840 --> 1:11:34.280
+ Whereas for StarCraft,
+
+1:11:34.280 --> 1:11:38.160
+ I knew what the steps would be to kind of get us there.
+
+1:11:38.160 --> 1:11:41.640
+ I think it was clear that using the imitation learning part
+
+1:11:41.640 --> 1:11:44.360
+ and then using these battle network agents
+
+1:11:44.360 --> 1:11:48.320
+ were gonna be key and it turned out that this was the case
+
+1:11:48.320 --> 1:11:51.640
+ and a little more was needed, but not much more.
+
+1:11:51.640 --> 1:11:54.360
+ For Turing test, I just don't know what the plan
+
+1:11:54.360 --> 1:11:56.000
+ or execution plan would look like.
+
+1:11:56.000 --> 1:11:59.160
+ So that's why I myself working on it
+
+1:11:59.160 --> 1:12:01.520
+ as a grand challenge is hard,
+
+1:12:01.520 --> 1:12:03.920
+ but there are quite a few sub challenges
+
+1:12:03.920 --> 1:12:05.480
+ that are related that you could say,
+
+1:12:05.480 --> 1:12:09.080
+ well, I mean, what if you create a great assistant,
+
+1:12:09.080 --> 1:12:11.400
+ like Google already has like the Google Assistant.
+
+1:12:11.400 --> 1:12:13.120
+ So can we make it better
+
+1:12:13.120 --> 1:12:15.440
+ and can we make it fully neural and so on?
+
+1:12:15.440 --> 1:12:18.200
+ That I start to believe maybe we're reaching a point
+
+1:12:18.200 --> 1:12:20.760
+ where we should attempt these challenges.
+
+1:12:20.760 --> 1:12:22.480
+ I like this conversation so much
+
+1:12:22.480 --> 1:12:24.920
+ because it echoes very much the StarCraft conversation.
+
+1:12:24.920 --> 1:12:26.920
+ It's exactly how you approach StarCraft.
+
+1:12:26.920 --> 1:12:29.680
+ Let's break it down into small pieces and solve those
+
+1:12:29.680 --> 1:12:31.400
+ and you end up solving the whole game.
+
+1:12:31.400 --> 1:12:34.120
+ Great, but that said, you're behind some
+
+1:12:34.120 --> 1:12:37.960
+ of the sort of biggest pieces of work and deep learning
+
+1:12:37.960 --> 1:12:39.360
+ in the last several years.
+
+1:12:40.280 --> 1:12:42.320
+ So you mentioned some limits.
+
+1:12:42.320 --> 1:12:44.960
+ What do you think are the current limits of deep learning
+
+1:12:44.960 --> 1:12:47.080
+ and how do we overcome those limits?
+
+1:12:47.080 --> 1:12:50.160
+ So if I had to actually use a single word
+
+1:12:50.160 --> 1:12:53.200
+ to define the main challenge in deep learning,
+
+1:12:53.200 --> 1:12:55.720
+ it's a challenge that probably has been the challenge
+
+1:12:55.720 --> 1:12:59.760
+ for many years and is that of generalization.
+
+1:12:59.760 --> 1:13:04.520
+ So what that means is that all that we're doing
+
+1:13:04.520 --> 1:13:06.800
+ is fitting functions to data.
+
+1:13:06.800 --> 1:13:11.800
+ And when the data we see is not from the same distribution
+
+1:13:12.160 --> 1:13:14.080
+ or even if there are some times
+
+1:13:14.080 --> 1:13:16.800
+ that it is very close to distribution
+
+1:13:16.800 --> 1:13:20.240
+ but because of the way we train it with limited samples,
+
+1:13:20.240 --> 1:13:23.880
+ we then get to this stage where we just don't see
+
+1:13:23.880 --> 1:13:27.760
+ generalization as much as we can generalize.
+
+1:13:27.760 --> 1:13:31.240
+ And I think adversarial examples are a clear example of this
+
+1:13:31.240 --> 1:13:34.640
+ but if you study machine learning and literature
+
+1:13:34.640 --> 1:13:38.320
+ and the reason why SVMs came very popular
+
+1:13:38.320 --> 1:13:39.720
+ were because they were dealing
+
+1:13:39.720 --> 1:13:42.400
+ and they had some guarantees about generalization
+
+1:13:42.400 --> 1:13:45.600
+ which is unseen data or out of distribution
+
+1:13:45.600 --> 1:13:47.000
+ or even within distribution
+
+1:13:47.000 --> 1:13:49.760
+ where you take an image adding a bit of noise,
+
+1:13:49.760 --> 1:13:51.280
+ these models fail.
+
+1:13:51.280 --> 1:13:56.280
+ So I think really I don't see a lot of progress
+
+1:13:56.280 --> 1:14:00.800
+ on generalization in the strong generalization sense
+
+1:14:00.800 --> 1:14:01.880
+ of the word.
+
+1:14:01.880 --> 1:14:05.280
+ I think our neural networks,
+
+1:14:05.280 --> 1:14:08.000
+ you can always find design examples
+
+1:14:08.000 --> 1:14:11.000
+ that will make their outputs arbitrary
+
+1:14:11.000 --> 1:14:16.000
+ which is not good because we humans would never be fooled
+
+1:14:16.000 --> 1:14:19.920
+ by these kind of images or manipulation of the image.
+
+1:14:19.920 --> 1:14:21.720
+ And if you look at the mathematics,
+
+1:14:21.720 --> 1:14:23.960
+ you kind of understand this is a bunch of matrices
+
+1:14:23.960 --> 1:14:27.320
+ multiplied together, there's probably numerics
+
+1:14:27.320 --> 1:14:30.880
+ and instability that you can just find corner cases.
+
+1:14:30.880 --> 1:14:34.560
+ So I think that's really the underlying topic
+
+1:14:34.560 --> 1:14:38.760
+ many times we see when even at the grand stage
+
+1:14:38.760 --> 1:14:40.840
+ of like during test generalization,
+
+1:14:40.840 --> 1:14:44.560
+ I mean, if you start, I mean, passing the during test,
+
+1:14:44.560 --> 1:14:47.920
+ should it be in English or should it be in any language?
+
+1:14:47.920 --> 1:14:52.320
+ I mean, as a human, if you ask something
+
+1:14:52.320 --> 1:14:54.120
+ in a different language, you actually will go
+
+1:14:54.120 --> 1:14:56.280
+ and do some research and try to translate it
+
+1:14:56.280 --> 1:15:01.080
+ and so on, should the during test include that, right?
+
+1:15:01.080 --> 1:15:02.920
+ And it's really a difficult problem
+
+1:15:02.920 --> 1:15:05.360
+ and very fascinating and very mysterious actually.
+
+1:15:05.360 --> 1:15:06.320
+ Yeah, absolutely.
+
+1:15:06.320 --> 1:15:09.120
+ But do you think it's, if you were to try to solve it,
+
+1:15:10.520 --> 1:15:14.280
+ can you not grow the size of data intelligently
+
+1:15:14.280 --> 1:15:17.400
+ in such a way that the distribution of your training set
+
+1:15:17.400 --> 1:15:20.360
+ does include the entirety of the testing set?
+
+1:15:20.360 --> 1:15:21.800
+ I think is that one path?
+
+1:15:21.800 --> 1:15:23.880
+ The other path is totally a new methodology.
+
+1:15:23.880 --> 1:15:25.000
+ That's not statistical.
+
+1:15:25.000 --> 1:15:27.080
+ So a path that has worked well
+
+1:15:27.080 --> 1:15:29.880
+ and it worked well in StarCraft and in machine translation
+
+1:15:29.880 --> 1:15:32.800
+ and in language is scaling up the data and the model.
+
+1:15:32.800 --> 1:15:37.400
+ And that's kind of been maybe the only single formula
+
+1:15:37.400 --> 1:15:40.440
+ that still delivers today in deep learning, right?
+
+1:15:40.440 --> 1:15:44.080
+ It's that scale, data scale and model scale
+
+1:15:44.080 --> 1:15:47.080
+ really do more and more of the things that we thought,
+
+1:15:47.080 --> 1:15:49.240
+ oh, there's no way it can generalize to these
+
+1:15:49.240 --> 1:15:51.360
+ or there's no way it can generalize to that.
+
+1:15:51.360 --> 1:15:54.840
+ But I don't think fundamentally it will be solved with this.
+
+1:15:54.840 --> 1:15:58.960
+ And for instance, I'm really liking some style
+
+1:15:58.960 --> 1:16:02.120
+ or approach that would not only have neural networks
+
+1:16:02.120 --> 1:16:06.400
+ but it would have programs or some discrete decision making
+
+1:16:06.400 --> 1:16:09.760
+ because there is where I feel there's a bit more,
+
+1:16:09.760 --> 1:16:12.200
+ like, I mean, the example of the best example,
+
+1:16:12.200 --> 1:16:14.680
+ I think for understanding this is,
+
+1:16:14.680 --> 1:16:17.640
+ I also worked a bit on, oh, like we can learn an algorithm
+
+1:16:17.640 --> 1:16:18.840
+ with a neural network, right?
+
+1:16:18.840 --> 1:16:20.160
+ So you give it many examples
+
+1:16:20.160 --> 1:16:22.880
+ and it's gonna sort the input numbers
+
+1:16:22.880 --> 1:16:24.440
+ or something like that.
