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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

#351

Post by bobsil1 »

sterlind wrote: post #291
mentat wrote: post #270

He invented modern graphics as a practical problem by himself as the sole researcher. Given the tools at the time that may have been a harder problem.

Yes, a practical problem. The math behind computer graphics (i.e. optics) had been around hundreds of years. The trick was using numerical analysis to optimize and approximate on limited hardware. We don't have the laws of AGI like we had the laws of optics (Asimov notwithstanding.) Tons of research effort was poured into the wrong avenues in vision (hand-tuned HoG, transforms, optical flow analysis) and ML (support…

A dog brain can't design an artificial dog brain, and a human brain probably can't design a human-level AGI. It will likely be machine-evolved on cheap, massively parallel hardware, with the key problem being speeding up evolutionary search.

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

#352

Post by WiseWeasel »

nothis wrote: post #269
phillco wrote: post #16

This is a very artfully written statement. It avoids the most more devastating headline of “John Carmack Stepping Down”. (Yes, going part-time isn’t the same as leaving entirely, but still).

The real headline is that VR is finally confirmed to have hit a major roadblock. If John Carmack gets frustrated with its progress, there's something up. I've long thought that the issue with VR is a conceptual one, not a technical one and maybe that frustration comes from there. "Running forward" is an unsolved problem in room scale VR. For a seated experience, you're basically back to a neat display gimmick + accur…

Advancements in AI might arguably be critical for AR.

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

#353

Post by throwawayhhakdl »

stevenwoo wrote: post #288
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…

Isn't this backwards a bit or did I get it wrong - not sure if I am phrasing this right. But to simplify from a laymen's perspective a reading of The Selfish Gene - all creatures will work to continue their genetic line unless misdirected as you describe. So if in some way continuing their genetic offspring is something that activates their opioid receptor, that's what we'll do, creating and raising offspring or as g…

Successful propagation strategies propagate, and therefore become prevalent. Life has no goal; it doesn’t try to propagate. It’s just the result of an evolved process that happens to correlate strongly with propagation. Most processes in organisms have an arbitrary first order objective like getting those happy chemicals. The fact that these first order objectives have a second order effect of survival and reproduction is a wholly unsurprising coincidence.

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

#354

Post by austhrow743 »

monktastic1 wrote: post #275
carlosdp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said that, where the hell did I say he pushed anything? All I'm saying is he's shown to be insanely productive and effective and I think he can catch up to the body of research (created and shared by those hundreds of scientists) to become a real contributor very quickly.

FWIW, "seriously contributing to this kind of problem" sounds basically the same as "pushing the envelope" to me. They both suggest contributing something novel and useful.

They are basically the same thing.

What are not basically the same thing are "he started seriously contributing to this kind of problem after a week in the woods" and "he spent a week in the woods a year ago and is ready to start contributing now. A year after that week in the woods."

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

#355

Post by hackinthebochs »

jacquesm wrote: post #263
brainpool wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is not a research problem but an imagination problem. I can’t vouch for how good John Carmack is in imagination, but striving to put things together with a goal seems like a good place to start.

I can imagine AGI just fine. Doesn't get me one tiny little bit closer to being able to make one. There are several ways in which one could go about such a development, all we have for now is an existence proof and none of the paths pointed out so far have been viable. Whether John will come up with novel path is not really an imagination issue but one of very deep understanding of the problem space, what has been tr…

The parent's point was that reaching AGI isn't merely a research problem, in the sense of X amount of person-hours of research by typical researchers will solve the problem. Rather, we need new ideas and new conceptual frameworks, i.e. new imaginative leaps to reveal the path forward towards AGI.

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

#356

Post by bobsil1 »

MagnumPIG wrote: post #164
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...

AGI won't require hand-designing a copy of the human brain, though knowing some of the principles would help.

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

#357

Post by ekianjo »

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!

> John Carmack seems like a guy that would've made fundamental contributions to science, had he been born a century before.

I see Carmack as a very(as in uniquely) talented Engineer. Usually, engineers are not the type who do very well in pure research topics. And AGI is certainly a pure research topic, since we don't have a clear leading us there. So while it's great to see he is interested in it, now sure if we should have any kind of expectation there.

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

#358

Post by OnlineGladiator »

mkl wrote: post #344
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not exactly. The acquisition was mostly in the form of Facebook shares, which I expect have increased in value since.

It was a mix of cash and shares (not sure on the split), but I checked the stock price for fun - holy shit it has nearly tripled since the acquisition 5 years ago.

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

#359

Post by deviantfero »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #206
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...

Seems like this would be easy to actually test instead of rely on a single anecdote. And the simplest explanation is a bug though I don't believe the story at all. There are probably multi-year-uptime bot servers in the wild right now. Reminds me of when I was new to Quake 3 and found an amazing server: it was always full of players and full of non-stop action. I played with these people all the time after school. No…

This reads like a horror story prompt of some kind, eerie!

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

#360

Post by throwawayhhakdl »

chillacy wrote: post #294
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…

I must be doing a poor job at being a human, given that I have passed the opportunity to activate my opioid receptors several times in my life so far (leftovers from surgeries).

One could argue that’s true, and that being bad at things is part of what makes general intelligence (artificial or otherwise) so powerful. Optimizing for goals about goals and redefining the objective Problem space on the fly
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