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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

#171

Post by blurbleblurble »

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"?

You know who just might be full of total bs is Ben Goertzel.

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

#172

Post by celdon25 »

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.

Wasn't this already done by Goertzel's SingularityNET? They raised $36 million in 66 seconds (note: I don't recommend trying this).

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

#173

Post by zwaps »

jorblumesea wrote: post #162
derefr wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even Einstein I would not say didn't have formal training. He had been in and around academia for most of his life. He was obviously far ahead of the curve, but he did accumulate the formal training. His stint in a regular job was more of an anomaly than his affinity to academia and physics.

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

#174

Post by mrfusion »

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 don’t think there are many researchers in AGI. AFAIK it’s kind of a joke field because no one has any clue how to approach true AGI.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

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

#175

Post by sabujp »

there's no "software" alone that can create an AGI. It's going to take a mix of really powerful hardware, high speed interconnects, and software coming together to do something anywhere close to what sentient (human) beings can do. Life isn't (yet) star trek and carmack isn't noonian soong. Current approx say the human brain is ~10^15 flops, there are only a few of these supercomputers in this regime, with only Summit reaching into the exaflop regime. Carmack would need full access to all of any of the petaflop machines. What he'll probably come up with instead is probably some new good algorithms for making things look like AGI.

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

#177

Post by umvi »

ralusek wrote: post #105
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.

Your opinion is very likely incorrect.

Want to put money on it? I bet $1000 we will not have a conscious computer within the next 50 years.

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

#178

Post by mortenjorck »

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…

Carmack is unquestionably a genius, but I think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers.

I wouldn't, however, bet against some kind of insanely clever development coming out of his new endeavor. Something like an absurdly efficient new object classifier, that reduces the compute requirements for self-driving cars by a non-trivial factor, would be a very Carmack thing.

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

#179

Post by mrits »

glofish wrote: post #56
yaseer wrote: post #28

John Carmack seems like a guy that would've made fundamental contributions to science, had he been born a century before. Computer science now occupies the place physics once did, in its impact on moving the world forward. Best of luck to him, I look forward to seeing what he produces!

why would being born in the current century preclude one from making fundamental contributions? You are making a common mistake of assuming that just because someone is good at something like programing computers the same skill would translate identically to a completely different domain. If anything he is lucky to have been born in an era where his skill of programming computers could be put to use - otherwise his t…

I couldn't disagree with you more

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

#180

Post by briefcomment »

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?

Not an extreme example, but Albert Szent-Gyorgi is known for his work with Vitamin C, when his work on bioenergetics and cancer are more interesting and possibly more promising.
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