Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 930 posts

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

#511

Post by Ultimatt »

CivBase wrote: post #366
Zod666 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Wireless teathering is the future of VR. True mobility is pointless when you're realistically restricted to a dedicated space anyways.

You should take more long haul flights if you think mobile is pointless.

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

#512

Post by Greed »

randomsearch wrote: post #491
throwaway34241 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

Out of curiosity, why do you see VR as being a necessary step towards the creation of AGI? Those two don't seem related at all in any way that I can discern.

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

#513

Post by 0db532a0 »

baddox wrote: post #452
Animats wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember this TED talk many years ago where the speaker proposes that intelligence is maximizing the future options available to you: https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...

Here’s another good TED talk: https://youtu.be/9cflCyyEA2I.

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

#514

Post by megla_ »

voxl wrote: post #388
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 s…

The most pretentious comment of the year.

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

#515

Post by yaseer »

glofish wrote: post #56
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!

why would being born in the current century preclude one from making fundamental contributions? You are making a common mistake of assuming that just because someone is good at something like programing computers the same skill would translate identically to a completely different domain. If anything he is lucky to have been born in an era where his skill of programming computers could be put to use - otherwise his t…

He did teach himself rocket science, and build an aerospace company as a 'side project'

Most programmers don't do that as their side project.

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

#516

Post by Scarblac »

EamonnMR wrote: post #337
sullyj3 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The scary thing (imo) is that we don't know where the line is for consciousness - if there even is a line. We've got no problem swatting flies, wonder if it'll be the same with spinning up and spinning down fly-level AGIs.

Continuous integration of the development branch would be mass murder?

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

#517

Post by Scarblac »

visarga wrote: post #483
fooker wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you've almost described the contemporary profession of being a Machine Learning Priest.

There are lots of ideas floating around. Everyone who has studied the field has ideas. Ideas are cheap, results matter. The problem is we don't know if any of these ideas would work, and proving an idea requires lots of data, simulations and compute. Being good at grasping the theory is just the first step in a thousand mile journey. The problem of AI is not going to be solved with a neat math trick on paper, but wit…

The field of statistical inference is about mathematically proving how good various statistical ideas are. It's possible to do better than just throw trial and error on a new idea.

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

#518

Post by Jaruzel »

Carmack's post in full:

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 were unconventional or unproven. I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.

I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal’s Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it.

For the time being at least, I am going to be going about it “Victorian Gentleman Scientist” style, pursuing my inquiries from home, and drafting my son into the work.

Runner up for next project was cost effective nuclear fission reactors, which wouldn’t have been as suitable for that style of work.

--

We're at 500 comments at the time of posting this, and no-ones pasted his post in full to save us having to visit Facebook...

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

#519

Post by TeMPOraL »

Sebguer wrote: post #420
eanzenberg wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Convince people to give him a lot of money to set on fire.

Well yes, but he's the cheapest provider of self-propelling pyres, and the only provider of pyres that can be used multiple times.

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

#520

Post by throw2312 »

visarga wrote: post #462
throw231 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) To be honest anyone who has a very good working knowledge of Linear Algebra can learn much of ML-math in a day. There really isn't anything mat…

If you know about math you're just as good at ML as a person who read everything about swimming is in swimming. You got to run experiments to see what happens, build an intuition, understand the problem from the inside. Math leaves you with a few pretty formulas and nothing else.

> much of ML-math in a day.
Post reply on HN