+
+1:16:24.440 --> 1:16:29.520
+ But really, strong generalization is you give me some numbers
+
+1:16:29.520 --> 1:16:32.360
+ or you ask me to create an algorithm that sorts numbers
+
+1:16:32.360 --> 1:16:34.760
+ and instead of creating a neural net which will be fragile
+
+1:16:34.760 --> 1:16:38.000
+ because it's gonna go out of range at some point,
+
+1:16:38.000 --> 1:16:40.400
+ you're gonna give it numbers that are too large,
+
+1:16:40.400 --> 1:16:42.680
+ too small and whatnot, you just,
+
+1:16:42.680 --> 1:16:46.400
+ if you just create a piece of code that sorts the numbers,
+
+1:16:46.400 --> 1:16:48.760
+ then you can prove that that will generalize
+
+1:16:48.760 --> 1:16:52.040
+ to absolutely all the possible inputs you could give.
+
+1:16:52.040 --> 1:16:53.920
+ So I think that's, the problem comes
+
+1:16:53.920 --> 1:16:56.000
+ with some exciting prospects.
+
+1:16:56.000 --> 1:16:59.560
+ I mean, scale is a bit more boring, but it really works.
+
+1:16:59.560 --> 1:17:02.960
+ And then maybe programs and discrete abstractions
+
+1:17:02.960 --> 1:17:04.920
+ are a bit less developed,
+
+1:17:04.920 --> 1:17:07.520
+ but clearly I think they're quite exciting
+
+1:17:07.520 --> 1:17:10.000
+ in terms of future for the field.
+
+1:17:10.000 --> 1:17:13.560
+ Do you draw any insight wisdom from the 80s
+
+1:17:13.560 --> 1:17:17.000
+ and expert systems and symbolic systems, symbolic computing?
+
+1:17:17.000 --> 1:17:18.920
+ Do you ever go back to those,
+
+1:17:18.920 --> 1:17:20.800
+ the reasoning, that kind of logic?
+
+1:17:20.800 --> 1:17:23.200
+ Do you think that might make a comeback?
+
+1:17:23.200 --> 1:17:25.000
+ You'll have to dust off those books?
+
+1:17:25.000 --> 1:17:30.000
+ Yeah, I actually love actually adding more inductive biases.
+
+1:17:31.360 --> 1:17:34.360
+ To me, the problem really is what are you trying to solve?
+
+1:17:34.360 --> 1:17:36.560
+ If what you're trying to solve is so important
+
+1:17:36.560 --> 1:17:39.240
+ that try to solve it no matter what,
+
+1:17:39.240 --> 1:17:44.240
+ then absolutely use rules, use domain knowledge
+
+1:17:44.280 --> 1:17:46.960
+ and then use a bit of the magic of machine learning
+
+1:17:46.960 --> 1:17:50.160
+ to empower or to make the system as the best system
+
+1:17:50.160 --> 1:17:55.160
+ that will detect cancer or detect weather patterns, right?
+
+1:17:56.080 --> 1:17:59.160
+ Or in terms of StarCraft, it also was a very big challenge.
+
+1:17:59.160 --> 1:18:01.320
+ So I was definitely happy
+
+1:18:01.320 --> 1:18:04.560
+ that if we had to cut a corner here and there,
+
+1:18:04.560 --> 1:18:06.920
+ it could have been interesting to do.
+
+1:18:06.920 --> 1:18:08.400
+ And in fact, in StarCraft,
+
+1:18:08.400 --> 1:18:10.600
+ we start thinking about expert systems
+
+1:18:10.600 --> 1:18:12.840
+ because it's a very, you can define,
+
+1:18:12.840 --> 1:18:15.120
+ I mean, people actually build StarCraft bots
+
+1:18:15.120 --> 1:18:18.720
+ by thinking about those principles like state machines
+
+1:18:18.720 --> 1:18:21.600
+ and rule based and then you could think
+
+1:18:21.600 --> 1:18:24.520
+ of combining a bit of a rule based system,
+
+1:18:24.520 --> 1:18:27.480
+ but that has also neural networks incorporated
+
+1:18:27.480 --> 1:18:29.080
+ to make it generalize a bit better.
+
+1:18:29.080 --> 1:18:31.840
+ So absolutely, I mean, we should definitely go back
+
+1:18:31.840 --> 1:18:35.440
+ to those ideas and anything that makes the problem simpler.
+
+1:18:35.440 --> 1:18:38.040
+ As long as your problem is important, that's okay.
+
+1:18:38.040 --> 1:18:41.080
+ And that's research driving a very important problem.
+
+1:18:41.080 --> 1:18:42.160
+ And on the other hand,
+
+1:18:42.160 --> 1:18:45.240
+ if you wanna really focus on the limits
+
+1:18:45.240 --> 1:18:47.240
+ of reinforcement learning, then of course,
+
+1:18:47.240 --> 1:18:50.800
+ you must try not to look at imitation data
+
+1:18:50.800 --> 1:18:54.200
+ or to look for some rules of the domain
+
+1:18:54.200 --> 1:18:57.040
+ that would help a lot or even feature engineering, right?
+
+1:18:57.040 --> 1:19:00.760
+ So this is a tension that depending on what you do,
+
+1:19:00.760 --> 1:19:03.360
+ I think both ways are definitely fine.
+
+1:19:03.360 --> 1:19:06.080
+ And I would never not do one or the other
+
+1:19:06.080 --> 1:19:08.040
+ if you're, as long as what you're doing
+
+1:19:08.040 --> 1:19:10.080
+ is important and needs to be solved, right?
+
+1:19:10.080 --> 1:19:13.520
+ All right, so there's a bunch of different ideas
+
+1:19:13.520 --> 1:19:16.920
+ that you've developed that I really enjoy.
+
+1:19:16.920 --> 1:19:21.920
+ But one is translating from image captioning,
+
+1:19:22.240 --> 1:19:23.960
+ translating from image to text.
+
+1:19:23.960 --> 1:19:28.720
+ Just another beautiful idea, I think,
+
+1:19:28.720 --> 1:19:33.240
+ that resonates throughout your work, actually.
+
+1:19:33.240 --> 1:19:36.760
+ So the underlying nature of reality being language always.
+
+1:19:36.760 --> 1:19:37.680
+ Yeah, somehow.
+
+1:19:37.680 --> 1:19:42.520
+ So what's the connection between images and text?
+
+1:19:42.520 --> 1:19:45.880
+ Or rather the visual world and the world of language
+
+1:19:45.880 --> 1:19:46.720
+ in your view?
+
+1:19:46.720 --> 1:19:51.480
+ Right, so I think a piece of research that's been central
+
+1:19:51.480 --> 1:19:54.400
+ to, I would say, even extending into StarCraft
+
+1:19:54.400 --> 1:19:57.680
+ is this idea of sequence to sequence learning,
+
+1:19:57.680 --> 1:19:59.840
+ which what we really meant by that
+
+1:19:59.840 --> 1:20:03.520
+ is that you can now really input anything
+
+1:20:03.520 --> 1:20:06.160
+ to a neural network as the input X
+
+1:20:06.160 --> 1:20:09.600
+ and then the neural network will learn a function F
+
+1:20:09.600 --> 1:20:12.840
+ that will take X as an input and produce any output Y.
+
+1:20:12.840 --> 1:20:16.240
+ And these X and Ys don't need to be like static
+
+1:20:16.240 --> 1:20:21.240
+ or like a feature, like a fixed vectors
+
+1:20:21.240 --> 1:20:22.240
+ or anything like that.
+
+1:20:22.240 --> 1:20:23.800
+ It could be really sequences
+
+1:20:23.800 --> 1:20:26.600
+ and now beyond like data structures, right?
+
+1:20:26.600 --> 1:20:31.600
+ So that paradigm was tested in a very interesting way
+
+1:20:31.600 --> 1:20:35.760
+ when we moved from translating French to English
+
+1:20:35.760 --> 1:20:37.960
+ to translating an image to its caption.
+
+1:20:37.960 --> 1:20:40.760
+ But the beauty of it is that really,
+
+1:20:40.760 --> 1:20:42.160
+ and that's actually how it happened.
+
+1:20:42.160 --> 1:20:45.240
+ I ran, I changed a line of code in this thing
+
+1:20:45.240 --> 1:20:47.520
+ that was doing machine translation
+
+1:20:47.520 --> 1:20:51.800
+ and I came the next day and I saw how it was producing
+
+1:20:51.800 --> 1:20:54.200
+ captions that seemed like, oh my God,
+
+1:20:54.200 --> 1:20:56.040
+ this is really, really working.
+
+1:20:56.040 --> 1:20:57.560
+ And the principle is the same, right?
+
+1:20:57.560 --> 1:21:02.560
+ So I think I don't see text, vision, speech, way forms
+
+1:21:02.560 --> 1:21:07.560
+ as something different, as long as you basically learn
+
+1:21:08.120 --> 1:21:13.120
+ a function that will vectorize these into,
+
+1:21:13.480 --> 1:21:17.480
+ and then after we vectorize it, we can then use transformers,
+
+1:21:17.480 --> 1:21:21.160
+ LSTMs, whatever the flavor of the month of the model is.
+
+1:21:21.160 --> 1:21:24.280
+ And then as long as we have enough supervised data,
+
+1:21:24.280 --> 1:21:28.280
+ really this formula will work and will keep working,
+
+1:21:28.280 --> 1:21:30.280
+ I believe to some extent.
+
+1:21:30.280 --> 1:21:33.360
+ Model of these generalization issues that I mentioned before.
+
+1:21:33.360 --> 1:21:35.400
+ So, but the task there is to vectorize
+
+1:21:35.400 --> 1:21:37.880
+ sort of form a representation that's meaningful,
+
+1:21:37.880 --> 1:21:41.400
+ and your intuition now, having worked with all this media,
+
+1:21:41.400 --> 1:21:45.240
+ is that once you are able to form that representation,
+
+1:21:45.240 --> 1:21:47.960
+ you could basically take anything, any sequence.
