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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

#141

Post by derefr »

echelon wrote: post #122
mochomocha wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What a weird future it would be if Carmack turns out to be the one to figure out the critical path and get it all working. An entire field of brilliant researchers be damned. History books (for as long as those continue to exist) would cite AGI as his major contribution to society, and his name would be more renowned than Edison or Tesla. An Einstein. None of his other contributions will matter, as the machines will…

I wonder how many historical figures went through the same thing? Who do we know for their contributions to field X, when 99% of their life was spent contributing to field Y?

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

#142

Post by whamlastxmas »

catalogia wrote: post #85
whamlastxmas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're on the wrong site if you're wanting to criticize software development as a career and suggest it does more harm than good

I can't think of a better site for him to make such arguments. What's the point of such criticism if the subjects of the criticism never read it?

One-off snide attacks in a comment section without any evidence or argument to back it up offers nothing of value.

If you have a strong stance about the evils of software development then write something of substance and post it. I am sure it will get plenty of discussion if there's any merit to it.

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

#143

Post by galangalalgol »

chasd00 wrote: post #112
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.

I think he got that from someone at SGI.

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

#144

Post by soulofmischief »

I'm happy. Carmack has done a lot of good with Oculus, but it hurt seeing my hero working for Facebook. I understand the need to remain in a consulting position, but at least now he's no longer under the corporate leash.

If anyone can hack AI, it's Carmack, and so when I read this headline I had a moment of fright thinking this meant Carmack was working on AI for Facebook.

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

#145

Post by draw_down »

JaRail wrote: post #110
pyentropy wrote: post #33

Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances. I wonder what kind of advances are needed for AGI. 1. Biological brains are non-differentiable spiking networks much more complicated than backpropagated ANNs. 2. Ion channels may or may not be affected by quantum effects. 3. The search space is huge (but organisms aren't optimal and natural selection is probably local search) 4. If it took ~3.8b years t…

> Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances. I think you'd be surprised how much progress is also being made outside those two factors. It's sort of like saying graphics only improve with more RAM and faster compute. We know there's more to it than that. In many cases, the cutting edge of a few years ago is easily bested by today's tutorial samples and 30 seconds of training. We're doing better w…

I think it’s meant precisely in contrast to something like graphics, where the human element has obviously contributed alongside computational advances. “The Bitter Lesson”, basically. To the other point, aren’t computational advances the reason that it’s only 30 seconds of training?

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

#146

Post by galangalalgol »

galangalalgol wrote: post #143
chasd00 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think he got that from someone at SGI.

Or was the second person to independently come up with it.

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

#147

Post by buboard »

pyentropy wrote: post #33

Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances. I wonder what kind of advances are needed for AGI. 1. Biological brains are non-differentiable spiking networks much more complicated than backpropagated ANNs. 2. Ion channels may or may not be affected by quantum effects. 3. The search space is huge (but organisms aren't optimal and natural selection is probably local search) 4. If it took ~3.8b years t…

> even rodents can outperform state of the art models at general tasks

Rodents can't play Go or a lot of other humanly-meaningful tasks. We don't need to build an artificial cell. A cell is too many components that by blind luck happened to find ways to work together, this is as far from efficient design as can be. The same way we don't build two-legged airplanes, we don't need anything that's close to the wet spiky mess that happens in human brains. It's more likely that we have all the ingredients already in ML, and we need to connect them in an ingenious way and amp up the parallelism.

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

#148

Post by _bxg1 »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #132
grumpy8 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a whole uninterrupted week of highly focussed work can get you pretty far (considering that you have the necessary background, which Carmack has, i.e. related to linear algebra, stats, programming, etc.)

Yes, but let's not assume the the hundreds of other scientists in the field have just been twiddling their thumbs the whole time. It is preposterous to assume that someone largely new to a highly specialized field can somehow start pushing the envelope within a week. Yes, JC is nothing short of brilliant, but these sort of assumptions just set him up to disappoint and is also highly unfair to all the other hardworkin…

Sometimes an outside perspective is just the ticket for getting past roadblocks that've stumped the experts. If any outsider could do this, it's John.

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

#149

Post by umvi »

wahern wrote: post #124
umvi wrote: post #92

There's no such thing as AGI in my opinion. There is no way to create a "conscious" machine. We might be able to come up with some reasonably impressive imitations, but nothing that is conscious or actually thinking like a human.

If you can explain precisely why we cannot build a conscious machine, you could become one of the most revered, and potentially wealthiest, researchers in the world, as I presume such a proof would necessarily introduce unknown and very useful science. I personally don't believe modern machine learning is remotely close to AI, except perhaps the very lowest rung of the ladder of self-serving AI definitions. I base th…

I can't prove it, but I will tell you why I believe it.

We can't build a conscious machine because I believe there is a spiritual aspect to life that we have thus far failed to empirically observe or measure. Put another way, I believe all humans have a "spirit" inside of them, and that said spirit is a prerequisite of conscious thought. This same spirit is what makes life after death possible. This belief, of course, is an extension of my belief in God.

Thus, it is impossible to build a truly conscious machine without a spirit to inhabit said machine.

This all implies, of course, that truly conscious AGI effectively proves God does not exist since it proves there is nothing special about humans or any intelligent life for that matter.

In summary, since I believe there is something special about life and that there is a secret sauce (spirits) that we haven't observed or measured, AGI projects are always doomed to fail (though they may spawn new interesting fields of mathematics or computer science)

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