What a boss.
And now, without a boss!
John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
321–330 of 930 posts
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#322Let's hope Boston Dynamics doesn't hire him. ;-)
Boston Dynamics isn't doing AGI.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#323This 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…
> he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical
Yes, he seemed to put a lot of effort to try to get things through FB internal politics, and not always successfully. I really wish his experiments with a scheme-based rapid prototyping environment / VR web browser had been allowed to continue [1]. VR suffers from a lack of content, and VR itself is well-suited to creating VR content, and his VR script would surely facilitate closing that loop among other things. Although now four years later I guess FB has a large team working on a locked-down, limited world building tool (closed platform, no programming ability). Oh well.
I don't think this is the end of this wave of VR, but at this point I wouldn't be at all surprised if say Apple or someone else ends up bringing it to the mainstream instead of Facebook. [2]
[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/RFlh0o6l3...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/11/20959066/apple-augmented...
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#324He should first work on figuring out if AGI is possible. Why assume the human mind is computable?
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#325The more people working on this, the better. I don't expect him to crack the problem but contributions are welcome.
John is smart, has a reputation, has resources, is well connected and has time. I hope he suceeds.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Millions*- A cursory Google search suggests that he has a net worth of 50MM.
Huh just assumed he got a bigger piece of the oculus sale.
Oculus was acquired for $2.3 billion, so he'd need to have owned nearly 50% of the company to become a billionaire from it's sale.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#327I've been dabbling in AGI and it seems like the field has a lot of low-hanging fruit. I'll bet Carmack can offer some significant contributions. I'll take an opportunity to plug a paper I recently published on comparing relative intelligence. The punchline will illuminate the low-hangingness of the fruit in this field. Suppose X and Y are AGIs and you want to know which is more intelligent. For any interactive reward…
How did you rule out other attributes in the voting, such as charisma, political environment, society wellness, etc?
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#328Bold undertaking even for someone as distinguished as John Carmack. I can't help thinking that this is too broad a goal and requires more theoretical work than engineering. Maybe making some self-replicating robots that can mate and give offsprings would be less ambitious (perhaps I am underestimating as well).
He just gave the general domain of the project, it would be weird to start this kind of semi-retirement on a very specific domain. I see this as the broad topic of interest that he will be investigating, but any actual research will be done into narrow fields, wherever some interesting idea hasn't been fully explored yet.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#329Progress 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…
> 2. Ion channels may or may not be affected by quantum effects.
In a sense, everything is affected by quantum effects. However, with neurons, they are generally large enough that quantum effects do not dominate. Voltage gated channels are dozens to hundreds of amino-acids long. Generally, there are hundreds to millions of ion channels in a cell membrane and the quantum tunneling of a few sodium ions in or out of the cell will generally not affect gestalt behavior of the cell, let alone a nervous system's long term state. Suffice to say, ion channels are not dominated by quantum behavior.
Largely, we have the building blocks to replicate neurons (as we currently understand them) in silico. However, as is typical with modeling, you get out what you put in. Meaning that how you set your models up will mostly determine what they do. Setting your net size, the parameters of you PDEs, boundary values, etc. are the most important things.
Now, that gets you a result, and it's likely to take a fair bit of time to run through. To get it up to real time the limiting factor really ends up being heat. Silicon takes a LOT of energy as compared to our heads, ~10^4 more per 'neuron'. If we want to get to real time, we're gonna need to deal with the entropy.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of a interesting armchair moral dilemma: Assume we have the tech to replicate/simulate a biological brain. Now say we want to study the effects of extreme pain/torture etc on the brain. Instead of studying living animals or humans we'd just simulate a brain, and simulate sending it pain signals and see what happens. But, if this is a 100% replicated brain, doesn't that mean its suffering is just as re…
> But, if this is a 100% replicated brain, doesn't that mean its suffering is just as real as a real brain's suffering, and therefor just as cruel? Yes, it does.
Or, assuming you don't believe in souls, "real" brain's suffering isn't real either. (The brain is just a machine, right?)
This reminds me of the idea that free will doesn't exist, but that we have to act as if it were.
So by analogy to that, maybe the AI isn't really suffering, but you have to act as if it were.
More food for thought:
Some surgery blocks memory but can be incredibly painful. Do we need to worry about that? Is the suffering that the brain can not remember "real"?