Live data from Hacker News

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

facebook.com

541–550 of 930 posts

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

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The genius of Cog was that it provided an accepted common framework towards building a grounded embodied AI. Rod was the first I saw to have a literal roadmap on the wall of PhD thesis's laid out around a common research platform, Cog, in this branch of AI.

In a sense, the journey was the reward rather than the very unlikely short term outcome back then.

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

#542
post #440

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.

half. the other half was spent building rockets (armadillo aerospace) and VR tech, which arguably is more interesting in its AR industrial or transportation applications.

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

#543
post #191

Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances. I wonder what kind of advances are needed for AGI. 1. Biological brains are non-differentiable spiking networks much more complicated than backpropagated ANNs. 2. Ion channels may or may not be affected by quantum effects. 3. The search space is huge (but organisms aren't optimal and natural selection is probably local search) 4. If it took ~3.8b years t…

> even rodents can outperform state of the art models at general tasks. Rodents? Try insects [1]. In the late 40s and early 50s, when neural networks were first explored with great enthusiasm, some of the leading minds of that generation believed (were convinced, in fact) that artificial intelligence (or AGI in today's terms) is five/ten years away; the skeptics, like Alan Turing, thought it was fifty years away. Sev…

> [1]: To those saying that insects or rodents can't play Go or chess -- they can't sort numbers, either, and even early computers did it better than humans.

They probably can, internally; they just can't operate on tokens we recognize as numbers explicitly. For a computer analogy, take Windows Notepad - there's probably plenty of sorting, computing square roots and linear interpolation being done under the hood in the GUI rendering code - but none of that is exposed in the interface you use to observe and communicate with the application.

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

#544
So apparently Mark Suckerburg reacted to it and 3000 other people.

Anyway he should probably go to Google for this. They look way more advanced than all others.

And not sure how much money he has but there should be ml involved and that costs a pretty penny

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

#545
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Game AI has nothing to do with AGI (or even regular AI) beyond the surface level description OP provided. The reason game AI hasn't progressed in the last few decades isn't because technology is holding us back - after all we can already achieve impressive machine learning feats using current-gen GPUs - it's because bad NPC AI is by design , so players can learn to overcome them and succeed. Very few people want to p…

You don't optimize for competitive performance (it is trivial to design a game AI that beats every player every time given that you have control over tilting the playing field). You use the AI for bounded response variations (all NPC's act 'natural' and different from the others) and engaging procedural generation (Here is a chapter of a story, now draft an entire zone with landscape, NPC's, cities, quest story lines, etc.).

Games like PvE MMO's need to find a way to produce engaging content faster than it can be consumed at a pricepoint that is economically viable. The way they do it now is by having the players repeat the same content over and over again with a diminishing returns variable reward behavioral reinforcement system.

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

#546

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…

> Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work. Sounds like the start of a truly horrifying Black Mirror episode

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

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

#547
post #246
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even rodents can outperform state of the art models at general tasks. Rodents? Try insects [1]. In the late 40s and early 50s, when neural networks were first explored with great enthusiasm, some of the leading minds of that generation believed (were convinced, in fact) that artificial intelligence (or AGI in today's terms) is five/ten years away; the skeptics, like Alan Turing, thought it was fifty years away. Sev…

This jumping spider has ~600k neurons in its brain - https://youtu.be/UDtlvZGmHYk They are creepy smart.

Speaking of Portias and smarts, I'm just going to recommend "Children of Time" here (and its recently released sequel, "Children of Ruin"). It's a story of a future where humans accidentally uplifted jumping spiders instead of monkeys, and goes deeply into how the minds, societies and technology of such spiders would be fundamentally different from our own.

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

#549
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have approaches. There's no end to half-assed "I thought about this for 10 seconds, how hard could it be!" solutions, really old approaches from decades ago where the brightest academics thought they could lick the problem over a summer, and some new public or hidden approaches that might be promising but (I can't know of course) I predict will still look a lot different than the final thing. I think a big rea…

The alignment problem?

> The alignment problem?

The problem of ensuring that the AI's values are aligned with ours. One big fear is that an AI will very effectively pursue the goals we give it, but unless we define those goals (and/or the method by which it modifies and creates its own goals) perfectly -- including all sorts of constraints that a human would take for granted, and others that are just really hard to define precisely -- we might get something very different from what we actually wanted.

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

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I want AGI to succeed, given some of the possibilities. Sure if it plays nicely alongside us, amplifying human society, that's great. But if we get relegated to second class with the AIs doing everything meaningful, then no thanks. But it's still a fascinating endeavor.

Why not? I'd say that a world that is managed by AGI with limited input from human beings is a good goal to have. If AGI could be done without the nasty parts of human psychology and they're inherently superior to genetically intact human beings why shouldn't be embrace it? I understand that it's a big assumption to make -- that a benevolent AI could be constructed. But under that assumption, why not have a benevolen…

> Why not? I'd say that a world that is managed by AGI with limited input from human beings is a good goal to have.

We already live in that world, with large institutional bureaucracies playing the role of paperclip-maximizing AGIs.

It's pretty wretched when you are in their path.

Post reply on HN