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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

#831

Post by oarabbus_ »

ekianjo wrote: post #345
oarabbus_ wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://qz.com/1739575/strong-oculus-quest-sales-boost-faceb...

180 000 units of VR headsets is pure pocket money for Facebook. And that does not even register in any kind of hardware sales charts. PC sales are more than 300 millions per year, and smartphones sales are more than 1.5 billions units per year. VR headsets don't sell at all.

I don't follow your logic even a little bit. It's like saying a toddler will never be able to wrestle his 10 year old brother because it only weighs 30lbs and the brother weighs 90.

How much did PCs sell when they "started to take off"?

How many units did smartphones sell when they "started to take off"?

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

#832

Post by munificent »

PaulHoule wrote: post #819
quicknir wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bas…

Granted. But the academic activity is focused around the kind of activities that Kuhn calls "Normal Science". That is, ML researchers mainly do competitions on the same data sets, trying to put up better numbers. In some sense that keeps people honest, it also lowers the cost of creating training data, but it only teaches people how to do the same data set over and over again, not how to do a fresh one. So a lot of t…

> But the academic activity is focused around the kind of activities that Kuhn calls "Normal Science".

True, but even Kuhn would note that most paradigm shifts still come from within the field. You don't need complete outsiders and, as far as I know, outsiders revolutionizing a field are quite rare.

You need someone (a) who can think outside the box, but you also need (b) someone who has all of the relevant background to not just reinvent some ancient discarded bad idea. Outsiders are naturals at (a) but are at a distinct disadvantage for (b).

I think what's really happening in this thread is:

1. Carmack is a well-deserved, beloved genius in his field.

2. He's also a coder, so "one of us".

3. Thus we want him to be a successful genius in some other field because that indirectly makes us feel better about ourselves. "Look what this brilliant coder like me did!"

But the odds of him making some big leap in AGI are very slim. That's not to say he shouldn't give it a try! Society progresses on the back of risky bets that pay off.

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

#833

Post by goertzen »

goldenkey wrote: post #754
simonh wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could be right, and for the record I upvoted your comment for the contribution regarding you experience with high level chess players. I think the downvotes you’re getting are regrettable.

I appreciate your sentiment. This field is my focus right now. My bachelors is in BioChemMed but I am doing a master in CS and have finished many courses including the free ones by Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio. Here is my strongest prediction: AGI is only possible if the AGI is allowed to cause changes to its inputs. Current ML needs to be grafted towards attention mechanisms and more boltzmann net / finite/infinite imp…

> "... if AGI is allowed to cause changes to its inputs."

Could you elaborate on this point ?

Do you mean that the AGI could change the source of inputs, or change the actual content of those inputs (e.g. filtering) or both?

And why do you think this is a critical piece ?

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

#834

Post by edavison1 »

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…

Fallout: New Vegas, a bunch of Telltale games, Myst/Riven, dozens of JRPGs (Chrono Trigger/Cross come to mind immediately) with branching endings and characters who survive or die based on player actions. Yeah, games are made all the time where the player has a meaningful impact on the game world.

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

#835

Post by ilaksh »

The_rationalist wrote: post #536
ilaksh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really that sure that the approaches to increasing the generality of AI being taken by LeCun (self-supervised model learning), Hinton (capsule networks) and Bengio (state representation learning) are all "total bullshit"?

From my reading, Hinton capsule networks seems far from being enough, it could at best be an incremental improvement. And is unrelated to English semantic parsing, it seems specialized for computer vision.

English semantic parsing is small part of AGI. And a system that can only do that or only for one language is never going to be general.

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

#836

Post by random023987 »

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…

> any examples of any games [...] that let you meaningfully impact the game world?

Dwarf Fortress

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

#837

Post by lazyjones »

mortenjorck wrote: post #178
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…

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…

> I think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers.

Researchers didn't build the first airplane. Nicolaus Otto, Carl Benz, Gottfried Daimler also weren't researchers. AGI will be a program and not a research paper and John Carmack is pretty good at getting those right.

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

#839

Post by ufmace »

aerovistae wrote: post #788
ufmace wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see Elon as a genius at any kind of engineering. Everything he's done there was pretty easily foreseeable as being physically possible. What he is remarkably good at is selecting daring and potentially market-changing business goals, and executing against them consistently and aggressively despite naysayers. It's easy to say that it's probably possible to land a orbital rocket first stage. But who would bet a…

If you think what he's done was easily foreseeable as possible, you haven't been paying much attention to headlines the past fifteen years.

Don't miss the "physically" part, that's critical. Something being physically possible is very different from it being a practical business.

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

#840

Post by soulofmischief »

sailingparrot wrote: post #201
soulofmischief wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be trite; You're well aware that hack in this context means to understand/make progress.

No, I actually understand it as solving it with unexpected tricks.

Well, now you can understand it differently.
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