+
+1:21:48.960 --> 1:21:51.240
+ Is there, going back to StarCraft,
+
+1:21:51.240 --> 1:21:52.800
+ is there limits on the length?
+
+1:21:54.080 --> 1:21:57.960
+ So we didn't really touch on the long term aspect.
+
+1:21:57.960 --> 1:22:01.640
+ How did you overcome the whole really long term aspect
+
+1:22:01.640 --> 1:22:02.480
+ of things here?
+
+1:22:02.480 --> 1:22:03.920
+ Is there some tricks or is it?
+
+1:22:03.920 --> 1:22:07.000
+ So the main trick, so StarCraft,
+
+1:22:07.000 --> 1:22:09.360
+ if you look at absolutely every frame,
+
+1:22:09.360 --> 1:22:11.120
+ you might think it's quite a long game.
+
+1:22:11.120 --> 1:22:14.440
+ So we would have to multiply 22 times,
+
+1:22:15.600 --> 1:22:18.200
+ 60 seconds per minute times maybe
+
+1:22:18.200 --> 1:22:20.360
+ at least 10 minutes per game on average.
+
+1:22:20.360 --> 1:22:24.160
+ So there are quite a few frames,
+
+1:22:24.160 --> 1:22:26.600
+ but the trick really was to,
+
+1:22:26.600 --> 1:22:30.760
+ only observe, in fact, which might be seen as a limitation,
+
+1:22:30.760 --> 1:22:33.600
+ but it is also a computational advantage.
+
+1:22:33.600 --> 1:22:36.040
+ Only observe when you act.
+
+1:22:36.040 --> 1:22:38.440
+ And then what the neural network decides
+
+1:22:38.440 --> 1:22:42.200
+ is what is the gap gonna be until the next action?
+
+1:22:43.200 --> 1:22:46.520
+ And if you look at most StarCraft games
+
+1:22:46.520 --> 1:22:50.200
+ that we have in the data set that Blizzard provided,
+
+1:22:50.200 --> 1:22:54.720
+ it turns out that most games are actually only,
+
+1:22:54.720 --> 1:22:56.720
+ I mean, it is still a long sequence,
+
+1:22:56.720 --> 1:23:00.720
+ but it's maybe like 1,000 to 1,500 actions,
+
+1:23:00.720 --> 1:23:04.720
+ which if you start looking at LSTMs,
+
+1:23:04.720 --> 1:23:07.720
+ large LSTMs, transformers,
+
+1:23:07.720 --> 1:23:10.720
+ it's not that difficult,
+
+1:23:10.720 --> 1:23:13.720
+ especially if you have supervised learning.
+
+1:23:13.720 --> 1:23:15.720
+ If you had to do it with reinforcement learning,
+
+1:23:15.720 --> 1:23:16.720
+ the credit assignment problem,
+
+1:23:16.720 --> 1:23:18.720
+ what is it that in this game that made you win?
+
+1:23:18.720 --> 1:23:20.720
+ That would be really difficult.
+
+1:23:20.720 --> 1:23:23.720
+ But thankfully, because of imitation learning,
+
+1:23:23.720 --> 1:23:26.720
+ we didn't kind of have to deal with this directly.
+
+1:23:26.720 --> 1:23:28.720
+ Although if we had to, we tried it,
+
+1:23:28.720 --> 1:23:30.720
+ and what happened is you just take all your workers
+
+1:23:30.720 --> 1:23:32.720
+ and attack with them.
+
+1:23:32.720 --> 1:23:35.720
+ And that sort of is kind of obvious in retrospect,
+
+1:23:35.720 --> 1:23:37.720
+ because you start trying random actions.
+
+1:23:37.720 --> 1:23:39.720
+ One of the actions will be a worker
+
+1:23:39.720 --> 1:23:40.720
+ that goes to the enemy base,
+
+1:23:40.720 --> 1:23:42.720
+ and because it's self play,
+
+1:23:42.720 --> 1:23:44.720
+ it's not gonna know how to defend,
+
+1:23:44.720 --> 1:23:46.720
+ because it basically doesn't know almost anything.
+
+1:23:46.720 --> 1:23:48.720
+ And eventually what you develop is this,
+
+1:23:48.720 --> 1:23:51.720
+ take all workers and attack,
+
+1:23:51.720 --> 1:23:54.720
+ because the credit assignment issue in our rally
+
+1:23:54.720 --> 1:23:55.720
+ is really, really hard.
+
+1:23:55.720 --> 1:23:57.720
+ I do believe we could do better,
+
+1:23:57.720 --> 1:24:00.720
+ and that's maybe a research challenge for the future.
+
+1:24:00.720 --> 1:24:03.720
+ But yeah, even in StarCraft,
+
+1:24:03.720 --> 1:24:05.720
+ the sequences are maybe 1,000,
+
+1:24:05.720 --> 1:24:08.720
+ which I believe is within the realm
+
+1:24:08.720 --> 1:24:10.720
+ of what transformers can do.
+
+1:24:10.720 --> 1:24:13.720
+ Yeah, I guess the difference between StarCraft and Go
+
+1:24:13.720 --> 1:24:15.720
+ is in Go and chess,
+
+1:24:15.720 --> 1:24:17.720
+ stuff starts happening right away.
+
+1:24:17.720 --> 1:24:18.720
+ Right.
+
+1:24:18.720 --> 1:24:21.720
+ Yeah, it's pretty easy to self play,
+
+1:24:21.720 --> 1:24:23.720
+ not easy, but to self play is possible
+
+1:24:23.720 --> 1:24:25.720
+ to develop reasonable strategies quickly
+
+1:24:25.720 --> 1:24:27.720
+ as opposed to StarCraft.
+
+1:24:27.720 --> 1:24:29.720
+ In Go, there's only 400 actions,
+
+1:24:29.720 --> 1:24:32.720
+ but one action is what people would call
+
+1:24:32.720 --> 1:24:34.720
+ the God action that would be,
+
+1:24:34.720 --> 1:24:37.720
+ if you had expanded the whole search tree,
+
+1:24:37.720 --> 1:24:39.720
+ that's the best action if you did minimax
+
+1:24:39.720 --> 1:24:41.720
+ or whatever algorithm you would do
+
+1:24:41.720 --> 1:24:43.720
+ if you had the computational capacity.
+
+1:24:43.720 --> 1:24:45.720
+ But in StarCraft,
+
+1:24:45.720 --> 1:24:48.720
+ 400 is minuscule.
+
+1:24:48.720 --> 1:24:51.720
+ In 400, you couldn't even click
+
+1:24:51.720 --> 1:24:53.720
+ on the pixels around a unit, right?
+
+1:24:53.720 --> 1:24:55.720
+ So I think the problem there
+
+1:24:55.720 --> 1:24:58.720
+ is in terms of action space size
+
+1:24:58.720 --> 1:25:00.720
+ is way harder,
+
+1:25:00.720 --> 1:25:03.720
+ and that search is impossible.
+
+1:25:03.720 --> 1:25:05.720
+ So there's quite a few challenges indeed
+
+1:25:05.720 --> 1:25:08.720
+ that make this kind of a step up
+
+1:25:08.720 --> 1:25:10.720
+ in terms of machine learning.
+
+1:25:10.720 --> 1:25:12.720
+ For humans, maybe playing StarCraft
+
+1:25:12.720 --> 1:25:14.720
+ seems more intuitive
+
+1:25:14.720 --> 1:25:16.720
+ because it looks real,
+
+1:25:16.720 --> 1:25:18.720
+ the graphics and everything moves smoothly,
+
+1:25:18.720 --> 1:25:20.720
+ whereas I don't know how to...
+
+1:25:20.720 --> 1:25:22.720
+ Go is a game that I wouldn't really need to study.
+
+1:25:22.720 --> 1:25:24.720
+ It feels quite complicated,
+
+1:25:24.720 --> 1:25:26.720
+ but for machines, maybe it's the reverse, yes.
+
+1:25:26.720 --> 1:25:28.720
+ Which shows you the gap, actually,
+
+1:25:28.720 --> 1:25:30.720
+ between deep learning and however the heck
+
+1:25:30.720 --> 1:25:32.720
+ our brains work.
+
+1:25:32.720 --> 1:25:35.720
+ So you developed a lot of really interesting ideas.
+
+1:25:35.720 --> 1:25:37.720
+ It's interesting to just ask,
+
+1:25:37.720 --> 1:25:40.720
+ what's your process of developing new ideas?
+
+1:25:40.720 --> 1:25:42.720
+ Do you like brainstorming with others?
+
+1:25:42.720 --> 1:25:44.720
+ Do you like thinking alone?
+
+1:25:44.720 --> 1:25:46.720
+ Do you like...
+
+1:25:46.720 --> 1:25:48.720
+ Like what was it?
+
+1:25:48.720 --> 1:25:50.720
+ Ian Goodfellow said he came up with Gans
+
+1:25:50.720 --> 1:25:52.720
+ after a few beers.
+
+1:25:52.720 --> 1:25:54.720
+ He thinks beers are essential
+
+1:25:54.720 --> 1:25:56.720
+ for coming up with new ideas.
+
+1:25:56.720 --> 1:25:58.720
+ We had beers to decide to play another game
+
+1:25:58.720 --> 1:26:00.720
+ of StarCraft after a week,
+
+1:26:00.720 --> 1:26:02.720
+ so it's really similar to that story.
+
+1:26:02.720 --> 1:26:04.720
+ Actually, I explained this
+
+1:26:04.720 --> 1:26:06.720
+ in a deep mind retreat,
+
+1:26:06.720 --> 1:26:08.720
+ and I said this is the same as the Gans story.
