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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

#351
post #240

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…

There's a hardware component here too though. I think hybrid photonic AI chips handling some of the workload are supposed to hit in 2025 at the latest, and some of the research on gains is very promising. So we may see timelines continue to accelerate as broader market shifts occur outside just software and models.

hybrid photonic AI chips handling some of the workload> working in photonics, read/reviewed papers about that and personly feel it's unlikely to happen in the next 5 years. The low density of integration, no usable nonlinearity beyond your photodetector and prohibitivly power inefficient conversion between analog(photonics) and digital make them hard to beat your Nvidia card.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not sure he was right about the "putting down his own cat because it was annoying" thing.

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

#354
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When he went to go work on VR at Facebook?

Wrong in the moral sense? He's still there though, right? edit: he is not still edit: he is still a consulting CTO

He's not stll there

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cold if he killed it/had it euthanized. Not if he simply found it a better home where it was a better fit and more appreciated.

From Masters of Doom : Scott Miller wasn’t the only one to go before id began working on Doom. Mitzi would suffer a similar fate. Carmack’s cat had been a thorn in the side of the id employees, beginning with the days of her overflowing litter box back at the lake house. Since then she had grown more irascible, lashing out at passersby and relieving herself freely around his apartment. The final straw came when she p…

That's a bummer.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And then someone gives it 4x the compute...

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

#357
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best humble brag I’ve ever seen.

Doesn't strike me as a humble brag at all. He just seems self-aware about how he's motivated and that that he functions better when it's someone else's money on the line.

Oh, I understand the intention.

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

#358

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…

How do you define AGI? How will we know that we achieved it?

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

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the point when an AGI is capable of constructing a slightly better version of itself and has the urge to do so, everything can happen very fast.

? What does 'replication' and 'urge' have to do with anything? That's arbitrary anthropomorphizing the concept of intelligence. And FYI we can already write software that can 'replicate' and has the 'urge' to do so very trivially.

> ? What does 'replication' and 'urge' have to do with anything?

Replication can lead to a positive feedback loop. My point was, that this could accelerate the 'intelligence score' beyond human inventiveness.

Depending on how intelligent the system actually is initially, what it wants to do, may become more important, than what it is told to do.

> And FYI we can already write software that can 'replicate' and has the 'urge' to do so very trivially. Thanks. Yes we can. But could any such software be called intelligent, so that replicating and improving recursively would lead to an increasing 'intelligence'?

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I work in AI and would roughly agree with it to first order. For me the key breakthrough has been seeing how large transformers trained with big datasets have shown incredible performance in completely different data modalities (text, image, and probably soon others too). This was absolutely not expected by most researchers 5 years ago.

past breakthrough doesn't guarantee future breakthroughs.
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