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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

#721

Post by foobiekr »

I’ve worked with legends in a specific space that is less consumer-y than games and graphics and less weirdly-desperate attention-seeking than ML and so the people therein are every bit Carmack-level but less visible. As they have aged out and wealthy’d out of working time, almost all of them have chosen to retire.

These are extremely high performing individuals who have made global impact. Shutting down for people like this is very hard and 100% of them have sent out mails much like Carmack’s Facebook post when the end came. Even the style and verbiage are similar.

None of them made a dent in their tinkering-phase project and moved on to normal above-average low-engagement hobbies. They are done.

I read his FB post as a pretty standard retirement announcement as a result. I think he’s telling us he is done.

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

#722

Post by toasterlovin »

nathias wrote: post #599
visarga wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are AGI, the general part comes from language and specialization of brains for language use.

We can communicate well about pretty much anything (we think, at least). That doesn't mean we possess the intellectual tool kit to handle basically any intellectual task. I think it's easy to think that we do, but that is just as easily explained by the fact that we've evolved for millions of years to be well suited to the environments we usually find ourselves in. We wouldn't refer to our bodies as general purpose bodies. They may seem that way, at times, since they've also been tuned by millions of years of evolution to be well suited to most of the environments we find ourselves in. But put our bodies in a different environment (like the ocean, or the desert, or really high altitudes) and it becomes immediately obvious that they're not general purpose, but instead a collection of various adaptations. Similarly, when you put humans in novel intellectual environments, it seems pretty clear that we're not general intelligences. After all, the math involved in balancing a checkbook is much simpler than the math involved in recognizing 3D objects, yet we do the simple task only with great difficulty, while the difficult task is done without struggle.

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

#723

Post by Kiro »

ekianjo wrote: post #647
Kiro wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. We've entered a new era of VR with the Quest. Any numbers we've seen before is irrelevant.

What do you mean? The quest is virtually inexistent market wise. Nobody is buying it. Did you see a huge uptake anywhere? I havent.

The article you're replying to is about Oculus Quest.

> The company’s non-advertising revenue jumped to $269 million during the third quarter, Facebook noted in its earnings report Oct. 30. That’s a 43% increase year-over-year [...] The revenue is coming from strong sales of Oculus Quest, one of Facebook’s VR headsets, of all places.

No idea how you can claim it has no market share when it's dominating the VR space, unless you're talking about a bigger market than VR. The point was that VR never took off until Quest and we've only seen the beginning now.

We see this with VR game developer sales as well:

> Previously, we’ve heard from the developers of Red Matter who said “we have surpassed Red Matter’s all time sales on Rift in just a few days on Oculus Quest” and Superhot who said sales were 300% higher on Quest, calling the all-in-one VR system “a watershed moment for the industry and the sales numbers suggests that players believe so too.”

https://uploadvr.com/oculus-quest-sales-strong/

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

#724

Post by mav3rick »

foobiekr wrote: post #721

I’ve worked with legends in a specific space that is less consumer-y than games and graphics and less weirdly-desperate attention-seeking than ML and so the people therein are every bit Carmack-level but less visible. As they have aged out and wealthy’d out of working time, almost all of them have chosen to retire. These are extremely high performing individuals who have made global impact. Shutting down for people l…

You cant project your colleagues on a third person.

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

#725

Post by mav3rick »

Roark66 wrote: post #656
dna_polymerase wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He shifted a whole industry towards a new paradigm. Look at Germany, they are desperate to catch up with Tesla, finally moving into electric cars. Without Elon they would keep selling their Diesel scam for the next decades.

Actually it was a bunch of Phd students from some Californian Uni that discovered the vw diesel scam. There is a short documentary about them online. Elon has no credit whatsoever in dieselgate. However, he did make electric cars something an average person would like to have. He also chose to make it work using the same inefficient principle of hauling 2 tons of steel to transport a single person. What he made is an…

Jesus, technology evolves. This is a good start.

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

#726

Post by staz »

foobiekr wrote: post #721

I’ve worked with legends in a specific space that is less consumer-y than games and graphics and less weirdly-desperate attention-seeking than ML and so the people therein are every bit Carmack-level but less visible. As they have aged out and wealthy’d out of working time, almost all of them have chosen to retire. These are extremely high performing individuals who have made global impact. Shutting down for people l…

by that standard Carmack retired a few times already and always came back with something interesting

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

#727

Post by marvin »

phyzome wrote: post #662

Ah yes, AGI: The idea that eats smart people. https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

Working towards more general AI technology is not what the author of this is criticizing. They're criticizing focusing on super-human AI rather than ethical problems of current AI. "The idea that eats smart people" is just a meme at this point, normally quoted outside its context.

But even so, history will have to judge whether the author's statements were true regarding the risk of super-human AI. Or whether a lot of _quite_ smart people weren't smart _enough_ to realize that there was a real likelihood of this being possible to achieve faster most thought.

Also, using ridicule as a rhetorical technique isn't the most sound type of reasoning, regarding the author of your link ;)

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

#728

Post by shurcooL »

hans1729 wrote: post #2

Heh, from the comments: > Congratulations on the new project, and may your hubris not doom us all.

I wanted to find some discussion on this topic. I’m not pessimistic, but I am curious to consider what it may mean for humanity if/when AGI happens.

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

#729

Post by earthboundkid »

whack wrote: post #650
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…

> AlphaGo didn't learn the rules of Go. It has no idea what those rules are, it's just been trained through trial and error not to break them. That's not the same thing. It's not approaching chess or Go as an intelligent thinking being, learning the rules and working out their consequences There are indeed some people who learn chess by "reading the manual". Or learn a language by memorizing grammar rules. Or learn h…

In a Platonic dialogue, they discuss the definition of knowledge as "true belief with an account". You have true beliefs about language, but you don't know it in the Platonic sense if you can't explain it to someone else. Another way I've heard this defined is, you don't know it if you couldn't write the algorithm for it.

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

#730

Post by arethuza »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #712
simonh wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alphago and it's kind are doing some things that we do, for sure. We do utilise pattern recognition and some of the neurological tools we bring to bear on these problems might look a bit like Alphago. The thing is those are parts of our neurology that have little to do with general intelligence. I think it's becoming clear that they are merely cognitive tools we bring to bear in the service of our higher level genera…

But in this classification, isn't "general intelligence" just a meta-single-problem-solver, solving the problem of which single purpose solver to bring to bear on this task? I think I think, but might I just be using a single problem solver that gives the appearance of thinking?

I suspect the way we think in terms of clear symbols and inference isn't actually how we think but a means of providing a post-hoc narrative to ourselves in a linguistic form.

Edit: Which kind of explains the failure of good-old fashioned symbolic AI as it was modelling the wrong thing.

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