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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

#401

Post by wpietri »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #355
jacquesm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you list a few fields of research where "X amount of person-hours of research by typical researchers will solve the problem"? I can't think of one.

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

#402

Post by armitron »

keanzu wrote: post #299
DavidSJ wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isaac Newton spent most of his life pursuing alchemy and obscure theological ideas, and found it a real nuisance whenever anyone pestered him about math or physics.

Isaac Newton is considered by some to be the greatest mathematician of all time and is regarded as the "Father of Calculus". "Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he has done is much the better part." - Gottfried Leibniz http://www.fabpedigree.com/james/mathmen.htm

"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage."

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

#403

Post by armitron »

lonelappde wrote: post #262
DavidSJ wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isaac Newton spent most of his life pursuing alchemy and obscure theological ideas, and found it a real nuisance whenever anyone pestered him about math or physics.

Not true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

Very true. Newton was an alchemist first and foremost and spent the vast majority of his time practicing alchemy rather than -what today one would call- science. One has to wonder what private reasons/results a genius of his magnitude had, in order to do that.

This little known fact is so embarrassing to some institutions [2], that they made up a new word "chymistry" in order to further obscure the issue and not outright admit the obvious.

[1] http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/newtons-works/alchem...

[2] https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/project/about.do

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Newton-Alchemist-Science-Enigma-Natur...

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

#404

Post by __s »

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…

This is a neat idea. Seems there's room to weigh value of electorate based on how liberally they praise. Thanks for sharing

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

#405

Post by iamleppert »

It must be hard to be someone like him. Always chasing the original high that made him famous, the enormous pressure to succeed must be nauseating.

Instead of retiring and relaxing and looking back on an impactful and lucky career, it says something about how powerful the original emotions were that led him to his current point.

He will do anything to get back to that state, that place in time, even sacrifice what are supposed to be the good years of his life stuck behind a screen.

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

#406

Post by anigbrowl »

sullyj3 wrote: post #309
lonelappde wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematically, AI is a pretty well modelled field. AGI is a philosophical problem.

you're possibly thinking of the problem of consciousness, which is a totally separate thing. AGI is just what it says on the tin - a general intelligence. That is, a problem solver that can operate at a human or greater level in a broad variety of domains. This ability is plausibly totally orthogonal to "having the lights on" - having subjective experience.

you're possibly thinking of the problem of consciousness, which is a totally separate thing.

Disagree.

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

#407

Post by fasturdotcom »

Fricken wrote: post #393
solipsism wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It begs the question, though: is the development of AGI contingent on some magical breakthrough, or is it a matter of endless tinkering and cobbling until we've got something that works?

magical breakthrough ...

https://research.fb.com/publications/canonical-surface-mappi...

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

#408

Post by neonate »

iamleppert wrote: post #405

It must be hard to be someone like him. Always chasing the original high that made him famous, the enormous pressure to succeed must be nauseating. Instead of retiring and relaxing and looking back on an impactful and lucky career, it says something about how powerful the original emotions were that led him to his current point. He will do anything to get back to that state, that place in time, even sacrifice what ar…

How do you know he isn't just doing what interests him? Not everyone wants to retire, especially highly creative people.

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

#409

Post by wpietri »

solipsism wrote: post #390
bobsil1 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Technically, a human can't draw a human. A human can only draw something that looks like a human to another human. The human viewer is doing most of the work by imagining that the drawn human is real (or by recalling the real human suggested by the drawing).

As an example, consider all of these ASCII stick figures:

http://www.ascii-art.de/ascii/s/stickman.txt

Clearly, it isn't necessary to deeply comprehend the essential nature of humanity in order to draw one.

Knowing how a mind works well enough to build one is an immense task. A better analogy would be building a human body from scratch, which is also something humans can't do.

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

#410

Post by eanzenberg »

fastball wrote: post #363
mortenjorck wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with the "field of researchers" is that most of us aren't geniuses. We're just plugging away at problems, like normal people. The opportunity for a genius is to come in, synthesize all existing information on the subject, and then come up with a novel approach to the whole thing. In some part, I think that is what Elon Musk has been able to do effectively. He comes into a field that already exists, reads…

What, pray tell, did Elon do that is "novel"?
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