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

601–610 of 930 posts

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

#601

Post by b3kart »

lostmsu wrote: post #365
nwsm wrote: post #195

What a joke. Carmack is going to sit at home and solve what teams of scientists can't do in decades. I'm complaining less about Carmack wanting to spend his time doing this and more about the comments here acting like he is some 10000x research scientist.

I recently "retired" to do the same, and logic here is - there is no harm in trying, if you have resources (of course, he has magnitudes more). You can get up to date in the field in under half a year of extensive reading. And many of those scientists are too busy solving more specific goals, that their labs set. I doubt there are more than 1,000 researchers in the world specifically working on AGI.

“_Specifically_ working on Artificial _General_ Intelligence” is a bit like “As a physics major I’ve decided to specialise in physics.”

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

#602

Post by vegarab »

sjg007 wrote: post #242
vegarab wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking about AlphaGo. AlphaZero was not given any prior knowledge of the game and is trained exclusively through self-play -- and it outperforms Monte Carlo tree search-based systems such as AlphaGo and Stockfish in chess 100-0 with a fraction of the training time. AlphaZero is also capable of playing Chess, Shogi and Go at a super-super-human.

You can view these as optimized pattern recognizer regexes. You start with a blank fully connected graph and it eventually converge on a useful function. That graph has many paths encoded in it that represents specific optimal game play.

Isn't this how the neurons and synapses in our brain work, though?

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

#603

Post by protomikron »

codingslave wrote: post #371
randcraw wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Deep learning has revolutionized AI and anyone hoping to contribute to AGI is going to have to master DL first, and probably a lot more AI like a variety of probabilistic methods. That's a challenging learning curve that's not much different from earning a PhD. And then, to stand out in AGI, you're going to have to integrate a dozen kinds of cutting edge components, none of which are anywhere ready for prime…

I actually don't think mastering deep learning is very difficult. Theres a gazillion papers and ideas floating around, but the core concepts, that actually work, things like batch normalization, gradient descent, dropout, etc are all relatively simple. Most of the complexity comes from second rate scientists pushing their flawed research out into the public in some form of a status game

> [...] but the core concepts, that actually work, things like batch normalization, gradient descent, dropout, etc are all relatively simple.

They may be simple, but it's controversial why they work. For example dropout is not really used much in recent CNN architectures, and it's just - I don't know - ~5 years old? So people don't even agree what the core concepts are ...

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

#604

Post by username90 »

toxik wrote: post #562
alpaca128 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but AlphaGo is specialized on a very specific task where planning and deep thinking is a basic requirement for high level play. We don't need to think 10 "turns" ahead when trying to walk through a door, we just try to push or pull on it. And if the door is locked or if there's another person coming from the opposite side we'll handle that situation when we come across it.

That’s not true, human beings plan ahead when opening doors more than many things — should I try to open this bathroom door or will that make it awkward if it’s locked and I have to explain that to my coworker afterwards? Should I keep this door open for a while so the guy behind me gets through as well? Not to mention that people typically route plan at doorways. Doors are basically planning triggers more than many…

Horses don't plan though, and they are much better than computers at a lot of tasks. If we can make a computer as smart as a horse, then we can likely also make it as smart as a human by bolting some planning logic on top of that.

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

#605

Post by protomikron »

Wow, that post blew up.

Like most engineers I respect JC for his incredible work, but I really think AGI is far off and at the moment would be very surprised if there is significant progress in the next years to come.

I also want you to read this extremely well written (old) blog post about the topic and I don't think much has improved since: https://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-visi...

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

#606

Post by _hao »

Jaruzel wrote: post #518

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 sol…

I have FB blocked so thanks for sharing!

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

#607

Post by lawlessone »

simonh wrote: post #596
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…

I don't think that approach is going to work. For any clearly bounded and delineated task, such as a game, the most optimal, lowest energy and lowest cost solution is not AGI but a custom tuned specialist solver. This is why I don't think Deep Blue or Alphago are paths towards AGI. They are just very highly advanced single-task solvers. Now Alphago and it's implementation framework are much more sophisticated than De…

The only way i think it can be done is simulated evolution.. be that simulated evolution of neural nets or something else.

As others have mentioned here though.. this becomes horrifying if we've created something sentient to kill in games or enslave.

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

#608

Post by have_faith »

simonh wrote: post #596
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…

I don't think that approach is going to work. For any clearly bounded and delineated task, such as a game, the most optimal, lowest energy and lowest cost solution is not AGI but a custom tuned specialist solver. This is why I don't think Deep Blue or Alphago are paths towards AGI. They are just very highly advanced single-task solvers. Now Alphago and it's implementation framework are much more sophisticated than De…

> It's like an image classifier that can identify an apple, but has no idea what an apple is

Kind of like humans then.

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

#609

Post by systemcluster »

a1studmuffin wrote: post #488
guelo wrote: 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…

Modern big-budget games incresingly don't use behavior trees and state machines for their AI anymore. This approach has been superseded by technologies like GOAP [1] or HTN [2]. These are computationally very expensive, especially in the constrained computation budget of a real-time game.

While it's true that game AI is often held back by game design decisions, it's not true that technology isn't holding us back in this area as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm7K68663rA (GDC Talk: Goal-Oriented Action Planning: Ten Years of AI Programming)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_task_network

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

#610

Post by jtolmar »

hestefisk wrote: post #461
rfhjt wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And programmers are probably not the ones who will come up with AI ideas. I'd bet on mathematicians that prove those Fermat's or ABC theorems.

That’s assuming maths is the fundamental building block of our brain, our consciousness. I happen to think there are some physical and chemical givens preceding it :)

Our brain is whatever evolution found that worked, and of course it's a bunch of chemistry. The "why" of why our brain works can easily be "it approximates these statistical algorithms well enough."
Post reply on HN