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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

#491

Post by randomsearch »

throwaway34241 wrote: post #323
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…

> 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…

The VR vs AI comparison is interesting to me, because I think both technologies have come in “waves”. However, I think this is the last VR wave - it’s going to be on a steady gradient to ubiquity now - whilst I believe AI will winter again and there are many more waves to come, and decades (centuries?) to pass before AGI.

Reasoning being:

VR is just making what we have better. Better screens, better refresh, better batteries, better lenses etc etc. I don’t see any roadblocks.

AGI, by contrast, is not going to be a better DNN. Harder to convince people but thinking is: brain neurons are vastly most sophisticated than digital; we don’t even fully understand what neurons do; we don’t have anything other than a vague understanding of what the brain does; it is apparent that we engage in plenty of symbolic reasoning, which DNN do not do; DNNs are fooled by trivial input changes that indicate they are massively overfitting data; from what I’ve heard from researchers at top AI companies/institutions DNN design is just a matter of hacking and trying stuff until you get that specific results on your given problem, so I don’t see where DL research is actually headed; improvements are correlated with compute power increases, indicating no qualitative gains in the study of learning.

I’m incredibly impressed by DL’s achievements but I believe at best current methods could serve as data preprocessing for a future AGI.

I’m actually quite glad that AGI is so far off, because I don’t think that it’s likely big tech companies will use it responsibly.

VR OTOH is very close and is going to change everything (and IMO is likely a necessary step towards AGI).

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

#493

Post by Daniel_sk »

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 believe this too, I think everyone in the field should probably first study the biology, workings and evolutionary mechanisms behind it. I think you first have to understand why actually such level of "GI" exists in humans, what's the actual purpose upon which it evolved. In a perfect world without constraints we would never exist (or life at all), because there would be no constraints that shaped us. Our mind and the way we think is built around the world we live in. Without all the sensor (and other chemical / inside the body) inputs the brain would not work - it would stop to work after the body and inputs are detached (even if you kept supplying all the nutrients). I don't think you can just "store" or encapsulate GI on digital storage because you would have to emulate all the complex environment inputs which it needs to function in a comparable way to humans... We are the "product" of the environment we live in.

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

#494

Post by Kiro »

Zod666 wrote: post #341
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…

"With the Quest, he (in my opinion) solidified VR's path to mobile standalones" Yes and I really wished he hadn't. Before he joined oculus they were working on the rift2, he steered them away from that to focus on mobile efforts. I do see the appeal of mobile vr but at the end of the day it is basically an android phone in a vr headset. PCvr is already 2 big steps back in graphical quality from desktop games. Mobile…

And yet Quest beats all other headsets.

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

#496

Post by de_watcher »

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.

Artificial Gaming Intelligence (AGI).

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

#497

Post by p1esk »

rfhjt wrote: post #486
p1esk wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at papers from corporate AI researchers (FAIR, Google Brain, DeepMind, OpenAI, etc) they pretty much do whatever they want.

And I disagree violently. The deepmind folks are on salary and every year they need to prove that they are worth the money. This applies to Demis himself: he needs to prove that his org deserves this gaziliion of dollars per year.

My point is they are not constrained to working on ads, or anything specific, and their work is not pointless.

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

#498

Post by mrmonkeyman »

visarga wrote: post #457
drongoking wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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) This may be his biggest impediment. ML has gotten very far with looking at problems as linear algebraic systems, where optimizing a loss function mathematically yields a good solution to a precisely defined (and well circumscribed) classif…

Humans are not AGI's. We're specialised in human survival, not general intelligence. We're pretty limited in intelligence in many ways, actually, and the environment doesn't support generality. Without a proper challenge an agent would not become super intelligent. The cost of developing such an intelligence would conflict with the need to minimise energy for survival.

Human survival, like composing hackernews comments and learning about Golang.

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

#499

Post by kamaal »

mortenjorck wrote: post #178
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…

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 think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers.

Sometimes, an outsider with his novel or even a different way of looking at things can contribute disproportionately to a field.

Even experts have blind spots, often they show in the form of bias. If you know something is hard or near impossible to do, you are unlikely to try. If you don't know at times it's possible to stumble upon a solution by merely bringing a new way of thinking to the table.

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

#500

Post by paggle »

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"?

Just made electric cars mainstream...
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