+
+1:26:08.720 --> 1:26:10.720
+ I mean, we were on a bar and we decided,
+
+1:26:10.720 --> 1:26:12.720
+ we were on a week and that's what happened.
+
+1:26:12.720 --> 1:26:14.720
+ I feel like we're giving the wrong message
+
+1:26:14.720 --> 1:26:16.720
+ to young undergrads.
+
+1:26:16.720 --> 1:26:18.720
+ But in general, do you like brainstorming?
+
+1:26:18.720 --> 1:26:20.720
+ Do you like thinking alone, working stuff out?
+
+1:26:20.720 --> 1:26:22.720
+ So I think throughout the years
+
+1:26:22.720 --> 1:26:24.720
+ also things changed, right?
+
+1:26:24.720 --> 1:26:26.720
+ So initially, I was
+
+1:26:26.720 --> 1:26:28.720
+ very fortunate to be
+
+1:26:28.720 --> 1:26:30.720
+ with great minds like
+
+1:26:30.720 --> 1:26:32.720
+ Jeff Hinton,
+
+1:26:32.720 --> 1:26:34.720
+ Jeff Dean, Ilya Tsutskiber.
+
+1:26:34.720 --> 1:26:36.720
+ I was really fortunate to join Brain
+
+1:26:36.720 --> 1:26:38.720
+ at a very good time.
+
+1:26:38.720 --> 1:26:40.720
+ At that point, ideas,
+
+1:26:40.720 --> 1:26:42.720
+ I was just kind of brainstorming with my colleagues
+
+1:26:42.720 --> 1:26:44.720
+ and learned a lot,
+
+1:26:44.720 --> 1:26:46.720
+ and keep learning is actually
+
+1:26:46.720 --> 1:26:48.720
+ something you should never stop doing, right?
+
+1:26:48.720 --> 1:26:50.720
+ So learning implies
+
+1:26:50.720 --> 1:26:52.720
+ reading papers and also discussing ideas
+
+1:26:52.720 --> 1:26:54.720
+ with others. It's very hard
+
+1:26:54.720 --> 1:26:56.720
+ at some point to not communicate
+
+1:26:56.720 --> 1:26:58.720
+ that being reading a paper from someone
+
+1:26:58.720 --> 1:27:00.720
+ or actually discussing, right?
+
+1:27:00.720 --> 1:27:02.720
+ So definitely
+
+1:27:02.720 --> 1:27:04.720
+ that communication aspect
+
+1:27:04.720 --> 1:27:06.720
+ needs to be there, whether it's written
+
+1:27:06.720 --> 1:27:08.720
+ or oral.
+
+1:27:08.720 --> 1:27:10.720
+ Nowadays,
+
+1:27:10.720 --> 1:27:12.720
+ I'm also trying to be a bit more strategic
+
+1:27:12.720 --> 1:27:14.720
+ about what research to do.
+
+1:27:14.720 --> 1:27:16.720
+ So I was describing
+
+1:27:16.720 --> 1:27:18.720
+ a little bit this sort of tension between
+
+1:27:18.720 --> 1:27:20.720
+ research for the sake of research,
+
+1:27:20.720 --> 1:27:22.720
+ and then you have, on the other hand,
+
+1:27:22.720 --> 1:27:24.720
+ applications that can drive the research, right?
+
+1:27:24.720 --> 1:27:26.720
+ And honestly,
+
+1:27:26.720 --> 1:27:28.720
+ the formula that has worked best for me is
+
+1:27:28.720 --> 1:27:30.720
+ just find a hard problem
+
+1:27:30.720 --> 1:27:32.720
+ and then try to
+
+1:27:32.720 --> 1:27:34.720
+ see how research fits into it,
+
+1:27:34.720 --> 1:27:36.720
+ how it doesn't fit into it,
+
+1:27:36.720 --> 1:27:38.720
+ and then you must innovate.
+
+1:27:38.720 --> 1:27:40.720
+ So I think machine translation
+
+1:27:40.720 --> 1:27:42.720
+ drove sequence to sequence.
+
+1:27:42.720 --> 1:27:44.720
+ Then maybe
+
+1:27:44.720 --> 1:27:46.720
+ learning algorithms
+
+1:27:46.720 --> 1:27:48.720
+ that had to, like combinatorial algorithms
+
+1:27:48.720 --> 1:27:50.720
+ led to pointer networks.
+
+1:27:50.720 --> 1:27:52.720
+ Starcraft led to really scaling up
+
+1:27:52.720 --> 1:27:54.720
+ imitation learning and the Alpha Star League.
+
+1:27:54.720 --> 1:27:56.720
+ So that's been a formula
+
+1:27:56.720 --> 1:27:58.720
+ that I personally like,
+
+1:27:58.720 --> 1:28:00.720
+ but the other one is also valid,
+
+1:28:00.720 --> 1:28:02.720
+ and I see it succeed a lot of the times
+
+1:28:02.720 --> 1:28:04.720
+ where you just want to investigate
+
+1:28:04.720 --> 1:28:06.720
+ model based RL
+
+1:28:06.720 --> 1:28:08.720
+ as a kind of a research topic,
+
+1:28:08.720 --> 1:28:10.720
+ and then you must then start to think,
+
+1:28:10.720 --> 1:28:12.720
+ well, how are the tests?
+
+1:28:12.720 --> 1:28:14.720
+ How are you going to test these ideas?
+
+1:28:14.720 --> 1:28:16.720
+ You need kind of a minimal
+
+1:28:16.720 --> 1:28:18.720
+ environment to try things.
+
+1:28:18.720 --> 1:28:20.720
+ You need to read a lot of papers and so on,
+
+1:28:20.720 --> 1:28:22.720
+ and that's also very fun to do,
+
+1:28:22.720 --> 1:28:24.720
+ and something I've also done quite a few times,
+
+1:28:24.720 --> 1:28:26.720
+ both at Brain, at DeepMind,
+
+1:28:26.720 --> 1:28:28.720
+ and obviously as a PhD.
+
+1:28:28.720 --> 1:28:30.720
+ So I think
+
+1:28:30.720 --> 1:28:32.720
+ the ideas and discussions,
+
+1:28:32.720 --> 1:28:34.720
+ I think it's important also
+
+1:28:34.720 --> 1:28:36.720
+ because you start sort of
+
+1:28:36.720 --> 1:28:38.720
+ guiding not only
+
+1:28:38.720 --> 1:28:40.720
+ your own goals, but
+
+1:28:40.720 --> 1:28:42.720
+ other people's goals
+
+1:28:42.720 --> 1:28:44.720
+ to the next breakthrough, so
+
+1:28:44.720 --> 1:28:46.720
+ you must really kind of understand
+
+1:28:46.720 --> 1:28:48.720
+ this feasibility also
+
+1:28:48.720 --> 1:28:50.720
+ as we were discussing before, right?
+
+1:28:50.720 --> 1:28:52.720
+ Whether this domain is ready
+
+1:28:52.720 --> 1:28:54.720
+ to be tackled or not, and you don't want
+
+1:28:54.720 --> 1:28:56.720
+ to be too early, you obviously don't want
+
+1:28:56.720 --> 1:28:58.720
+ to be too late, so it's really interesting
+
+1:28:58.720 --> 1:29:00.720
+ this strategic component of research,
+
+1:29:00.720 --> 1:29:02.720
+ which I think as a grad student
+
+1:29:02.720 --> 1:29:04.720
+ I just had no idea,
+
+1:29:04.720 --> 1:29:06.720
+ I just read papers and discussed
+
+1:29:06.720 --> 1:29:08.720
+ ideas, and I think this has been maybe
+
+1:29:08.720 --> 1:29:10.720
+ the major change, and I recommend
+
+1:29:10.720 --> 1:29:12.720
+ people kind of
+
+1:29:12.720 --> 1:29:14.720
+ fit forward to success, how it looks like
+
+1:29:14.720 --> 1:29:16.720
+ and try to backtrack, other than just
+
+1:29:16.720 --> 1:29:18.720
+ kind of looking out, this looks cool,
+
+1:29:18.720 --> 1:29:20.720
+ this looks cool, and then you do a bit of
+
+1:29:20.720 --> 1:29:22.720
+ random work, which sometimes you stumble upon
+
+1:29:22.720 --> 1:29:24.720
+ some interesting things, but
+
+1:29:24.720 --> 1:29:26.720
+ in general it's also good to plan a bit.
+
+1:29:26.720 --> 1:29:28.720
+ Yeah, I like it.
+
+1:29:28.720 --> 1:29:30.720
+ Especially like your approach of taking
+
+1:29:30.720 --> 1:29:32.720
+ on really hard problems, stepping right in
+
+1:29:32.720 --> 1:29:34.720
+ and then being super skeptical about
+
+1:29:34.720 --> 1:29:36.720
+ being able to solve the problem.
+
+1:29:36.720 --> 1:29:38.720
+ I mean, there's a
+
+1:29:38.720 --> 1:29:40.720
+ balance of both, right? There's a silly
+
+1:29:40.720 --> 1:29:42.720
+ optimism
+
+1:29:42.720 --> 1:29:44.720
+ and a critical
+
+1:29:44.720 --> 1:29:46.720
+ sort of skepticism
+
+1:29:46.720 --> 1:29:48.720
+ that's good to balance, which
+
+1:29:48.720 --> 1:29:50.720
+ is why it's good to have a team of people
+
+1:29:50.720 --> 1:29:52.720
+ that balance that.
