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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

#261

Post by intelVISA »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #256
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…

I was surprised by how bullish he is about this. At least a few years ago the experts in the field didn't see AGI anywhere near us for at least a few decades, and all of the bulls were physicists, philosophers or Deepak-Chopra-for-the-TED-crowd bullshit artists who have never written a line of code in their lives, mostly milking that conference and podcast dollar, preaching Skynet-flavored apocalypse or rapture. To s…

if Carmack's in I'm in. Has he ever been drastically wrong?

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

#262

Post by ml_basics »

wcerfgba wrote: post #239

Does anyone else subscribe to the idea that AGI is impossible/unlikely without 'embodied cognition', i.e. we cannot create a human-like 'intelligence' unless it has a similar embodiment to us, able to move around a physical environment with it's own limbs, sense of touch, sight, etc. ? Any arguments against the necessity of this? I feel like any AGI developed in silico without freedom of movement will be fundamentall…

I don't think it is necessary - though all forms of intelligence we're aware of have bodies, that's just a fact about the hardware we run on.

It seems plausible to me that we could create forms of intelligence that only run on a computer and have no bodies. I agree that we might find it difficult to recognize them as intelligent though because we're so conditioned to thinking of intelligence as embodied.

An interesting thought experiment: suppose we create intelligences that are highly connected to one another and the whole internet through fast high bandwidth connections, and have effectively infinite memory. Would such intelligences think they were handicapped compared to us because they leak physical bodies? I'm not so sure!

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

#263

Post by 1000100_1000101 »

b20000 wrote: post #155

I thought AGI meant "adventure game interface". Apparently not, what a disappointment!

Wasn't sure what AGI was either. A quick Google for "What is an AGI company", and it appeared to be related to Global Agriculture Industries (The letter swapping between the name and acronym, I'm assuming, is due to not being English originally). I thought Carmack is taking on John Deere. Following Musk's lead and tackling big things. Good for him, best of luck. Wonder what the HN folks are saying in the comments...

Apparently not agriculture at all, but Artificial General Intelligence. Oh. Apparently throwing "company" on the term like Carmack's tweet did vastly changes how Google's AI interprets the query... AI isn't even in the first page of results.

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

#264

Post by gwern »

O__________O wrote: post #158
nomel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

One interesting paper on estimating the complexity of code: http://www.offconvex.org/2021/04/07/ripvanwinkle/

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

#265

Post by oefnak »

wcerfgba wrote: post #239

Does anyone else subscribe to the idea that AGI is impossible/unlikely without 'embodied cognition', i.e. we cannot create a human-like 'intelligence' unless it has a similar embodiment to us, able to move around a physical environment with it's own limbs, sense of touch, sight, etc. ? Any arguments against the necessity of this? I feel like any AGI developed in silico without freedom of movement will be fundamentall…

When you're sitting behind your computer for a while, you can forget it is there, and just 'live' in the internet, right? That's not so big a difference maybe, if you can abstract the medium away that feeds you the information.

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

#266

Post by pawelmurias »

ryanSrich wrote: post #229
danielheath wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s it going to do, break out of its own simulation?

Real AGI would adapt and fool a human into letting it out. Or escaping through some other means. That's the entire issue with AGI. Once it can learn on its own there's no way to control it. Building in fail safes wouldn't work on true AGI, as the AGI can learn 1000x faster than us, and would free itself. This is why real AGI is likely very far away, and anything calling itself AGI without the ability to learn and ada…

Nope. An atrificial general intelligence that was working like a 2x slower human would be both useful and easy to control.

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

#267

Post by version_five »

sailingparrot wrote: post #227
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 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. Who is we exactly? As someone working in AI research I know no one that would agree with this statement, so im quite puzzled by that statement.

> Who is we exactly?

When I read these kind of threads, I believe it's "enthusiast" laypeople who follow the headlines but don't actually have a deep understanding of the tech.

Of course there are the promoters who are raising money and need to frame each advance in the most optimistic light. I don't see anything wrong with that, it just means that there will be a group of techie but not research literate folks who almost necessarily become the promoters and talk about how such and such headline means that a big advance is right around the corner. That is what I believe we're seeing here.

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

#268

Post by jlawson »

jacquesm wrote: post #117
jlawson wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

There are a million obvious counterexamples when we talk about other humans, much less animals, much less AI which we engineered from scratch.

The problem is that you're interpreting your own emotions as objective parts of reality. In reality, your emotions don't extend outside your own head. They are part of your body, not part of the world. It's like thinking that the floaties in your eyes are actually out there in the skies and on the walls, floating there. They're not - they're in you.

If we don't add these feelings to an AI's body, they won't exist for that being.

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

#270

Post by ericlewis »

fatherzine wrote: post #251
JoshTko wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OTOH if you & your foes develop them both, then there is a probability asymptotically approaching 1 that the weapons will be used over the next X years. Perhaps the only winning move is indeed not to play?

problem is you don't know if they aren't playing - so you must still work on it.
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