Live data from Hacker News

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

facebook.com

181–190 of 930 posts

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

#182
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Conscious and intelligent have different meanings though?

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

#183

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…

"his name would be more renowned"

Or hated as the name of the man who's opened the Pandora box and doomed us all.

Just daydreaming and having a nightmare.

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

#184
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I've actually seen that is completely inaccurate and unfair. The only thing that he did to "deserve that" that I know of is to start seriously pursuing and talking about AGI before it was cool again.

For example, OpenCog is an implementation of the classic cognitive architecture and its about as traditional and far from "total bs" as you can get in AGI.

I have never heard anything to back up the insults against Goertzel.

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

#185

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 t…

Carmack is someone who has proven to be an almost unequalled productivity machine when working on medium-difficulty problems... Now, for the first time, we'll see if his approach to problem solving can also work on a truly difficult problem. I agree it's very much an open question.

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

#186

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 t…

Bringing up armadillo wasn't meant as an example of success in business but rather as an example of ability to dive into new fields effectively. They did some cool stuff in their short run, and there's an offshoot company still going.

But yea, I agree with your general point. I'd just note that having that ability to be insanely productive in working on things people haven't done before means to me that if it's possible for someone like him to really get good at this field, he's probably gunna do it.

Who knows how far you can get with just "putting stuff together." That's what Edison did.

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

#187

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…

Current ML technology probably has little or nothing to do with whatever technology will eventually be needed to produce true AGI.

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

#188

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 t…

I keep re-reading my post and idk how it reads as a claim that Carmack is going to re-invent the field or something. All I'm saying is it's possible for him to become a player, just like you suggest.

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where and how are you working on AGI? Are you at opencog or Cyx?

I'm not a big player on the field. I'm specialized in semantic parsing and argument checking. I'm the first to my knowledge to have made a syllogism (and more) checker for English. Also, I have allowed researchers to beat the state of the art on constituency and dependency parsing (but simply by sharing knowledge of the state of the art to other researchers). I do this on my free time so I'm not productive, but I hav…

Doesn't honestly sound very promising but I would still like to see the IR and stuff if that is online.

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

#190

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.

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

Please tell me this is sarcasm.
Post reply on HN