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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

#791

Post by TremendousJudge »

emmanuel_1234 wrote: post #502
anonytrary wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI today is comparable to physics in the 1700s. Back then, it was a bunch of people tinkering with prisms and apples. Today, it's a bunch of people tinkering with hyperparameters. I suspect that we know as little about AGI today as someone in the 1700s knew about QFT. Not only did they not know about QFT, but they didn't even know that they didn't know it.

Wouldn't it be fun if the next Newton turns out to be the guy who wrote Doom and other FPS, games that were blamed for any kind of surge of violence until the GTA games show up?

Wouldn't be out of place -- Newton worked on alchemy, teology and managed the Royal Mint

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

#792

Post by deegles »

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…

If he invents (births?) an AGI, will it be Facebooks property? Sounds like the beginning of a dystopian novel.

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

#793

Post by orbifold »

seanwilson wrote: post #790
Ntrails wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many players complain in story heavy games that their choices have no consequences to the story - this is largely because building stories with meaningful branches isn't economically feasible. That's not entirely true - it's just that no games studios are willing to compromise on graphics and art for something silly like the ability to impact the game world.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic about the "something silly" part, but do you have any examples of any games (indie, commercial or academic) that let you meaningfully impact the game world? I think they don't exist because it's an exceptionally difficult problem, even for games with lo-fi graphics or text only. I've found it hard to find any AI projects that generate stories or plots that are remotely compellin…

Minecraft is successful precisely because you can meaningfully impact the game world.

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

#794

Post by solipsism »

xamuel wrote: post #677
sytelus wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you summarize what exactly interesting insights did you gained by casting this problem as the election system? Unfortunately abstract fails to communicate this (I hate "teaser-only" abstracts!). Also, it might be easy to go from relative metric to sort of absolute by comparing against a "starndard" agent, for example, a random agent.

The #1 thing is it led to an elegant notion of how to compare intelligence (or rather, a parametrized family of intelligence comparators). There's a theorem called Arrow's Theorem, which basically says there's no good way to decide elections between more than 2 candidates. There are a handful of requirements an election-deciding method should have, and no method satisfies all those requirements. But Arrow's theorem h…

Taking their characterization, a definition for relative intelligence is immediate--it writes itself

A definition, but not a concrete and practical way of determining the relative difference between two agents?

Come on, bring this into reality. We're mostly a bunch of coders here. Stop talking about ultrafilters, concepts that are complex and thus render those of us not familiar with them unable to understand what you're saying.

Answer the question.. How can you take two real agents and, in finite time with finite resources, and in a completely general way, compare their intelligences?

The answer might be "the paper doesn't get us any closer to that." So just say that. Otherwise you're being misleading, because you start out by presenting the problem in a simple way. Then you get complex when you answer it.

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

#795

Post by chrchang523 »

foobiekr wrote: post #786
jjoonathan wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any reason to be so dismissive. Scientific pursuits have an extremely steep risk profile and are systematically underfunded because nobody knows how to capture the value that comes out of them. If someone wants to chase one on their own dime, we should celebrate that contribution to society rather than dwell on the fact that the median (even 99th percentile) outcome is that the project goes nowhere and th…

I’m not being dismissive at all; it’s an alternate read on what he wrote and honestly closer to what he seems to be saying than the people reading this as his intending to go full bore.

Carmack is only 49. I'd agree with your interpretation if he was 10+ years older, but he is still young enough to take a real swing at this.

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

#796

Post by xamuel »

larkery wrote: post #756
xamuel wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the environments are not uniformly distributed. In fact, the paper actually defines not one single intelligence comparator but an infinite family, parametrized by a hyperparameter which is, essentially, a choice of which environments vote and how to count their votes. Crucially, this doesn't change the truth of the structural theorems (except that some of the theorems require the hyperparameter satisfy certain…

Hah, interesting - this is a reference I hadn't seen and I like the sound of it. There was me thinking I'd had an idea of my own one time! The reference machine thing would be the next problem to argue if using 2^-K as the weight; whilst you can make the K-complexity of any particular string low by putting an instruction in your machine that is 'output the string', this is clearly cheating! So there ought to be a con…

The computability problem can be addressed by using Levin complexity instead of Kolmogorov complexity, an approach which you can read here: http://users.monash.edu/~dld/Publications/2010/HernandezOral...

It still suffers the problem that it's highly lopsided in favor of simpler environments. Of course you're absolutely right that environments too complex to exist in our universe should get low weight. But it's hard to find the right "Goldilocks zone" where those ultra-complex environments are discounted sufficiently but medium-complexity environments aren't overly disenfranchised, and where ultra-simple environments aren't given overwhelming authority.

>There was me thinking I'd had an idea of my own one time!

I wouldn't give up. Although it's such a long paper, Legg and Hutter 2007 actually has very little solid content: they propose the definition, and the rest of the paper is mostly filler. There are approximately zero theorems or even formal conjectures. One area I think is ripe for contributions would be to better articulate what the desired properties of an intelligence measure should be. Legg and Hutter offered a measure using Kolmogorov weights, but WHY is that any better than just randomly assigning any gibberish numbers to agents in any haphazard way--what axioms does it satisfy that one might want an intelligence measure to satisfy?

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

#798

Post by MS90 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #768
shashankp wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack creates AI, AI is used to invent effective fission reactors. Check and mate.

AI sees humans as thread, all humans die.

> AI sees humans as thread

We shall all be woven into the fabric of the new artificial reality.

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

#799

Post by quicknir »

fastball wrote: post #363
mortenjorck wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack is unquestionably a genius, but I think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers. I wouldn't, however, bet against some kind of insanely clever development coming out of his new endeavor. Something like an absurdly efficient new object classifier, that reduces the compute requirements for self-driving cars by a non-trivial factor, would be a very Carmack t…

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…

I normally don't bother but this comment is so profoundly ridiculous I had to say something.

Tenured ML professors at the top 100 or so universities in the world aren't "most of us". A very large chunk of these people are geniuses. Those jobs are incredibly hard to get, and most of these people are reading everything that is getting published, on an ongoing basis, and are outputting something novel, on an ongoing basis.

The fact that you think that John Carmack, because he's a name that you've actually heard of, is going to go into ML and suddenly make some giant advance that all the poor plebs in the field weren't able to do, is only a reflection of your misunderstanding of what's already happening in academia, not on Carmack's skills or abilities.

You're acting as though everyone are just low level practitioners using sklearn, and it would be a great idea to have some smart people work on developing something novel. Guess what: that's already happening, with incredibly smart people, on an incredibly large scale. Carmack doing it would just be another drop in the bucket.

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

#800

Post by daodedickinson »

My dream would be that Carmack would go toward Douglass Hofstadter and they'd move us toward forms that flawed human intelligence has been striving toward, rather than reifying flaws. I wish the people capable of helping with that could help with that and then I hope that the rest of us could all gather together to solve the loneliness CATACLYSM.
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