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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

#131

Post by paxys »

Jack000 wrote: post #116

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 y…

We will have something that we ourselves define to be AGI, sure, but then it's easy to hit any goal that way. Is that machine really intelligent? What does that word even mean? Can it think for itself? Is it sentient?

Similar to AI, AGI is going to be a new industry buzzword that you can throw at anything and mean nothing.

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

#133

Post by mupuff1234 »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #49
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.

If I'm remembering right, Carmack believes AGI will be a thing by 2030. He said this in his recent interview with Lex Fridman.

But I think something of the level of a 6 year old, not so much a super being.

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

#134

Post by bitcurious »

falcrist wrote: post #76
mushufasa wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he very clearly has an amoral attitude towards technology development -- "you can't stop progress." He does describe his own "hacker ethic" and whatever he develops he may make more open than OpenAI. though I think he has some moral compass around what he believes people should do or not do with technology. For example, he has publicly expressed admiration for electric cars / cleantech and SpaceX's decision t…

He also has a vastly different take on privacy than most of us seem to have. He thinks it'll eventually go away and it won't be bad when it does. I believe he talked about it in one of his quakecon keynotes. As a LONG time admirer of Carmack (I got my EE degree and went into embedded systems and firmware design due in no small part to his influence), I feel like he's honest and forthright about his stances, but also…

He recently described his love of computers as rooted in realizing that “they won’t talk back to you.” The job he wanted at Meta was “Dictator of VR.” When someone talks AI ethics to him, he just tunes out because he doesn’t think it’s worth even considering until they are fully sentient as the level of a human toddler, at which point you can turn them on and off and modify their development until you have a perfect worker. His reason for working in AI is that he thinks it’s where a single human can have the largest leverage on history.

All that paraphrased from the Lex interview.

I see him as the guy who builds the “be anything do anything” singularity, but then adds a personal “god mode” to use whenever the vote goes the wrong way. Straight out of a Stephenson novel.

On the other hand, he’s not boring!

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

#136

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

xen2xen1 wrote: post #73
bpodgursky wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And consensus is never wrong!

Especially assertions of consensus provided without evidence of said consensus.

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

#138

Post by JoshTko »

cgrealy wrote: post #130

I don’t understand why you would want AGI. Even ignoring Terminator-esque worst case scenarios, AGI means humans are no longer the smartest entities on the planet. The idea that we can control something like that is laughable.

It's akin to nuclear weapons. If you do not develop them, then you'd be subject to the will of the ones that develops them first. So invariably you have to invest in AGI lest, an unsavory group develops it first.

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

#139

Post by semi-extrinsic »

Tepix wrote: post #7

I wonder if Carmacks moral compass is in order. First he sticks around at Facebook, now he endangers humanity with AGI. And i'm only half joking.

The meme that AGI, if we ever have it, will somehow endanger humanity is just stupid to me.

For one, the previous US president is the perfect illustration that intelligence is neither sufficient nor necessary for gaining power in this world.

And we do in fact live in a world where the upper echelons of power mostly interact in the decidedly analog spaces of leadership summits, high-end restaurants, golf courses and country clubs. Most world leaders interact with a real computer like a handful of times per year.

Furthermore, due to the warring nature of us humans, the important systems in the world like banking, electricity, industrial controls, military power etc. are either air-gapped or have a requirement for multiple humans to push physical buttons in order to actually accomplish scary things.

And because we humans are a bit stupid and make mistakes sometimes, like fat-fingering an order on the stock market and crashing everything, we have completely manual systems that undo mistakes and restore previous values.

Sure, a mischievous AGI could do some annoying things. But nothing that our human enemies existing today couldn't also do. The AGI won't be able to guess encryption keys any faster than the dumb old computer it runs on.

Simply put, to me there is no plausible mechanism by which the supposedly extremely intelligent machine would assert its dominance over humanity. We have plenty of scary-smart humans in the world and they don't go around becoming super-villains either.

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

#140

Post by lagrange77 »

Jack000 wrote: post #116

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 y…

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

Any resources on that?

I have a feeling that RL might play a big role in the first AGI, too, but why transformers in particular?

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