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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

#431

Post by nkoren »

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…

Musk actually has credited Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace with providing the inspiration for vertically landing the Falcon 9. Of course Armadillo was likewise inspired by the Delta Clipper, which was in turn inspired by the LEM, etc. But it's one thing to vertically-land a rocket a few times when you have billions of dollars at your disposal; it's another thing to do it hundreds of times for a thousandth the price. That was Carmack's contribution: proving that vertical landing can be both incredibly robust, and cheap as chips. Really valuable work.

I had the pleasure of meeting Carmack a few times over the years at small aerospace conferences. He's both as true a geek and as much of a gentleman as you might imagine. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he does with AGI.

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

#432

Post by kache_ »

I can see where he's coming from. He's in the unique position where he can work on whatever interests him, he has the mathematical background to absorb all this knowledge. I think a big part of this is that he's worried about his age catching up to him and disabling his ability to make any meaningful contribution. One thing to note is that he's going to loop his son into his research.

The creation of synthetic intelligence will be a result of multiple distinct breakthroughs. The more people with unlimited resources and high creativity working on this problem, the more likely those breakthroughs will be made.

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

#433

Post by bitexploder »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #424

One could imagine him beginning to work in gaming AI, but he says he wants to work on AGI, not simply gaming AI. I'm personally not convinced that it is encouraging when someone bright sets their sights on AGI, particularly someone who appears to have never competed on Kaggle. It screams hubris.

I am not convinced current AI is the approach to an AGI. I think it is at least feasible someone outside of this sphere has a reasonable shot at it. It feels like many AI researchers get caught up in refining existing techniques that amount to fancy statistics algorithms and data crunching, but not AGI. Current AI techniques may be synthesized or used in part in some AGI but it’s clear there is a revolutionary step to be made. Kaggle is almost just an optimization fest, and not really advancing towards AGI.

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

#434

Post by nmfisher »

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…

> 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.

This was the (loud) subtext for me, too.

Carmack doesn't strike me as the type of person to walk away from a problem lightly. Given how many problems remain unsolved when it comes to VR, I wonder if he's just admitted that it will never be the endgame he wanted it to be.

Cash-wish, he's obviously sitting pretty. Better off spending your remaining years working on something you can make a meaningful contribution towards.

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

#435

Post by [deleted] »

carlosdp wrote: post #188
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#436

Post by tinus_hn »

eanzenberg wrote: post #410
fastball wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

He made it cool to drive an electric car.

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

#437

Post by Animats »

nikki93 wrote: post #422
Animats wrote: post #313

This is encouraging. If you're going to work on artificial general intelligence, a reasonable context in which to work on it is game NPCs. They have to operate in a world, interact with others, survive, and accomplish goals. Simulator technology is now good enough that you can do quite realistic worlds. Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work. Robotics has the same issue…

Yeah I believe in this game / simulated world NPC idea too. To get the kind of complexity we want we either need sensors in the real world or interfacing in a virtual world that humans bring complexity to (probably both -- the humans are part of the sensing technology to start). Things like AlphaZero etc. got good cuz they had a simulatable model of the world (just a chess board + next state function in their case).…

I've long taken the position that intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up. Not falling down, not running into stuff, not getting hurt, not breaking things, making some progress on the current task. Common sense. Most of animal brains, and a large fraction of the human brain, is devoted to managing that. On top of that is some kind of coarse planner giving goals to the lower level systems.

This area is under-studied. The logicians spent decades on the high level planner part. The machine learning people are mostly at the lower and middle vision level - object recognition, not "what will happen next". There's a big hole in the middle. It's embarrassing how bad robot manipulation is. Manipulation in unstructured situations barely works better than it did 50 years ago. Nobody even seems to be talking about "common sense" any more.

"Common sense" can be though of as the ability to predict the consequences of your actions. AI is not very good at this yet, which makes it dangerous.

Back when Rod Brooks did his artificial insects, he was talking about jumping to human level AI, with something called "Cog".[1] I asked him "You built a good artificial insect. Why not go for a next step, a good artificial mouse?" He said "Because I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's best artificial mouse".

Cog was a flop, and Brooks goes down in history as the inventor of the mass market robot vacuum cleaner. Oh well.

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/CMAA-group.pdf

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

#438

Post by sterlind »

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?

It is sorta interesting to wonder about how far we can bootstrap ourselves. We went from trees to moon landings and neural networks, maybe we and our tools can rise to the top of the Kardashev scale (barring any cataclysms.)

If so, it implies there's a sort of intelligence-completeness, where species can accomplish any physically possible objective.

Or maybe we will peter out before achieving practical fusion, quantum gravity or AGI. Either way, "X can't create X" is a silly argument. Humans create humans, there's whole websites dedicated to that.

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

#439

Post by rfhjt »

nradov wrote: post #367
EamonnMR wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of this assertion. It mimics some bits and pieces of the only GI we know about right now; that's as good a start as any, right?

You can carve a block of wood into something that looks like a computer. That should be a good start on building a device that can run Linux, right?

Yes. Then you just cast a spell to summon a computer spirit and let it manifest into the wooden block.

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

#440

Post by guelo »

Animats wrote: post #313

This is encouraging. If you're going to work on artificial general intelligence, a reasonable context in which to work on it is game NPCs. They have to operate in a world, interact with others, survive, and accomplish goals. Simulator technology is now good enough that you can do quite realistic worlds. Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work. Robotics has the same issue…

Yes but it sounds weird to me because Carmack has spent his whole life involved with games but has not been known for an interest in game AI before.
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