+
+1:29:52.720 --> 1:29:54.720
+ You don't do that on your own, you have both
+
+1:29:54.720 --> 1:29:56.720
+ mentors that have seen
+
+1:29:56.720 --> 1:29:58.720
+ or you obviously want to chat and
+
+1:29:58.720 --> 1:30:00.720
+ discuss whether it's the right time.
+
+1:30:00.720 --> 1:30:02.720
+ I mean, Damis
+
+1:30:02.720 --> 1:30:04.720
+ came in 2014 and he said
+
+1:30:04.720 --> 1:30:06.720
+ maybe in a bit we'll do StarCraft and
+
+1:30:06.720 --> 1:30:08.720
+ maybe he knew
+
+1:30:08.720 --> 1:30:10.720
+ and I'm just following his lead, which
+
+1:30:10.720 --> 1:30:12.720
+ is great because he's brilliant, right?
+
+1:30:12.720 --> 1:30:14.720
+ So, these things are
+
+1:30:14.720 --> 1:30:16.720
+ obviously quite
+
+1:30:16.720 --> 1:30:18.720
+ important that you want to
+
+1:30:18.720 --> 1:30:20.720
+ be surrounded by people
+
+1:30:20.720 --> 1:30:22.720
+ who are diverse, they
+
+1:30:22.720 --> 1:30:24.720
+ have their knowledge. There's also
+
+1:30:24.720 --> 1:30:26.720
+ important to...
+
+1:30:26.720 --> 1:30:28.720
+ I've learned a lot from people
+
+1:30:28.720 --> 1:30:30.720
+ who actually
+
+1:30:30.720 --> 1:30:32.720
+ have an idea that I might not think it's good
+
+1:30:32.720 --> 1:30:34.720
+ but if I give them the space to try it
+
+1:30:34.720 --> 1:30:36.720
+ I've been proven wrong many, many times
+
+1:30:36.720 --> 1:30:38.720
+ as well. So, that's great.
+
+1:30:38.720 --> 1:30:40.720
+ I think it's...
+
+1:30:40.720 --> 1:30:42.720
+ Your colleagues are more important than yourself
+
+1:30:42.720 --> 1:30:44.720
+ I think so.
+
+1:30:44.720 --> 1:30:46.720
+ Now, let's real quick
+
+1:30:46.720 --> 1:30:48.720
+ talk about another impossible problem.
+
+1:30:48.720 --> 1:30:50.720
+ AGI.
+
+1:30:50.720 --> 1:30:52.720
+ What do you think it takes to build a system
+
+1:30:52.720 --> 1:30:54.720
+ that's human level intelligence?
+
+1:30:54.720 --> 1:30:56.720
+ We talked a little bit about the touring test, StarCraft
+
+1:30:56.720 --> 1:30:58.720
+ all these have echoes of general intelligence
+
+1:30:58.720 --> 1:31:00.720
+ but if you think about
+
+1:31:00.720 --> 1:31:02.720
+ just something that you would sit back
+
+1:31:02.720 --> 1:31:04.720
+ and say, wow, this is
+
+1:31:04.720 --> 1:31:06.720
+ really something that resembles
+
+1:31:06.720 --> 1:31:08.720
+ human level intelligence, what do you think it takes
+
+1:31:08.720 --> 1:31:10.720
+ to build that?
+
+1:31:10.720 --> 1:31:12.720
+ So, I find that
+
+1:31:12.720 --> 1:31:14.720
+ AGI oftentimes is maybe not
+
+1:31:14.720 --> 1:31:16.720
+ very well defined
+
+1:31:16.720 --> 1:31:18.720
+ so what I'm trying to
+
+1:31:18.720 --> 1:31:20.720
+ then come up with for myself is
+
+1:31:20.720 --> 1:31:22.720
+ what would be a result
+
+1:31:22.720 --> 1:31:24.720
+ look like that
+
+1:31:24.720 --> 1:31:26.720
+ you would start to believe that
+
+1:31:26.720 --> 1:31:28.720
+ you would have agents or neural nets
+
+1:31:28.720 --> 1:31:30.720
+ that no longer sort of overfit
+
+1:31:30.720 --> 1:31:32.720
+ to a single task, right?
+
+1:31:32.720 --> 1:31:34.720
+ But actually
+
+1:31:34.720 --> 1:31:36.720
+ kind of learn
+
+1:31:36.720 --> 1:31:38.720
+ the skill of learning, so to speak
+
+1:31:38.720 --> 1:31:40.720
+ and that actually is a field that I
+
+1:31:40.720 --> 1:31:42.720
+ am fascinated by which is
+
+1:31:42.720 --> 1:31:44.720
+ the learning to learn or meta learning
+
+1:31:44.720 --> 1:31:46.720
+ which is about no longer
+
+1:31:46.720 --> 1:31:48.720
+ learning about a single domain
+
+1:31:48.720 --> 1:31:50.720
+ so you can think about the learning algorithm
+
+1:31:50.720 --> 1:31:52.720
+ itself is general, right?
+
+1:31:52.720 --> 1:31:54.720
+ So the same formula we applied for
+
+1:31:54.720 --> 1:31:56.720
+ Alpha Star or StarCraft
+
+1:31:56.720 --> 1:31:58.720
+ we can now apply to kind of almost any
+
+1:31:58.720 --> 1:32:00.720
+ video game or you could apply to
+
+1:32:00.720 --> 1:32:02.720
+ many other problems and domains
+
+1:32:02.720 --> 1:32:04.720
+ but the algorithm
+
+1:32:04.720 --> 1:32:06.720
+ is what's kind of generalizing
+
+1:32:06.720 --> 1:32:08.720
+ but the neural network, the weights
+
+1:32:08.720 --> 1:32:10.720
+ those weights are useless even
+
+1:32:10.720 --> 1:32:12.720
+ to play another race, right? I train
+
+1:32:12.720 --> 1:32:14.720
+ a network to play very well at PROTOS vs PROTOS
+
+1:32:14.720 --> 1:32:16.720
+ I need to throw away those weights
+
+1:32:16.720 --> 1:32:18.720
+ if I want to play
+
+1:32:18.720 --> 1:32:20.720
+ now Terran vs Terran
+
+1:32:20.720 --> 1:32:22.720
+ I would need to retrain
+
+1:32:22.720 --> 1:32:24.720
+ a network from scratch with the same algorithm
+
+1:32:24.720 --> 1:32:26.720
+ that's beautiful but the network
+
+1:32:26.720 --> 1:32:28.720
+ itself will not be useful
+
+1:32:28.720 --> 1:32:30.720
+ so I think when I, if I see
+
+1:32:30.720 --> 1:32:32.720
+ an approach that
+
+1:32:32.720 --> 1:32:34.720
+ can absorb or start
+
+1:32:34.720 --> 1:32:36.720
+ solving new problems
+
+1:32:36.720 --> 1:32:38.720
+ without the need to kind of restart
+
+1:32:38.720 --> 1:32:40.720
+ the process I think that
+
+1:32:40.720 --> 1:32:42.720
+ to me would be a nice way to define
+
+1:32:42.720 --> 1:32:44.720
+ some form of AGI
+
+1:32:44.720 --> 1:32:46.720
+ again, I don't know
+
+1:32:46.720 --> 1:32:48.720
+ the grandiose like age, I mean
+
+1:32:48.720 --> 1:32:50.720
+ during tests we solve before AGI
+
+1:32:50.720 --> 1:32:52.720
+ I mean, I don't know, I think concretely
+
+1:32:52.720 --> 1:32:54.720
+ I would like to see clearly
+
+1:32:54.720 --> 1:32:56.720
+ that meta learning happen
+
+1:32:56.720 --> 1:32:58.720
+ meaning there is
+
+1:32:58.720 --> 1:33:00.720
+ an architecture or a network
+
+1:33:00.720 --> 1:33:02.720
+ that as it sees new problem
+
+1:33:02.720 --> 1:33:04.720
+ or new data it solves it
+
+1:33:04.720 --> 1:33:06.720
+ and to make it
+
+1:33:06.720 --> 1:33:08.720
+ kind of a benchmark it should
+
+1:33:08.720 --> 1:33:10.720
+ solve it at the same speed that we do solve
+
+1:33:10.720 --> 1:33:12.720
+ new problems when I define
+
+1:33:12.720 --> 1:33:14.720
+ a new object and you have to recognize it
+
+1:33:14.720 --> 1:33:16.720
+ when you start playing a new game
+
+1:33:16.720 --> 1:33:18.720
+ you played all the Atari games but now you play a new Atari game
+
+1:33:18.720 --> 1:33:20.720
+ well, you're going to be
+
+1:33:20.720 --> 1:33:22.720
+ pretty quickly pretty good at the game
+
+1:33:22.720 --> 1:33:24.720
+ so that's perhaps
+
+1:33:24.720 --> 1:33:26.720
+ what's the domain and what's the exact benchmark
+
+1:33:26.720 --> 1:33:28.720
+ it's a bit difficult, I think as a community
+
+1:33:28.720 --> 1:33:30.720
+ we might need to do some work to define it
+
+1:33:32.720 --> 1:33:34.720
+ but I think this first step
+
+1:33:34.720 --> 1:33:36.720
+ I could see it happen relatively soon
+
+1:33:36.720 --> 1:33:38.720
+ but then the whole
+
+1:33:38.720 --> 1:33:40.720
+ what AGI means and so on
+
+1:33:40.720 --> 1:33:42.720
+ I am a bit more confused about
+
+1:33:42.720 --> 1:33:44.720
+ what I think people mean different things
+
+1:33:44.720 --> 1:33:46.720
+ there's an emotional psychological level
+
+1:33:48.720 --> 1:33:50.720
+ that
+
+1:33:50.720 --> 1:33:52.720
+ like even the Turing test, passing the Turing test
+
+1:33:52.720 --> 1:33:54.720
+ is something that we just pass judgment
+
+1:33:54.720 --> 1:33:56.720
+ on as human beings what it means to be
+
+1:33:56.720 --> 1:33:58.720
+ you know, as a
+
+1:33:58.720 --> 1:34:00.720
+ as a dog
+
+1:34:00.720 --> 1:34:02.720
+ an AGI system
+
+1:34:02.720 --> 1:34:04.720
+ like what level, what does it mean
+
+1:34:04.720 --> 1:34:06.720
+ what does it mean
+
+1:34:06.720 --> 1:34:08.720
+ but I like the generalization
+
+1:34:08.720 --> 1:34:10.720
+ and maybe as a community we converge towards
+
+1:34:10.720 --> 1:34:12.720
+ a group of domains
+
+1:34:12.720 --> 1:34:14.720
