Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 930 posts

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

#151

Post by landryraccoon »

djohnston wrote: post #99
cambalache wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hehe, I love CS, but give me significant advances in physics, chemistry or medicine over some new "breakthrough" in machine learning.

A general AI would give you all 3

That argument is like saying if we had better theorists you wouldn't need to build particle accelerators.

Nature has brute facts that can only be discovered through observation. I would be surprised to see evidence that an intelligence, no matter how smart, could reason to the fundamental properties of neutrinos without massive physical real world experiments and piles of observational data.

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

#153

Post by DoctorOetker »

vecplane wrote: post #19

I don't understand how he could contribute to the field of AGI research from home, by himself, and maybe with his son. It's the kind of problem that requires incredible amounts of data, hardware, and theory to make any progress. Wouldn't it make more sense for him to join a cutting-edge team, like DeepMind or OpenAI?

the recent result on 15% optimal learning error rate for binary classification, could have been derived with pencil on paper by anyone...

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

#154

Post by moogly »

reilly3000 wrote: post #134

Arguably he got started on this years ago. The story goes that Quake 3's AI was so sophisticated, that when left alone for 4 years on a bot vs bot server, the units learned pacifism as a self-preservation strategy. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/07/02/quake-iii-a...

Mr. Elusive (Jean-Paul van Waveren) was the guy who wrote the bot code for Quake 3: Arena, not Carmack.

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

#155

Post by pacala »

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…

Not being constrained by the publish or perish treadmill is a huge plus.

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

#156

Post by streetcat1 »

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!

Just out of curiosity, how do you define a genius programmer? (vs regular programmer).

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

#157

Post by dimino »

_bxg1 wrote: post #148
short_sells_poo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes, but mostly not.

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

#158

Post by wahern »

akira2501 wrote: post #90
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…

> gene editing Gene expression is often tied to the environment the organism is in. Mere possession a gene isn't enough to benefit from it. Some expressions don't take effect immediately, but rather activate in subsequent generations. Epigenetics is a whole equally large layer on top of this system. A single-focus approach may not be sufficient, and even if it is, it's not likely to cope with environmental entropy ve…

If you can craft a gene[1] to express some particular phenotype (a big if), surely you can craft it to express itself without reliance on epigentic[2] chemistry.

[1] I understand gene to mean some ill-defined, not necessarily contiguous set of genetic sequences (DNA, RNA, and analogs) with an identifiable, particularized expression that effects reproductive (specifically, replicative) success. I think over time "gene" has been redefined and narrowed in a way to make it easier to claim to have made supposedly model-breaking discoveries.

[2] Some others on HN have made strong cases for why epigenetics isn't a meaningful departure from the classic genetic model; just a cautionary tail for eager reductivists who would draw unsupported conclusions from the classic model. See, also, note #1.

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

#159

Post by sneak »

narrator wrote: post #137

Humans optimize for activating the opioid receptor. These receptors are distributed all over the brain and tied into all sorts of subtle neural networks. That's why opioid addicts don't do much when they're high. As far as the entire structure of the brain is concerned, an opioid addict's brain is done optimizing and the fitness function is pegged at 1. I think an AGI will end up being like an AI that plays the Sims…

So, opiate synthesis and delivery?

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

#160

Post by romwell »

buboard wrote: post #147
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…

The problem with the analogy is that the car, by far, is not a general transportation device. Practically, most cars are solving a very constrained transportation problem: moving on roads that humans made.

We don't have anything remotely close to a wetware-enabled transportation device, something that can move on flat land, climb mountains, swim in bodies of water, crawl in caves, hide in trees.

Within the constrained problem, the machine exceeds humans. But generally, the wetware handles moving around much better.

Same with AI: in a constrained problem, the AI can excel (beat humans in chess and go). But I doubt we will see a general AI any time soon.

Post reply on HN