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

611–620 of 930 posts

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

#611

Post by arethuza »

lawlessone wrote: post #607
simonh wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reverse engineering a human mind would be another approach.

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

#612

Post by thorin »

tinus_hn wrote: post #436
eanzenberg wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He made it cool to drive an electric car.

He certainly made it more cool than my hero and his precursor ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5

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

#613

Post by username90 »

p1esk wrote: post #497
rfhjt wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are constrained to problems with annual results though.

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

#614

Post by soup10 »

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…

Such pointless gatekeeping, if Carmack turns his attention and resources to AI he will be able to make contributions to the field. Will they be groundbreaking? Maybe not, but why is everyone so eager to immediately discourage him.

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

#615

Post by jtolmar »

nradov wrote: post #187
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…

Current ML technology probably has little or nothing to do with whatever technology will eventually be needed to produce true AGI.

I think older AI work like POMDPs and statistical work like causal inference are more on line with what's needed to produce true AGI than the current breakthroughs in neural nets are. And I'd certainly prefer our chances to survive the results if AGI is reached through statistical rigor.

Though we know for a fact that it is possible to find intelligence by randomly throwing things at the wall until something works. It's not like evolution uses a principled statistical process.

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

#616

Post by noir-york »

have_faith wrote: post #608
simonh wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A child picks up an apple but doesn't know what an apple "is". It doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe it.

As adults we know what an apple is because we understand it as a concept, the ideal "apple", and can manipulate the concept into areas way outside the original concept (say, the phrase "apple of my eye").

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

#617

Post by wolf550e »

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"?

Falcon 9's reusable first stage has been claimed by reputable people to be impossible, before it happened. Not just "economically not worth pursuing", which was wrong but forgivable, but straight "impossible".

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

#618

Post by z3phyr »

sobani wrote: post #538
hnaccy wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming game AI means an agent that directly competes with the player. Plenty of games have NPCs with scripted routines, dialog, triggers, etc that could be improved either by reducing the dev cost to generate them without reducing quality or reacting to player behavior more naturally.

Except in those cases it's even more important that the NPCs don't do anything unexpected. Those NPCs are like actors in a stage play, you don't want them to come up with their own lines and confusing the audience. Don't forget there is a certain randomness with 'more natural' and with randomness you're going to invite Murphy to the party.

It would be fun if they ad lib

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

#619

Post by jaster »

xamuel wrote: post #319

I've been dabbling in AGI and it seems like the field has a lot of low-hanging fruit. I'll bet Carmack can offer some significant contributions. I'll take an opportunity to plug a paper I recently published on comparing relative intelligence. The punchline will illuminate the low-hangingness of the fruit in this field. Suppose X and Y are AGIs and you want to know which is more intelligent. For any interactive reward…

You might be interested in the No Free Lunch Theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem).

For what I skimmed from your paper, it looks like the LH agents may be viewed as discrete optimization processes trying to optimize an objective/utility function across an infinite space of possible environments (infinite voters).

If it is the case, and if each environment vote has the same weight, you may be in a case of no free lunch, where the performances of all possible agents (including the random agent) will average to the same across all possible environments.

Or, to restate the above, for each environment in which an agent is doing well, it is possible to construct an "anti-environment" where the agent is performing exactly as bad.

My personal opinion on the topic of AGI is that it is actually a case of NFLT.

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

#620

Post by lazyjones »

AccordingDay wrote: post #214
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…

But there's 100s of world-class researchers working on this problem already.

100s of world-class researchers may be good at coming up with new ideas and hypotheses towards AGI, but are they good enough programmers to test all of them in reasonable time, with relevant data sets?
Post reply on HN