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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

#381

Post by burnte »

agumonkey wrote: post #343
jacquesm wrote: post #168

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…

Wasn't his shadow volume technique quite hard and original ? He's not just plumbing things it seems.

A lot of what he did in PC graphics was very original, but in the old days it was narrowly applicable, while by the time Doom 3 was in development, his gfx programming could be more widely applied to other things. I think his fast inverse sqrt was VERY impressive, which he didn't invent first but may have come up with independently.

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

#382

Post by bane »

I'm surprised nobody has made the connection with the announcement of Horizon. Carmack joined Oculus in order to build the next generation of 3d Virtual worlds. It's done, other than some polish, which means he's not needed anymore.

However Horizon turns out (I'm bearish on it tbh), Carmack has had his shot to build the digital future, it's now turned out how it has, and there's not much flexibility left for him to maneuver, it's time to move on.

I think AGI is going to turn out like his shot at Rocketry, big and complex enough that he'll find his niche and contribute, but not make any significant breakthroughs.

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

#383

Post by solipsism »

xamuel wrote: post #319

I'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…

For any interactive reward-giving environment E, you could place X into E and see how much reward X gets; likewise for Y. If X gets more reward, you can consider that as evidence of X being more intelligent.

That's an odd definition of intelligence. By that definition, a bird is more "intelligent" than a human at the task of opening a nut. Seems like "fitness" would be a much more appropriate term.

It seems especially strange to consider this work in the field of general intelligence. Nothing about what you just described is general. By this definition, a chess bot is much more intelligent than the average person. I don't think we'd say a chess bot has general intelligence.

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

#384

Post by chapium »

AccordingDay wrote: post #214
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…

But there's 100s of world-class researchers working on this problem already.

He will be surrounded by brilliant peers, sounds good.

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

#385

Post by narrator »

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…

You ever think that cattle are exploiting humans to genetically propagate themselves more successfully than any other large mammal besides Humans?

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

#386

Post by hedvig »

curiousgal wrote: post #115
binarymax wrote: post #98

Does anyone have a non-facebook version of this story?

Starting this week, I’m moving to a "Consulting CTO” position with Oculus. I will still have a voice in the development work, but it will only be consuming a modest slice of my time. As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace, and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague “line of sight” to the solutions, even if they wer…

Fusion John, we need you in fusion research. It's only 10 years away

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

#387

Post by solipsism »

dkural wrote: post #379
jacquesm wrote: post #168

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…

Please take this as nothing more than my subjective opinion: I believe that humans don't have GI but HI - we have a "world-view" that is very idiosyncratic to being human, which is essentially heuristics all the way down - in other words, I don't believe there is a magical novel concept that explains HI, but that it is a collection of party tricks that evolved over time, i.e. hacky engineered system.

I don't see why that's not GI. That HI enables us to do incredible things, far beyond what we evolved to do (we evolved to hunt and fuck and exist in small groups, not to do quantum mechanics).

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

#388

Post by voxl »

leesec wrote: post #311

Wow, there are a lot of people in this thread arguing whether or not John Carmack has the right skills to help AGI, or about the specifics of his knowledge. Do you all realize you're arguing about nothing? Good for him for doing something he seems excited about. Maybe we should all stop gossiping and go do something we're excited about too.

What is actually being argued is the cult worship of a particular engineer. I am against cult worship, so find the fact that Carmack is entering this space simply not news worthy. Yet here it is.

Do I wish him the best of luck and hope he cracks the problem? Of course, all the same I would wish that of an upstart PhD student. Yet, the announcements of a brilliant PhD student attending a university to work on AGI is somehow not on hacker news.

This is cult worship of the personality Carmack has amassed, perhaps completely accidentally. When Carmack actually achieves something interesting let us discuss it then, not the mere announcement that he will try, as if that means anything. Read: it doesn't.

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

#389

Post by onion2k »

jacquesm wrote: post #168

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…

Even the rocketry example that is hailed here as a success mostly wasn't.

This demonstrates how hard the problem is. When you're tackling a really hard problem "mostly not a success" is a success. Most people faced with the same problem would return "no successes".

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

#390

Post by solipsism »

bobsil1 wrote: post #351
sterlind wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A dog brain can't design an artificial dog brain, and a human brain probably can't design a human-level AGI.

That's ridiculous. A dog can't draw a dog, therefore a human can't draw a human?

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