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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

#151
post #77

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.

AGI has been 20-30 years away for some 70 years now...

Kurzweil in 2002 made $20,000 bet that a difficult, well defined 2h version of Turing test will by passed by 2029.

https://longbets.org/1/

Given development in language models in the last 2 years he may have a decent chance at winning that bet.

People give him 65% chance [0] and by now there are only 7 years left.

[0] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3648/computer-passes-tur...

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they never expect to sit in. Not everything requires an immediate profit incentive to be a good idea.

A society does not grow great when an old man collects $20 million dollars for the fruit of a tree that he has no capability of planting in the first place.

So sure are you that Carmack can't make inroads here, I wonder where you get the confidence from?

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

#154
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember him saying we don't have "line of sight" to AGI, and there could just be "6 or so" breakthrough ideas needed to get there. And he said he was over 50% on us seeing "signs of life" by 2030. Something like being able to "boot up a bunch of remote Zoom workers" for your company. The "6 or so" breakthroughs sounds about right to me. But I don't really see the reason for being optimistic about 2030. It could ju…

> The "6 or so" breakthroughs sounds about right to me. What’s your logic? Or his if you know it?

If you think about big areas of cognition like memory, planning, exploration, internal rewards, etc., it's conceivable that a breakthrough in each could lead to amazing results if they can be combined.

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

#156
post #135
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you do any task asked of you, which could be asked of a human being? ANY task.

If the task is possible… then why not?

What if you don't know how to complete the task?

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

#157

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?

Transformers have gradually taken over in every other ML domain.

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

#158
post #94

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

> saying the code for AGI will be simple To be fair, it will most likely be some python imports, for the most of it, with complex abstractions tied together in relatively simple ways. Just look at most ML notebooks, where "simple" code can easily mean "massive complexity, burning MW of power, distributed across thousands of computers".

No, not what he means, he means code will be simple enough that a single person would be able to write it, if then knew what to write and will bootstrap itself into existence for that simple code and vast amounts of external resources viable via humans, data, etc.

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

#159
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you do any task asked of you, which could be asked of a human being? ANY task.

I may not be able to ANY task sufficiently well (ex Calculus, Poetry, Emotion), but by the very definition of being a Human I can do *any* Human task.

With specific training, sure. Why are we holding an AI to a higher standard?

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

#160
post #86
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.

But who would own the automatons and power generators, and what would be their impetus to share their power? Unless the means of (energy) production moved out of the hands of the few it seems like it wouldn't make the rest of our lives any more idyllic.
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