Marcus Hutter

Last updated

Marcus Hutter
Marcus Hutter.jpg
NationalityGerman
Alma mater Technical University Munich and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Known for Universal artificial intelligence
Artificial General Intelligence
Awards IJCAI 2023
Alignment 2018
AGI 2016
UAI 2016
IJCAI-JAIR 2014
Kurzweil AGI 2009
Lindley 2006
Best Paper Prizes
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions DeepMind, Google, IDSIA, ANU, BrainLAB
Thesis Instantons in QCD  (1996)
Doctoral advisor Harald Fritzsch
Other academic advisors Wilfried Brauer
Doctoral students Shane Legg, Jan Leike and Tor Lattimore
Website www.hutter1.net

Marcus Hutter (born 14 April 1967 in Munich) is a computer scientist, professor and artificial intelligence researcher. As a senior researcher at DeepMind, he studies the mathematical foundations of artificial general intelligence. [1] [2]

Contents

Hutter studied physics and computer science at the Technical University of Munich. In 2000 he joined Jürgen Schmidhuber's group at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Manno, Switzerland. [3] [4] He developed a mathematical formalism of artificial general intelligence named AIXI. He has served as a professor at the College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. [5]

Research

Starting in 2000, Hutter developed and published a mathematical theory of artificial general intelligence, AIXI, based on idealised intelligent agents and reward-motivated reinforcement learning. [6] [7] [4] His first book Universal Artificial Intelligence: Sequential Decisions Based on Algorithmic Probability was published in 2005 by Springer. [8] Also in 2005, Hutter published with his doctoral student Shane Legg an intelligence test for artificial intelligence devices. [9] In 2009, Hutter developed and published the theory of feature reinforcement learning. [10] In 2014, Lattimore and Hutter published an asymptotically optimal extension of the AIXI agent. [11]

An accessible podcast with Lex Fridman about his theory of Universal AI appeared in 2021 [12] and a more technical follow-up with Tim Nguyen in 2024 in the Cartesian Cafe. [13] His new (2024) book [14] also gives a more accessible introduction to Universal AI and progress in the 20 years since his first book, including a chapter on ASI safety, which featured as a keynote at the inaugural workshop on AI safety in Sydney. [15]

Hutter Prize

In 2006, Hutter announced the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge, with a total of €50,000 in prize money. [16] [17] In 2020, Hutter raised the prize money for the Hutter Prize to €500,000. [4]

See also

Published works

Related Research Articles

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an interdisciplinary area of machine learning and optimal control concerned with how an intelligent agent should take actions in a dynamic environment in order to maximize a reward signal. Reinforcement learning is one of the three basic machine learning paradigms, alongside supervised learning and unsupervised learning.

Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Advances in the field of deep learning have allowed neural networks to surpass many previous approaches in performance.

Minimum Description Length (MDL) is a model selection principle where the shortest description of the data is the best model. MDL methods learn through a data compression perspective and are sometimes described as mathematical applications of Occam's razor. The MDL principle can be extended to other forms of inductive inference and learning, for example to estimation and sequential prediction, without explicitly identifying a single model of the data.

In computer science, computational learning theory is a subfield of artificial intelligence devoted to studying the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms.

Ray Solomonoff was an American mathematician who invented algorithmic probability, his General Theory of Inductive Inference, and was a founder of algorithmic information theory. He was an originator of the branch of artificial intelligence based on machine learning, prediction and probability. He circulated the first report on non-semantic machine learning in 1956.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Algorithmic probability</span>

In algorithmic information theory, algorithmic probability, also known as Solomonoff probability, is a mathematical method of assigning a prior probability to a given observation. It was invented by Ray Solomonoff in the 1960s. It is used in inductive inference theory and analyses of algorithms. In his general theory of inductive inference, Solomonoff uses the method together with Bayes' rule to obtain probabilities of prediction for an algorithm's future outputs.

Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference proves that, under its common sense assumptions (axioms), the best possible scientific model is the shortest algorithm that generates the empirical data under consideration. In addition to the choice of data, other assumptions are that, to avoid the post-hoc fallacy, the programming language must be chosen prior to the data and that the environment being observed is generated by an unknown algorithm. This is also called a theory of induction. Due to its basis in the dynamical character of Algorithmic Information Theory, it encompasses statistical as well as dynamical information criteria for model selection. It was introduced by Ray Solomonoff, based on probability theory and theoretical computer science. In essence, Solomonoff's induction derives the posterior probability of any computable theory, given a sequence of observed data. This posterior probability is derived from Bayes' rule and some universal prior, that is, a prior that assigns a positive probability to any computable theory.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This contrasts with narrow AI, which is limited to specific tasks. Artificial superintelligence (ASI), on the other hand, refers to AGI that greatly exceeds human cognitive capabilities. AGI is considered one of the definitions of strong AI.

A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to a property of problem-solving systems whether or not these high-level intellectual competencies are embodied in agents that act in the world. A superintelligence may or may not be created by an intelligence explosion and associated with a technological singularity.