+ that are sufficiently far away
+
+1:34:14.720 --> 1:34:16.720
+ that would be really damn impressive
+
+1:34:16.720 --> 1:34:18.720
+ if we're able to generalize
+
+1:34:18.720 --> 1:34:20.720
+ so perhaps not as close as Protoss and Zerg
+
+1:34:20.720 --> 1:34:22.720
+ but like Wikipedia
+
+1:34:22.720 --> 1:34:24.720
+ that would be a good step
+
+1:34:24.720 --> 1:34:26.720
+ and then a really good step
+
+1:34:26.720 --> 1:34:28.720
+ but then from Starcraft to Wikipedia
+
+1:34:28.720 --> 1:34:30.720
+ and back
+
+1:34:30.720 --> 1:34:32.720
+ that kind of thing
+
+1:34:32.720 --> 1:34:34.720
+ and that feels also quite hard and far
+
+1:34:34.720 --> 1:34:36.720
+ I think this
+
+1:34:36.720 --> 1:34:38.720
+ as long as you put the benchmark out
+
+1:34:38.720 --> 1:34:40.720
+ as we discovered for instance with ImageNet
+
+1:34:40.720 --> 1:34:42.720
+ then tremendous progress can be had
+
+1:34:42.720 --> 1:34:44.720
+ so I think maybe there's a lack of
+
+1:34:44.720 --> 1:34:46.720
+ benchmark
+
+1:34:46.720 --> 1:34:48.720
+ but I'm sure we'll find one and the community
+
+1:34:48.720 --> 1:34:50.720
+ will then work towards that
+
+1:34:52.720 --> 1:34:54.720
+ and then beyond what AGI might mean
+
+1:34:54.720 --> 1:34:56.720
+ or would imply
+
+1:34:56.720 --> 1:34:58.720
+ I really am hopeful to see
+
+1:34:58.720 --> 1:35:00.720
+ basically machine learning
+
+1:35:00.720 --> 1:35:02.720
+ or AI just scaling up
+
+1:35:02.720 --> 1:35:04.720
+ and helping
+
+1:35:04.720 --> 1:35:06.720
+ people that might not have the resources
+
+1:35:06.720 --> 1:35:08.720
+ to hire an assistant
+
+1:35:08.720 --> 1:35:10.720
+ or that
+
+1:35:10.720 --> 1:35:12.720
+ they might not even know what the weather is like
+
+1:35:12.720 --> 1:35:14.720
+ but so I think there's
+
+1:35:14.720 --> 1:35:16.720
+ in terms of the impact
+
+1:35:16.720 --> 1:35:18.720
+ the positive impact of AI
+
+1:35:18.720 --> 1:35:20.720
+ I think that's maybe what we should also
+
+1:35:20.720 --> 1:35:22.720
+ not lose focus
+
+1:35:22.720 --> 1:35:24.720
+ the research community building AGI
+
+1:35:24.720 --> 1:35:26.720
+ that's a real nice goal
+
+1:35:26.720 --> 1:35:28.720
+ and I think the way that DeepMind puts it
+
+1:35:28.720 --> 1:35:30.720
+ is and then use it to solve everything else
+
+1:35:30.720 --> 1:35:32.720
+ so I think we should paralyze
+
+1:35:32.720 --> 1:35:34.720
+ yeah we shouldn't forget
+
+1:35:34.720 --> 1:35:36.720
+ of all the positive things that are actually
+
+1:35:36.720 --> 1:35:38.720
+ coming out of AI already and are going
+
+1:35:38.720 --> 1:35:40.720
+ to be coming out
+
+1:35:40.720 --> 1:35:42.720
+ right
+
+1:35:42.720 --> 1:35:44.720
+ and then let me ask
+
+1:35:44.720 --> 1:35:46.720
+ relative to popular perception
+
+1:35:46.720 --> 1:35:48.720
+ do you have any worry about the existential
+
+1:35:48.720 --> 1:35:50.720
+ threat of artificial intelligence
+
+1:35:50.720 --> 1:35:52.720
+ in the near or far future
+
+1:35:52.720 --> 1:35:54.720
+ that some people have
+
+1:35:54.720 --> 1:35:56.720
+ I think in the near future
+
+1:35:56.720 --> 1:35:58.720
+ I'm skeptical so I hope
+
+1:35:58.720 --> 1:36:00.720
+ I'm not wrong but
+
+1:36:00.720 --> 1:36:02.720
+ I'm not concerned
+
+1:36:02.720 --> 1:36:04.720
+ but I appreciate efforts
+
+1:36:04.720 --> 1:36:06.720
+ ongoing efforts
+
+1:36:06.720 --> 1:36:08.720
+ and even like a whole research field on
+
+1:36:08.720 --> 1:36:10.720
+ AI safety emerging and in conferences
+
+1:36:10.720 --> 1:36:12.720
+ and so on I think that's great
+
+1:36:12.720 --> 1:36:14.720
+ in the long term
+
+1:36:14.720 --> 1:36:16.720
+ I really hope we
+
+1:36:16.720 --> 1:36:18.720
+ just can simply
+
+1:36:18.720 --> 1:36:20.720
+ have the benefits outweigh the potential dangers
+
+1:36:20.720 --> 1:36:22.720
+ I am hopeful for that
+
+1:36:22.720 --> 1:36:24.720
+ but also we must
+
+1:36:24.720 --> 1:36:26.720
+ remain vigilant to kind of monitor
+
+1:36:26.720 --> 1:36:28.720
+ and assess whether the tradeoffs
+
+1:36:28.720 --> 1:36:30.720
+ are there and we have
+
+1:36:30.720 --> 1:36:32.720
+ enough
+
+1:36:32.720 --> 1:36:34.720
+ also lead time to prevent
+
+1:36:34.720 --> 1:36:36.720
+ or to redirect our efforts
+
+1:36:36.720 --> 1:36:38.720
+ if need be
+
+1:36:38.720 --> 1:36:40.720
+ but I'm quite optimistic
+
+1:36:40.720 --> 1:36:42.720
+ about the technology
+
+1:36:42.720 --> 1:36:44.720
+ and definitely more fearful
+
+1:36:44.720 --> 1:36:46.720
+ of other threats in terms of
+
+1:36:46.720 --> 1:36:48.720
+ planetary level
+
+1:36:48.720 --> 1:36:50.720
+ at this point but obviously
+
+1:36:50.720 --> 1:36:52.720
+ that's the one I kind of have more
+
+1:36:52.720 --> 1:36:54.720
+ power on so clearly
+
+1:36:54.720 --> 1:36:56.720
+ start thinking more and more about this
+
+1:36:56.720 --> 1:36:58.720
+ and it's kind of
+
+1:36:58.720 --> 1:37:00.720
+ it's grown in me actually to
+
+1:37:00.720 --> 1:37:02.720
+ start reading more about AI safety
+
+1:37:02.720 --> 1:37:04.720
+ which is a field that so far I have not
+
+1:37:04.720 --> 1:37:06.720
+ really contributed to but maybe
+
+1:37:06.720 --> 1:37:08.720
+ there's something to be done there as well
+
+1:37:08.720 --> 1:37:10.720
+ I think it's really important
+
+1:37:10.720 --> 1:37:12.720
+ I talk about this with a few folks
+
+1:37:12.720 --> 1:37:14.720
+ but it's important to ask you
+
+1:37:14.720 --> 1:37:16.720
+ and shove it in your head because you're at the
+
+1:37:16.720 --> 1:37:18.720
+ leading edge of actually
+
+1:37:18.720 --> 1:37:20.720
+ what people are excited about in AI
+
+1:37:20.720 --> 1:37:22.720
+ I mean the work with AlphaStar
+
+1:37:22.720 --> 1:37:24.720
+ at the very cutting edge of the kind
+
+1:37:24.720 --> 1:37:26.720
+ of thing that people are afraid of
+
+1:37:26.720 --> 1:37:28.720
+ and so you speaking
+
+1:37:28.720 --> 1:37:30.720
+ to that fact and
+
+1:37:30.720 --> 1:37:32.720
+ that we're actually quite far away
+
+1:37:32.720 --> 1:37:34.720
+ to the kind of thing that people might be
+
+1:37:34.720 --> 1:37:36.720
+ afraid of but it's still
+
+1:37:36.720 --> 1:37:38.720
+ worthwhile to think about
+
+1:37:38.720 --> 1:37:40.720
+ and it's also good that you're
+
+1:37:40.720 --> 1:37:42.720
+ that you're not as worried
+
+1:37:42.720 --> 1:37:44.720
+ and you're also open to
+
+1:37:44.720 --> 1:37:46.720
+ I mean there's two aspects
+
+1:37:46.720 --> 1:37:48.720
+ I mean me not being worried but obviously
+
+1:37:48.720 --> 1:37:50.720
+ we should prepare
+
+1:37:50.720 --> 1:37:52.720
+ for it
+
+1:37:52.720 --> 1:37:54.720
+ for things that could
+
+1:37:54.720 --> 1:37:56.720
+ go wrong, misuse of the technologies
+
+1:37:56.720 --> 1:37:58.720
+ as with any technologies
+
+1:37:58.720 --> 1:38:00.720
+ so I think
+
+1:38:00.720 --> 1:38:02.720
+ there's always tradeoffs
+
+1:38:02.720 --> 1:38:04.720
+ and as a society we've kind of
+
+1:38:04.720 --> 1:38:06.720
+ solved this to some extent
+
+1:38:06.720 --> 1:38:08.720
+ in the past so I'm hoping that
+
+1:38:08.720 --> 1:38:10.720
+ by having the researchers
+
+1:38:10.720 --> 1:38:12.720
+ and the whole community
+
+1:38:12.720 --> 1:38:14.720
+ brainstorm and come up with
+
+1:38:14.720 --> 1:38:16.720
+ interesting solutions to the new things
+
+1:38:16.720 --> 1:38:18.720
+ that will happen in the future
+
+1:38:18.720 --> 1:38:20.720
+ that we can still also push the research
+
+1:38:20.720 --> 1:38:22.720
+ to the avenue that
+
+1:38:22.720 --> 1:38:24.720
+ I think is kind of the greatest avenue
+
+1:38:24.720 --> 1:38:26.720
+ which is to
+
+1:38:26.720 --> 1:38:28.720
+ understand intelligence, right? How are we doing
+
+1:38:28.720 --> 1:38:30.720
+ what we're doing and
+
+1:38:30.720 --> 1:38:32.720
+ obviously from a scientific standpoint
+
+1:38:32.720 --> 1:38:34.720
+ that is kind of the drive
+
+1:38:34.720 --> 1:38:36.720
+ my personal drive of
+
+1:38:36.720 --> 1:38:38.720
+ all the time that I spend doing
+
+1:38:38.720 --> 1:38:40.720
+ what I'm doing really.
