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John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

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Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#111

Post by McTossOut »

bronz wrote: post #26

i say this with respect and humility, but i am very surprised at the naivete with which John addressed the subject of AGI. he is so casual about it -- not only the idea of working on it but also the idea of it existing at all. he seems oblivious to the gravity of that discovery. it is not just "very valuable," it will be earth shattering and probably wipe out humanity. and its his side-project. and his son will help…

I'll level with you, if all I had heard was soundbites, I'd be skeptical myself; it's a bit like Neil DeGrasse Tyson telling you he's going to unify gravity or something. This guy can go and adlib a 2 hour talk about implementing subsurface scattering, and build it from the ground up in a commercially viable way.

This dismal, dimwitted "advanced" filter and sort industry has recently started training all their employees in and vomiting all over every consumer with is nothing, worthless, and at best lunacy.

All it takes is patience, know-how, and insight. For that, Carmack fits the bill.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#112

Post by chasd00 »

ausjke wrote: post #46

he is 49 this year, considered as one of the most genius programmer on earth. There are professors still doing real work at 90+ year old(yes, the UT professor goodenough for Nobel prize), John has a long way ahead, best luck!

i've heard he was pretty good, i didn't realize he was this widely respected and admired. I remember him for that fast inverse square root hack but that's about it.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#115

Post by curiousgal »

binarymax wrote: post #98

Does anyone have a non-facebook version of this story?

Starting this week, I’m moving to a "Consulting CTO” position with Oculus.

I will still have a voice in the development work, but it will only be consuming a modest slice of my time.

As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace, and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague “line of sight” to the solutions, even if they were unconventional or unproven. I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.

I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal’s Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it.

For the time being at least, I am going to be going about it “Victorian Gentleman Scientist” style, pursuing my inquiries from home, and drafting my son into the work.

Runner up for next project was cost effective nuclear fission reactors, which wouldn’t have been as suitable for that style of work.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#116

Post by Yajirobe »

mochomocha wrote: post #91
carlosdp wrote: post #68

This doesn't surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) As recent as his last Oculus Connect keynote, he exto…

> He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). You must be joking, right? I'm as much of a Carmack fan as anyone here, but overstating the skills of one personal hero does no good to anyone.

Huh? One week is more than enough to go through Siraj's videos.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#117

Post by ralusek »

I think any monumental leap forward is going to come from changing the way networks are motivated. Simple back propagation attempting to reduce the error from a fixed objective have proven to be useful, but doesn't actually resemble how more generalizable intelligence works.

I think getting the feedback loop integrated with something that behaves more like dopamine/serotonin/pain feedback is going to be the likely direction we'd need to go. Basically, the network needs to be able to form new objectives and recognize when it's meeting or failing at those objectives, rather than just optimizing its network to be less and less bad at predicting specific outputs.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#119

Post by The_rationalist »

asadlionpk wrote: post #14
The_rationalist wrote: post #11

I hope he'll go the hybrid symbolic and neural network way (causal and statistical), instead of just statistical. AGI needs a type system... I hope I'll achieve AGI before him but it's nice to know there's some real competition! (because, reader, there are almost 0 researchers seriously trying to achieve AGI in a not totally bullshit way. Only opencog and Cyc comes to mind).

Do you have a goto resource to watch/read for someone new and kinda interested in the field?

The opencog website is a great resource. Going directly to the specification is a bit too intimidating but here it is: https://wiki.opencog.org/w/CogPrime_Overview

You might just begin by learning the list of NLP tasks and how good are the state of the art at it. The cognitive architecture that needs to be created to achieve AGI will one way or another be a composition of said tasks, which are the primitives.

You can discover such a taxonomy here: https://github.com/sebastianruder/NLP-progress/blob/master/R...

Also you might be interested by learning logic as a big task is to translate natural language into queryable, logical forms.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#120

Post by VikingCoder »

drcode wrote: post #81
Impossible wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack built rockets and id bought $100Ks of NeXT machines to make Doom so I wouldn't put it past him to have incredible amounts of hardware... even at home. Considering his position at Facebook and that he is industry famous he probably has access to data and cloud resources that a researcher outside of OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, etc. normally wouldn't have access to. He could also raise money relatively easily to pur…

What would be awesome is if he just said one day "I need 100 million dollars for my AGI project to buy hardware, anyone who wants to share in a 20% cut of the business just send funds to bitcoin address ### or ethereum address ###". He would be fully funded within an hour, probably. Unfortunately that could never happen because of the SEC.

John Carmack could set up a Patreon for us to watch him vlog his progress, and could earn more than most of us ever will.
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