A cognitive architecture refers to both a theory about the structure of the human mind and to a computational instantiation of such a theory used in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational cognitive science. These formalized models can be used to further refine comprehensive theories of cognition and serve as the frameworks for useful artificial intelligence programs. Successful cognitive architectures include ACT-R and SOAR. The research on cognitive architectures as software instantiation of cognitive theories was initiated by Allen Newell in 1990.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multi-armed bandit</span> Resource problem in machine learning

In probability theory and machine learning, the multi-armed bandit problem is a problem in which a decision maker iteratively selects one of multiple fixed choices when the properties of each choice are only partially known at the time of allocation, and may become better understood as time passes. A fundamental aspect of bandit problems is that choosing an arm does not affect the properties of the arm or other arms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dimitri Bertsekas</span> Greek electrical engineer

Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also a Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, Tempe.

AIXI is a theoretical mathematical formalism for artificial general intelligence. It combines Solomonoff induction with sequential decision theory. AIXI was first proposed by Marcus Hutter in 2000 and several results regarding AIXI are proved in Hutter's 2005 book Universal Artificial Intelligence.

Bayesian optimization is a sequential design strategy for global optimization of black-box functions, that does not assume any functional forms. It is usually employed to optimize expensive-to-evaluate functions. With the rise of artificial intelligence innovation in the 21st century, Bayesian optimizations have found prominent use in machine learning problems, for optimizing hyperparameter values.

Instrumental convergence is the hypothetical tendency for most sufficiently intelligent, goal-directed beings to pursue similar sub-goals, even if their ultimate goals are quite different. More precisely, agents may pursue instrumental goals—goals which are made in pursuit of some particular end, but are not the end goals themselves—without ceasing, provided that their ultimate (intrinsic) goals may never be fully satisfied.

Shane Legg is a machine learning researcher and entrepreneur. With Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, he cofounded DeepMind Technologies, and works there as the chief AGI scientist. He is also known for his academic work on artificial general intelligence, including his thesis supervised by Marcus Hutter.

This glossary of artificial intelligence is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to the study of artificial intelligence (AI), its subdisciplines, and related fields. Related glossaries include Glossary of computer science, Glossary of robotics, and Glossary of machine vision.

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), AI alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person's or group's intended goals, preferences, and ethical principles. An AI system is considered aligned if it advances the intended objectives. A misaligned AI system pursues unintended objectives.

The following outline is provided as an overview of, and topical guide to, machine learning:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multi-agent reinforcement learning</span> Sub-field of reinforcement learning

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a sub-field of reinforcement learning. It focuses on studying the behavior of multiple learning agents that coexist in a shared environment. Each agent is motivated by its own rewards, and does actions to advance its own interests; in some environments these interests are opposed to the interests of other agents, resulting in complex group dynamics.

References

  1. "HomePage of Marcus Hutter".
  2. "TIME100 AI 2023: Shane Legg". Time. 7 September 2023. Retrieved 25 August 2024.
  3. "Marcus Hutter". aiandsociety.org. 15 May 2017. Retrieved 25 August 2024.
  4. 1 2 3 Sagar, Ram (7 April 2020). "Compress Data And Win Hutter Prize Worth Half A Million Euros". Analytics India Magazine. Retrieved 7 March 2024.
  5. "Professor Marcus Hutter". Australian National University . Retrieved 25 August 2024.
  6. Marcus Hutter (2000). A Theory of Universal Artificial Intelligence based on Algorithmic Complexity. arXiv: cs.AI/0004001 . Bibcode:2000cs........4001H.
  7. Hutter, Marcus (28 November 2013). "To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation". The Conversation. Retrieved 25 August 2024.
  8. Marcus Hutter (2005). Universal Artificial Intelligence: Sequential Decisions Based on Algorithmic Probability. Berlin; Heidelberg; New York: Springer. ISBN   9783540221395.
  9. Graham-Rowe, Duncan (12 August 2005). "IQ test for AI devices gets experts thinking". New Scientist. Retrieved 25 August 2024.
  10. Marcus Hutter (2009). "Feature Reinforcement Learning: Part I. Unstructured MDPs" (PDF). Journal of Artificial General Intelligence. 1 (1): 3. arXiv: 0906.1713 . Bibcode:2009JAGI....1....3H. doi:10.2478/v10229-011-0002-8. ISSN   1946-0163.
  11. Tor Lattimore and Marcus Hutter (2014). "Bayesian Reinforcement Learning with Exploration" (PDF). Algorithmic Learning Theory. Proc. 25th International Conf. on Algorithmic Learning Theory ({ALT'14}). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 8776. pp. 170–184. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-11662-4_13. hdl: 1885/14709 . ISBN   978-3-319-11661-7.
  12. Fridman, Lex (26 February 2020). "Marcus Hutter: Universal Artificial Intelligence, AIXI, and AGI" via YouTube.
  13. Nguyen, Tim (10 May 2024). "Universal Artificial Intelligence and Solomonoff Induction" via YouTube.
  14. Marcus Hutter (2024). An Introduction to Universal Artificial Intelligence. Taylor & Francis. ISBN   9781032607023.
  15. Hutter, Marcus (9 December 2024). "ASI Safety via AIXI" via YouTube.
  16. Chiang, Ted (9 February 2023). "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web". The New Yorker. ISSN   0028-792X . Retrieved 25 August 2024.
  17. Marcus Hutter. "50'000€ Prize for Compressing Human Knowledge". hutter1.net. Retrieved 29 November 2016.