+
+1:38:40.720 --> 1:38:42.720
+ Where do you see the deep learning as a field heading
+
+1:38:42.720 --> 1:38:44.720
+ where do you think the next big
+
+1:38:44.720 --> 1:38:46.720
+ breakthrough might be?
+
+1:38:46.720 --> 1:38:48.720
+ So I think deep learning
+
+1:38:48.720 --> 1:38:50.720
+ I discussed a little of this before
+
+1:38:50.720 --> 1:38:52.720
+ deep learning has to be
+
+1:38:52.720 --> 1:38:54.720
+ combined with some form of discretization
+
+1:38:54.720 --> 1:38:56.720
+ program synthesis
+
+1:38:56.720 --> 1:38:58.720
+ I think that's kind of as a research
+
+1:38:58.720 --> 1:39:00.720
+ in itself is an interesting topic
+
+1:39:00.720 --> 1:39:02.720
+ to expand and start doing more research
+
+1:39:02.720 --> 1:39:04.720
+ and then
+
+1:39:04.720 --> 1:39:06.720
+ as kind of what will deep learning
+
+1:39:06.720 --> 1:39:08.720
+ enable to do in the future
+
+1:39:08.720 --> 1:39:10.720
+ I don't think that's going to be what's going to happen
+
+1:39:10.720 --> 1:39:12.720
+ this year but also this
+
+1:39:12.720 --> 1:39:14.720
+ idea of
+
+1:39:14.720 --> 1:39:16.720
+ not to throw away all the weights
+
+1:39:16.720 --> 1:39:18.720
+ this idea of learning to learn
+
+1:39:18.720 --> 1:39:20.720
+ and really having
+
+1:39:20.720 --> 1:39:22.720
+ these agents
+
+1:39:22.720 --> 1:39:24.720
+ not having to restart their weights
+
+1:39:24.720 --> 1:39:26.720
+ and you can have an agent
+
+1:39:26.720 --> 1:39:28.720
+ that is kind of solving
+
+1:39:28.720 --> 1:39:30.720
+ or classifying images on ImageNet
+
+1:39:30.720 --> 1:39:32.720
+ but also generating speech
+
+1:39:32.720 --> 1:39:34.720
+ if you ask it to generate some speech
+
+1:39:34.720 --> 1:39:36.720
+ and it should really be kind of
+
+1:39:36.720 --> 1:39:38.720
+ almost the same
+
+1:39:38.720 --> 1:39:40.720
+ network but
+
+1:39:40.720 --> 1:39:42.720
+ might not be a neural network it might be a neural network
+
+1:39:42.720 --> 1:39:44.720
+ with an optimization algorithm
+
+1:39:44.720 --> 1:39:46.720
+ attached to it but I think this idea
+
+1:39:46.720 --> 1:39:48.720
+ of generalization to new task
+
+1:39:48.720 --> 1:39:50.720
+ is something that we first
+
+1:39:50.720 --> 1:39:52.720
+ must define good benchmarks but then
+
+1:39:52.720 --> 1:39:54.720
+ I think that's going to be exciting
+
+1:39:54.720 --> 1:39:56.720
+ and I'm not sure how close we are
+
+1:39:56.720 --> 1:39:58.720
+ but I think there's
+
+1:39:58.720 --> 1:40:00.720
+ if you have a very limited domain
+
+1:40:00.720 --> 1:40:02.720
+ I think we can start doing some progress
+
+1:40:02.720 --> 1:40:04.720
+ and
+
+1:40:04.720 --> 1:40:06.720
+ much like how we did a lot of programs
+
+1:40:06.720 --> 1:40:08.720
+ in computer vision we should start thinking
+
+1:40:08.720 --> 1:40:10.720
+ I really like a talk that
+
+1:40:10.720 --> 1:40:12.720
+ Leon Boutou gave at ICML
+
+1:40:12.720 --> 1:40:14.720
+ a few years ago which is
+
+1:40:14.720 --> 1:40:16.720
+ this train test paradigm should be broken
+
+1:40:16.720 --> 1:40:18.720
+ we should stop
+
+1:40:18.720 --> 1:40:20.720
+ thinking about a training test
+
+1:40:20.720 --> 1:40:22.720
+ sorry a training set and a test set
+
+1:40:22.720 --> 1:40:24.720
+ and these are closed
+
+1:40:24.720 --> 1:40:26.720
+ things that are untouchable
+
+1:40:26.720 --> 1:40:28.720
+ I think we should go beyond these and
+
+1:40:28.720 --> 1:40:30.720
+ in meta learning we call these the meta training set
+
+1:40:30.720 --> 1:40:32.720
+ and the meta test set which is
+
+1:40:32.720 --> 1:40:34.720
+ really thinking about
+
+1:40:34.720 --> 1:40:36.720
+ if I know about ImageNet
+
+1:40:36.720 --> 1:40:38.720
+ why would that network
+
+1:40:38.720 --> 1:40:40.720
+ not work on MNIST which is a much
+
+1:40:40.720 --> 1:40:42.720
+ simpler problem but right now it really doesn't
+
+1:40:42.720 --> 1:40:44.720
+ it you know
+
+1:40:44.720 --> 1:40:46.720
+ but it just feels wrong right so I think
+
+1:40:46.720 --> 1:40:48.720
+ that's kind of the
+
+1:40:48.720 --> 1:40:50.720
+ there's the on the application
+
+1:40:50.720 --> 1:40:52.720
+ or the benchmark sites we probably
+
+1:40:52.720 --> 1:40:54.720
+ will see quite a few
+
+1:40:54.720 --> 1:40:56.720
+ more interest and progress and hopefully
+
+1:40:56.720 --> 1:40:58.720
+ people defining new
+
+1:40:58.720 --> 1:41:00.720
+ and exciting challenges really
+
+1:41:00.720 --> 1:41:02.720
+ do you have any hope or
+
+1:41:02.720 --> 1:41:04.720
+ interest in knowledge graphs
+
+1:41:04.720 --> 1:41:06.720
+ within this context so it's kind of
+
+1:41:06.720 --> 1:41:08.720
+ constructing graphs
+
+1:41:08.720 --> 1:41:10.720
+ going back to graphs
+
+1:41:10.720 --> 1:41:12.720
+ well neural networks are graphs but I mean
+
+1:41:12.720 --> 1:41:14.720
+ a different kind of knowledge graph
+
+1:41:14.720 --> 1:41:16.720
+ sort of like semantic graphs
+
+1:41:16.720 --> 1:41:18.720
+ where there's concepts
+
+1:41:18.720 --> 1:41:20.720
+ so I think
+
+1:41:20.720 --> 1:41:22.720
+ the idea of graphs
+
+1:41:22.720 --> 1:41:24.720
+ is so I've been quite interested
+
+1:41:24.720 --> 1:41:26.720
+ in sequences first and then more
+
+1:41:26.720 --> 1:41:28.720
+ interesting or different data structures
+
+1:41:28.720 --> 1:41:30.720
+ like graphs and
+
+1:41:30.720 --> 1:41:32.720
+ I've studied graph neural networks
+
+1:41:32.720 --> 1:41:34.720
+ in the last three years or so
+
+1:41:34.720 --> 1:41:36.720
+ I
+
+1:41:36.720 --> 1:41:38.720
+ found these models just very interesting from
+
+1:41:38.720 --> 1:41:40.720
+ like deep learning
+
+1:41:40.720 --> 1:41:42.720
+ standpoint but then
+
+1:41:42.720 --> 1:41:44.720
+ how what do we want
+
+1:41:44.720 --> 1:41:46.720
+ why do we want these models and why would we
+
+1:41:46.720 --> 1:41:48.720
+ use them what's the application
+
+1:41:48.720 --> 1:41:50.720
+ what's kind of the killer application of graphs
+
+1:41:50.720 --> 1:41:52.720
+ right and
+
+1:41:52.720 --> 1:41:54.720
+ perhaps
+
+1:41:54.720 --> 1:41:56.720
+ if we
+
+1:41:56.720 --> 1:41:58.720
+ could extract a knowledge graph
+
+1:41:58.720 --> 1:42:00.720
+ from Wikipedia automatically
+
+1:42:00.720 --> 1:42:02.720
+ that would be interesting because
+
+1:42:02.720 --> 1:42:04.720
+ then these graphs have
+
+1:42:04.720 --> 1:42:06.720
+ this very interesting structure
+
+1:42:06.720 --> 1:42:08.720
+ that also is a bit more compatible with
+
+1:42:08.720 --> 1:42:10.720
+ this idea of programs and
+
+1:42:10.720 --> 1:42:12.720
