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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

#161

Post by Rapzid »

nickjj wrote: post #36
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?

John Carmack is practically a machine. He's openly talked about his work ethic in a bunch of places. He's the type of guy who after a life time of coding calculated he's 100% efficient up until 13 hour work days and then he drops off[0]. Although he did mention working those long hours is often best working on multiple things instead of 1 topic but maybe with AGI there's a bunch of different avenues to explore. [0]:…

He must have some very good advice on getting a good nights sleep. Makes all the difference IMHO.

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

#162

Post by jorblumesea »

derefr wrote: post #141
echelon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Very few, at least for STEM fields. If you look at notable scientists in any given field, their main contributions were in their expertise area before the thing that made them famous. Teller had already made serious contributions to physics before the atom bomb. Jennifer Doudna (CRISPR, CAS9) was the first to see the structure of RNA (except for tRNA) using an innovative crystalline technique. Planck is mainly known for quantum physics, but made huge contributions to the field in general.

It's hard to think of many famous scientists that weren't already well known in their field. Some stand out. Einstein, for example, had a fairly lackluster career until his Annus Mirabilis papers. Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves) bounced to and from various jobs. But largely, the idea of the brilliant outsider is like the 10x engineer. It exists, but is rare.

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

#163

Post by pyentropy »

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…

AlphaZero has coded all the rules for the respective three games, they do a tree search and their neural network output layer has exactly n neurons for max(n) possible moves. Although it's impressive they don't teach it heuristics and strategies, it's a very specific task.

What about pigeons predicting breast cancer with 99% probability, rats learning to drive cars, monkeys building tools?

Rodents stand a bigger chance at learning Go than AlphaZero spontaneously building stone tools and driving cars.

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

#164

Post by MagnumPIG »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #150

Hm. I don't feel like additional engineering expertise is what's missing to achieve AGI, there's still a lot more science to do I think, and I'm not sure how good Carmack is at that.

Honestly we don't even know enough in the psychology department to possibly arrive at AGI anytime soon.

BUT if anyone can clear a hurdle or two...

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

#165

Post by [deleted] »

ilaksh wrote: post #64
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).

Are you really that sure that the approaches to increasing the generality of AI being taken by LeCun (self-supervised model learning), Hinton (capsule networks) and Bengio (state representation learning) are all "total bullshit"?

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by DavidSJ »

derefr wrote: post #141
echelon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Isaac Newton spent most of his life pursuing alchemy and obscure theological ideas, and found it a real nuisance whenever anyone pestered him about math or physics.

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

#167

Post by sailingparrot »

soulofmischief wrote: post #144

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 .

> If anyone can hack AI, it's Carmack

Pretty sure you don't get to AGI with some hacks.

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

#168

Post by jacquesm »

AGI is not an engineering problem but a research problem. John Carmack is good at putting stuff together but how good he is at coming up with novel concepts for an open research problem remains to be seen. Even the rocketry example that is hailed here as a success mostly wasn't. That doesn't make me happy, it would have been far nicer if Armadillo had succeeded, more competition in that space is better. But for all the work done it was more of an advanced hobby project along the lines of those guys in the Nordics than something that moved the needle scientifically.

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

#169

Post by Keyframe »

tus88 wrote: post #152

What this title should have been: John Carmack gives up on VR.

Following up on “John Carmack gives up on aerospace” and hopefully not followed up by “John Carmack gives up on AI”.

I like the guy as much as most, but so far it seems like he has been wandering around. He’s had much success in the early days of 3D video games and that’s about it. A guy of his calibre would probably make a good impact if he joined one of the expert teams like DeepMind. No matter how smart he is, AI today is a completely different ballgame then what he was part of so far. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see him making any sort of breakthrough on his own, with his son. Maybe he wants to spend more time with his family, which is great, or he drank koolaid about his own legend. Odds are against him, heavily so. Good luck, in any case.

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

#170

Post by pvarangot »

catalogia wrote: post #62
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…

From what I understand, quantum effects being essential to the process is a fringe belief. Penrose is probably the most famous 'serious person' (sorry Deepak Chopra) to espouse the idea, but I'm inclined to believe that might be a Linus Pauling/Vitamin C sort of scenario. Penrose started from the perspective of believing there must be quantum effects, then began fishing for physical evidence of it.

Yeah, "quantum mechanics and cognition are very complex and therefore equivalent", sorry I don't know who to attribute the quote to.
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