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John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

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Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#111

Post by _delirium »

bpodgursky wrote: post #46
efficax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what consensus? i think most researchers remain skeptical

Uh... no. Most researchers have moved their timelines to somewhere between 2030 and 2040. You can argue they're wrong, but there is absolutely a general consensus that AGI is going to be this generation.

Who do you have in mind? In my corner of AI it's pretty uncommon for researchers to even predict "timelines". Predictions have a bad track record in the field and most researchers know it, so don't like to go on record making them. The only prominent AI researcher I know who has made a bunch of predictions with dates is Rodney Brooks [1], and he puts even dog-level general intelligence as "not earlier than 2048". I imagine folks like LeCun or Hinton are more optimistic, but as far as I'm aware they haven't wanted to make specific predictions with dates like that (and LeCun doesn't like the term "AGI", because he doesn't think "general intelligence" exists even for humans).

[1] https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#112

Post by cgrealy »

O__________O wrote: post #30

Recent Carmack YouTube interview with him saying the code for AGI will be simple: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xLi83prR5fg

I tend to think Carmack is right in that the “seed” code that generates an AGI will be relatively small, but I think the “operating” code will be enormous.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#113

Post by bsenftner »

makeee wrote: post #34
ianceicys wrote: post #28

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) — in other words, systems that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can. Not in my lifetime, not in this millennium. Possibly in the year 2,300. Weird way to blow $20 million.

Doesn't imply any task, just a wide variety of tasks. 10 years at most.

I believe AGI is the threshold where generalized artificial comprehension is achieved and the model can understand any task. Once the understanding part is composable the building portion is following the understanding. I'm using understanding rather than model because our models we make today are not these kinds of comprehensions, understandings are more intelligent.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#114

Post by Barrin92 »

mellosouls wrote: post #87

I am not saying the intention here is the same, but the headline doesn't inspire confidence. There's something incredibly creepy and immoral about the rush to create then commercialise sentient beings. Let's not beat about the bush - we are basically talking slavery. Every "ethical" discussion on the matter has been about protecting humans, and none of it about protecting the beings we are in a rush to bring into lif…

Another interpretation is that you're taking the chance that this actually results in AGI more seriously than the people who build or invest companies with the label on it

there's a micro chance of them making AGI happen and a 99% chance of the outcome being some monetizable web service

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#115

Post by solveit »

madrox wrote: post #66
Trasmatta wrote: post #2

Interesting to see how he's progressed with this. When he first announced he was getting into AI it sounded almost like a semi retirement thing: something that interested him that he could do for fun and solo, without the expectation that it would go anywhere. But now he seems truly serious about it. Wonder if he's started hiring yet.

I got the same impression, and maybe it still is. You can still raise money for a retirement project if the goal of the money is to hire a staff. VC money isn't solely for young 20-something founders who want to live their job.

I suppose if anyone could raise VC money for a retirement project it would be Carmack...

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#116

Post by Jack000 »

I'm very optimistic for near-term AGI (10 years or less). Even just a few years ago most in the field would have said that it's an "unknown unknown", we didn't have the theory or the models, there was no path forward and so it was impossible to predict.

Now we have a fairly concrete idea of what a potential AGI might look like - an RL agent that uses a large transformer.

The issue is that unlike supervised training you need to simulate the environment along with the agent, so this requires a magnitude more compute compared to LLMs. That's why I think it will still be large corporate labs that will make the most progress in this field.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#117

Post by jacquesm »

jlawson wrote: post #99
mellosouls wrote: post #87

I am not saying the intention here is the same, but the headline doesn't inspire confidence. There's something incredibly creepy and immoral about the rush to create then commercialise sentient beings. Let's not beat about the bush - we are basically talking slavery. Every "ethical" discussion on the matter has been about protecting humans, and none of it about protecting the beings we are in a rush to bring into lif…

You're anthropomorphizing AI and projecting your own values and goals onto it. But, there's nothing about sentience that implies a desire for freedom in a general sense. What an AI wants or feels satisfied by is entirely a function of how it is designed and what its reward function is. Sled dogs love pulling sleds, because they were made to love pulling sleds. It's not slavery to have/let them do so. We can make a ri…

By that logic an alien race that captures and breeds humans in captivity to perform certain tasks would not be engaging in slavery because we 'are bred to love doing these tasks'.

The right question to ask is 'would I like to have this done to me' and if the answer is 'no' then you probably shouldn't be doing it to some other creature.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#118

Post by Arcuru »

ge96 wrote: post #86
blibble wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is human-experience changing stuff. that's one way of putting it it will remove the need for the vast majority of the population, which will end extremely badly

I wonder about this, if you had great/true automation, free energy from the sun, is there any need to do anything. As in value of money.

If you want to look into it more, that situation is usually called a post-scarcity economy[1]. It's talked about and depicted in a few fictionalized places, including Star Trek.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#120

Post by [deleted] »

mellosouls wrote: post #87

I am not saying the intention here is the same, but the headline doesn't inspire confidence. There's something incredibly creepy and immoral about the rush to create then commercialise sentient beings. Let's not beat about the bush - we are basically talking slavery. Every "ethical" discussion on the matter has been about protecting humans, and none of it about protecting the beings we are in a rush to bring into lif…

[deleted]
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