+ deep learning kind of working together
+
+1:42:12.720 --> 1:42:14.720
+ jumping neighborhoods and so on
+
+1:42:14.720 --> 1:42:16.720
+ you could imagine defining some primitives
+
+1:42:16.720 --> 1:42:18.720
+ to go around graphs right so
+
+1:42:18.720 --> 1:42:20.720
+ I think
+
+1:42:20.720 --> 1:42:22.720
+ I really like the idea of a knowledge
+
+1:42:22.720 --> 1:42:24.720
+ graph and in fact
+
+1:42:24.720 --> 1:42:26.720
+ when we
+
+1:42:26.720 --> 1:42:28.720
+ we started or you know
+
+1:42:28.720 --> 1:42:30.720
+ as part of the research we did for StarCraft
+
+1:42:30.720 --> 1:42:32.720
+ I thought wouldn't it be cool to give
+
+1:42:32.720 --> 1:42:34.720
+ the graph of
+
+1:42:34.720 --> 1:42:36.720
+ you know all the
+
+1:42:36.720 --> 1:42:38.720
+ all these buildings that depend on each other
+
+1:42:38.720 --> 1:42:40.720
+ and units that have
+
+1:42:40.720 --> 1:42:42.720
+ prerequisites of being built by that and so
+
+1:42:42.720 --> 1:42:44.720
+ this is information
+
+1:42:44.720 --> 1:42:46.720
+ that the network can learn and extract
+
+1:42:46.720 --> 1:42:48.720
+ but it would have been great to see
+
+1:42:48.720 --> 1:42:50.720
+ or to think of
+
+1:42:50.720 --> 1:42:52.720
+ really StarCraft as a giant graph
+
+1:42:52.720 --> 1:42:54.720
+ that even also as the game evolves
+
+1:42:54.720 --> 1:42:56.720
+ you kind of start taking branches
+
+1:42:56.720 --> 1:42:58.720
+ and so on and we tried
+
+1:42:58.720 --> 1:43:00.720
+ to do a little bit of research on this
+
+1:43:00.720 --> 1:43:02.720
+ nothing too relevant
+
+1:43:02.720 --> 1:43:04.720
+ but I really like the idea
+
+1:43:04.720 --> 1:43:06.720
+ and it has elements that are
+
+1:43:06.720 --> 1:43:08.720
+ which something you also worked with in terms of visualizing
+
+1:43:08.720 --> 1:43:10.720
+ your networks as elements of
+
+1:43:10.720 --> 1:43:12.720
+ having human interpretable
+
+1:43:12.720 --> 1:43:14.720
+ being able to generate knowledge
+
+1:43:14.720 --> 1:43:16.720
+ representations that are human interpretable
+
+1:43:16.720 --> 1:43:18.720
+ that maybe human experts can then tweak
+
+1:43:18.720 --> 1:43:20.720
+ or at least understand
+
+1:43:20.720 --> 1:43:22.720
+ so there's a lot of interesting
+
+1:43:22.720 --> 1:43:24.720
+ aspect there and for me personally I'm just a huge fan of
+
+1:43:24.720 --> 1:43:26.720
+ Wikipedia and it's a shame
+
+1:43:26.720 --> 1:43:28.720
+ that our neural networks
+
+1:43:28.720 --> 1:43:30.720
+ aren't taking advantage of all the structured
+
+1:43:30.720 --> 1:43:32.720
+ knowledge that's on the web.
+
+1:43:32.720 --> 1:43:34.720
+ What's next for you?
+
+1:43:34.720 --> 1:43:36.720
+ What's next for DeepMind?
+
+1:43:36.720 --> 1:43:38.720
+ What are you excited about?
+
+1:43:38.720 --> 1:43:40.720
+ For AlphaStar?
+
+1:43:40.720 --> 1:43:42.720
+ Yeah so I think
+
+1:43:42.720 --> 1:43:44.720
+ the obvious next steps
+
+1:43:44.720 --> 1:43:46.720
+ would be to
+
+1:43:46.720 --> 1:43:48.720
+ apply AlphaStar to
+
+1:43:48.720 --> 1:43:50.720
+ other races I mean that sort of
+
+1:43:50.720 --> 1:43:52.720
+ shows that the algorithm
+
+1:43:52.720 --> 1:43:54.720
+ works because
+
+1:43:54.720 --> 1:43:56.720
+ by mistake something in the architecture
+
+1:43:56.720 --> 1:43:58.720
+ that happens to work for proto's
+
+1:43:58.720 --> 1:44:00.720
+ but not for other races right so
+
+1:44:00.720 --> 1:44:02.720
+ as verification I think
+
+1:44:02.720 --> 1:44:04.720
+ that's an obvious next step that we are working on
+
+1:44:04.720 --> 1:44:06.720
+ and
+
+1:44:06.720 --> 1:44:08.720
+ then I would like to see
+
+1:44:08.720 --> 1:44:10.720
+ so agents and players
+
+1:44:10.720 --> 1:44:12.720
+ can specialize on
+
+1:44:12.720 --> 1:44:14.720
+ different skill sets that allow them to be
+
+1:44:14.720 --> 1:44:16.720
+ very good. I think we've seen
+
+1:44:16.720 --> 1:44:18.720
+ AlphaStar understanding
+
+1:44:18.720 --> 1:44:20.720
+ very well when to take battles and when
+
+1:44:20.720 --> 1:44:22.720
+ to not do that
+
+1:44:22.720 --> 1:44:24.720
+ also very good at micromanagement
+
+1:44:24.720 --> 1:44:26.720
+ and moving the units around and so on
+
+1:44:26.720 --> 1:44:28.720
+ and also very good at producing
+
+1:44:28.720 --> 1:44:30.720
+ nonstop and trading of economy
+
+1:44:30.720 --> 1:44:32.720
+ with building units
+
+1:44:32.720 --> 1:44:34.720
+ but I have not
+
+1:44:34.720 --> 1:44:36.720
+ perhaps seen as much as I would like
+
+1:44:36.720 --> 1:44:38.720
+ this idea of the poker idea
+
+1:44:38.720 --> 1:44:40.720
+ that you mentioned right.
+
+1:44:40.720 --> 1:44:42.720
+ I'm not sure StarCraft or AlphaStar
+
+1:44:42.720 --> 1:44:44.720
+ rather has developed a very
+
+1:44:44.720 --> 1:44:46.720
+ deep understanding of
+
+1:44:46.720 --> 1:44:48.720
+ what the opponent is doing
+
+1:44:48.720 --> 1:44:50.720
+ and reacting to that and sort of
+
+1:44:50.720 --> 1:44:52.720
+ trying to
+
+1:44:52.720 --> 1:44:54.720
+ trick the player to do something else or that
+
+1:44:54.720 --> 1:44:56.720
+ you know so this kind of reasoning
+
+1:44:56.720 --> 1:44:58.720
+ I would like to see more so I think
+
+1:44:58.720 --> 1:45:00.720
+ purely from a research standpoint
+
+1:45:00.720 --> 1:45:02.720
+ there's perhaps also quite a few
+
+1:45:02.720 --> 1:45:04.720
+ things to be done there
+
+1:45:04.720 --> 1:45:06.720
+ in the domain of StarCraft. Yeah in the
+
+1:45:06.720 --> 1:45:08.720
+ domain of games I've seen some
+
+1:45:08.720 --> 1:45:10.720
+ interesting work in sort of
+
+1:45:10.720 --> 1:45:12.720
+ in even auctions manipulating
+
+1:45:12.720 --> 1:45:14.720
+ other players sort of forming a belief
+
+1:45:14.720 --> 1:45:16.720
+ state and just messing with
+
+1:45:16.720 --> 1:45:18.720
+ people. Yeah it's called theory of mind
+
+1:45:18.720 --> 1:45:20.720
+ so it's a fast
+
+1:45:20.720 --> 1:45:22.720
+ theory of mind on StarCraft
+
+1:45:22.720 --> 1:45:24.720
+ is kind of they're really
+
+1:45:24.720 --> 1:45:26.720
+ made for each other so
+
+1:45:26.720 --> 1:45:28.720
+ that would be very exciting to see
+
+1:45:28.720 --> 1:45:30.720
+ those techniques applied to StarCraft
+
+1:45:30.720 --> 1:45:32.720
+ or perhaps StarCraft driving
+
+1:45:32.720 --> 1:45:34.720
+ new techniques as I said
+
+1:45:34.720 --> 1:45:36.720
+ this is always the tension between the two.
+
+1:45:36.720 --> 1:45:38.720
+ Wow Oriel thank you so much for talking
+
+1:45:38.720 --> 1:45:48.720
+ awesome it was great to be here thanks
+