This is probably a great time to try to crack AGI. The cost and power of computing has just about become ok for the task and the published work out there like AlphaZero is getting kind of close but probably needs one or two major algorithmic changes to get there.
John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
901–910 of 930 posts
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#902Earlier 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…
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…
Tenured ML professors at the top 100 or so universities in the world aren't "most of us".
Those jobs are incredibly hard to get,
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
#903Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> ML researchers mainly do competitions on the same data sets, trying to put up better numbers. There are surely a lot of researchers doing that, but do you really think anyone who has a plausible claim at being one of the top 100 researchers in the field in the entire world is doing that? Even if there are only 100 people doing truly novel research, that's still 100 times as many people as are going to be working on…
How many people were working on physics before Einstein came along?
I don't think you understand the desired outcome here. We want eureka moments, and we're hopeful for some. That doesn't mean we expect them to happen. Stop being such a pessimist.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#904Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well.... There's the possibility that there's a certain degree of myopia in the AI field as a whole. As in, we know that there are some pretty gaping holes in our models and understanding, and most of the effort is spent on refining approaches that we have already validated. Maybe a better analogy would be "specialize physical theories that work in all environments, not have to be adapted separately for the ocean, sp…
There's certainly a lot to be done, and we'll likely need new approaches. But is it really productive to be tackling a general problem when we don't even know how to solve specific sub-problems? Especially if solving said sub-problems would bring a lot of value in its own right.
It’s basic research. No one knows anything about which approaches will work. If a genius millionaire technologist wants to dedicate all their time and effort to any novel approach, I’d strongly endorse it. (Not that it matters; they’ll do it anyway).
I feel likewise for any research effort; it’s not like this will put all cancer research on hold, or more immediately practical AI research. It’s just a few hundred people globally :) And it’s such promising technology.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#905Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Carmack doing it would just be another drop in the bucket. If this research is as compute intensive as it seems to be, Carmack's contribution might be that he increases the rate other researchers can add their drops to the bucket. Carmack isn't the first techie to take on a big hard problem. Jeff Hawkins, a name many of us also know, did as well.
Yes, he may well improve some algorithm, or rewrite some commonly used tool to improve efficiency. And researchers are often not incentivized to do that, so it would be great. But a far cry from the picture people are painting about him soaking up the field and using his genius to solve some major problem quickly. If by "techie" you mean, professional software engineer, that's fine, but there's no reason to assume th…
> If by "techie" you mean, professional software engineer, that's fine
No, I mean technologist. He has a pretty solid history with software, physics, aerospace, optics, etc...
> might know enough right now to be in a PhD program
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The frontier in AGI or even just AI is enormous and I think I would be more surprised if Carmack were not able to find some place he could expand the border of what we know.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#906Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Something about predatory nature of both insects seems to tune up their intelligence. Yep. To be a predator, you need to outwit your prey and think fast, so it's thought to be a natural INT grinder. `w´ Presumably, this could drive up the INT of prey too, but maybe it's cheaper to just be faster/harder to see? But you can't be THAT hard to see, and the speed only saves you in failed ambushes, so planning successful…
What is I.N.T.? I couldn't find a definition.
Parent is using the commonly accepted stat abbreviation for intelligence in role playing games
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#907Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be a clunky analogy, but is this fundamentally different than a killing a human as long as we keep a record of their DNA sequence? Maintaining the information doesn't seem enough to negate snuffing out the execution of that information
The generic AI could be "playing" in a thousand virtual environments at once. Killing one of them doesn't really have a parallel in human life, or ethics. I mean, yes, you killed a sentient being. But if that sentient being has a thousand concurrent lives, then what does "killing" one of those lives even mean? And if it can respawn another identical life in a millisecond, does it even count as killing? I suspect that…
Would this opinion change if scientists were able to prove the multiverse theory where there are infinite numbers of "us" living concurrent lives as well?
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#908Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a very broad, general description of behaviour that doesn’t actually describe an implementation. In fact it could apply to many completely different possible implementations. I suspect though that humans do more than this, that we have a way of either constructing entirely new models from scratch, or of dramatically adapting models to new situations without mere iterative fitting to feedback. Humans are actual…
I don't know. I'm not so sure that we can create new working models from scratch. We definitely learn by iterative feedback: babies wiggle stuff and watch what happens to learn how to move their bodies. Learning to ride a bicycle is mostly about falling off bicycles until you learn how not to. I've seen people apply their normal behaviour to situations that have changed, and then get totally confused (and angry) as t…
I think we apply radically different cognitive machinery to physical skills like riding a bicycle, compared to playing a card game where the rules are on the cards, and you have no idea what rule will be on the next card or even what rules are possible. We can train Chimps to ride bicycles, so they have the cognitive machinery for that, but we can't teach them to play these kinds of card games.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#909I'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…
I have also been researching AGI and what I found over the years is that a large majority of the work involved requires knowledge of outside fields that have been studied for centuries. Metaphysics, epistemology, macro/microeconomics, geometry --- dozens of fields that you would never guess should ever be related to AI in any way are actually pivotal when it comes to AGI.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#910Yann LeCun's [0] comment on the post: Welcome to the club, John. A word of warning though: There is no such thing as AGI. Reaching human-level AI is a good goal. But human intelligence is very, very specialized. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_LeCun?fbclid=IwAR2e9mzCqS...
Sounds exactly like what I would say if my life's work revolved around the idea that AI boils down to how many neurons we can simulate