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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

#771

Post by program_whiz »

Maybe I am a naysayer, but John Carmack is going against other companies and teams with not only billions in funding for hardware and data, but also with big staffs of experts.

Not only are people who have been in the research for a while more likely to have good ideas, but having the support of engineers to write tests and data wrangling, Neuroscientists to bounce ideas off of, and a whole bevy of support staff is just more likely to produce results.

I'm also not a big fan of the kind of hero worship of "well he wrote Doom, so this should be a cakewalk." I'm not saying he won't, but he probably won't. What am I missing here that everyone seems all hyped up about?

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

#772

Post by LanceH »

username90 wrote: post #643
Mtinie wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Horses don’t plan though[...]” Can you expand on this statement? While I have no way to “debug” a horse’s brain in real-time, my experiences suggest they absolutely conduct complex decision-making while engaging in activities. Two examples which immediately come to mind where I believe I see evidence of “if this, then that” planning behavior: 1. Equestrian jumping events; horses often balk before a hurdle 2. Herds o…

The context was this quote: > intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up In this context horses don't plan or have much capacity for shared learning, at least not as far as I know. Quote: “This study indicates that horses do not learn from seeing another horse performing a particular spatial task, which is in line with most other findings from social learning exper…

In my experience they learn to open gates. They certainly aren't trained to do this, but learn from watching people or each other.

They will also open a gate to let another horse out of their stall which I would count as some form of planning.

Beyond that I can't think of anything in all the years around them. They can manage to be surprised by the same things every single day.

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

#773

Post by marcus_holmes »

arethuza wrote: post #730
marcus_holmes wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes a lot of sense. An internal narrator on events explaining them to the passenger, rather than the driver of said events.

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

#774

Post by saiya-jin »

arcturus17 wrote: post #574
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…

Thanks it didn’t so much save me as it enabled me, since I have it blocked.

same here, can't access it at work, at its damn interesting topic for many of us

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

#775

Post by coolassdude6941 »

program_whiz wrote: post #771

Maybe I am a naysayer, but John Carmack is going against other companies and teams with not only billions in funding for hardware and data, but also with big staffs of experts. Not only are people who have been in the research for a while more likely to have good ideas, but having the support of engineers to write tests and data wrangling, Neuroscientists to bounce ideas off of, and a whole bevy of support staff is j…

His “competitors” are irrelevant. It’s obvious that the existing approach (dl/rl) is a dead end, at least for AGI. So the idea of a possible genius working on a new approach with no monetary incentive is exciting.

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

#776

Post by iandanforth »

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…

Hi John! Animats was very cool! As you know game physics still kinda sucks for this work. Unity/Bullet/MuJoCo are the best we have and even they have limited body collision counts. Luckily we've now got some GPU physics acceleration, but IMO it's not enough.

What we really need is a scalable, distributed, physics pipeline so we can scale sims to 1000x realtime with billions of colliding objects. My guess is that Google/Stadia or Unity/UnityML are better places to do that work than Facebook, but if Carmack decides to learn physics engines* and make a dent I'm sure he will.

Until our environments are rich and diverse our agents will remain limited.

*More, I'm sure his knowledge already exceeds most people's.

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

#777

Post by Ajedi32 »

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…

Sounds like he agrees with you:

> 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.

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

#778

Post by kiney »

davidgrenier wrote: post #714
_hao wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have FB blocked so thanks for sharing!

I would like to block facebook but I'm on debian. Last thing I tried to block was reddit through /etc/hosts and it didn't work.

might be easier to user your adblocker

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

#779

Post by burnte »

friendlybus wrote: post #428
burnte wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of what he did in PC graphics was very original, but in the old days it was narrowly applicable, while by the time Doom 3 was in development, his gfx programming could be more widely applied to other things. I think his fast inverse sqrt was VERY impressive, which he didn't invent first but may have come up with independently.

He didn't do the fast inverse on quake. The wiki article has a bunch of guesses for who did it.

I literally said that.

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

#780

Post by simonh »

acollins1331 wrote: post #736
simonh wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a single-task solver, or hierarchy of them, go about constructing a conceptual model of a new problem domain? The problem with a solver is it only really goes in a single direction, but when modeling a system you spend a huge amount of time backtracking and eliminating elements that yielded progress at first but then proved to be obstacles to progress later. You also need to be able to rapidly adapt to chan…

Seems to me you're just describing reinforcement learning. Youre just saying a human child can adapt to the new problem faster than the AI can adapt, which is true but not the argument you've been making in this thread.

It's not reinforcement learning, because the child can do it the first time, so there's no reinforcement. I have kids, so many times I have played games with them successfully, purely from a description of the rules and playing as we went. They even beat me once the first time we ever played a game, by employing a rule at the end which had never come up in previous play. Compared to that Alphago isn't even in the race, because we can't even tell it the rules.
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