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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

#371

Post by godelski »

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.

> As someone working in AI research

Being in the tail end of my PhD, I want to second this sentiment. I'm not even bullish on AGI (more specifically HLI) in 50 years. Scale will only take you so far and we have to move past frequentism. Hell, causality research still isn't that popular but is quite important for intelligence.

I think people (especially tech enthusiasts) are getting caught in the gullibility gap.

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

#372

Post by salty_biscuits »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #188
colinmhayes wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s certainly the philosophy side of AGI, but there’s also the practical side. Does the Chinese room understand Chinese? If your goal is just to create a room that passes Chinese Turing tests that doesn’t matter.

The philosophy side of the matter seems meaningless, it interrogates the meaning of language, not the capabilities of technology. When people ask "Could machines think?" the question isn't really about machines, it's about precisely what we mean by the word 'think'. Can a submarine swim? Who cares! What's important is that a submarine can do what a submarine does. Whether or not the action of a submarine fits the mea…

But a submarine doing what a submarine does is a tautology. What people are really grasping at is can a machine be human? And pinning down what it means to be human seems very important to ruminate on. Can machines think? Cogito, ergo sum...

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

#373

Post by dinosaurdynasty »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #311
sabellito wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a wondeful youtube channel from a researcher who focusses exactly on this topic, I think you should check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q

I watched the whole thing. Man spent a lot of breath asserting that an AGI will have broadly the same types of goals that humans do. Said exactly zero words about why we won't just be able to tell the AGI "no, you're not getting what you want", and then turn it off.

He covers that in another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM

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

#374

Post by trention »

riku_iki wrote: post #360
ml_basics wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The old problem of induction. It's interesting how many of the AI accelerationist crowd are (purposefully pretending to be) unaware of it.

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

#375

Post by gambiting »

cgrealy wrote: post #326
gambiting wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The current state of AI safety is nowhere near the point where controlling an AGI is possible. I just don't understand this logic though. Just.....switch it off. Unlike humans, computers have an extremely easy way to disable - just pull the plug. Even if your AGI is self-replicating, somehow(and you also somehow don't realize this long before it gets to that point) just....pull the plug. Even Carmack says this isn…

Imagine a bunch of chimps capture a human. They put them in a cage surrounded by tigers and spikes and remove all weapons from the human. The human uses their phone to call for rescue. That is us trying to contain an AGI. We probably cannot even conceive of the ways it can get out of any pitiful cage we put it in. That, or it’s so dumb, it’s not worth making in the first place.

I still don't understand. That presuposes that the AGI will just materialize out of thin air, and immediately have human level intelligence. That once day you just have a bunch of dumb computers, the next day you have an AGI hell-bent on escaping at all cost.

That's not going to happen - even Carmack believes so. The process to get AGI is going to take a long time, and we'll go through lots and lots of iterations of progressively more intelligent machines, starting with ones that are at toddler-level at best. And yes, toddlers are little monkeys when it comes to escaping, but they are not a global world ending threat.

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

#376

Post by uplifter »

arkitaip wrote: post #3

> This is explicitly a focusing effort for me. I could write a $20M check myself, but knowing that other people's money is on the line engenders a greater sense of discipline and determination. Dude doesn't even need the money...

Getting someone to invest in your idea is also a good way to demonstrate to others that your idea is worth investing in, a signal that isn't nearly as strong as when you invest in it yourself.

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

#377

Post by trention »

intelVISA wrote: post #261
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #256

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?

>Has he ever been drastically wrong

Has he ever made a prediction with as drastic a consequence and transformative potential as the one he is currently making about AGI? Actually, is there any track record of predictions he has made and how they have panned out?

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

#378

Post by ta988 »

godelski wrote: post #371
sailingparrot wrote: post #227

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.

> As someone working in AI research Being in the tail end of my PhD, I want to second this sentiment. I'm not even bullish on AGI (more specifically HLI) in 50 years. Scale will only take you so far and we have to move past frequentism. Hell, causality research still isn't that popular but is quite important for intelligence. I think people (especially tech enthusiasts) are getting caught in the gullibility gap.

Yes we are going back to symbolism, , ontologies and causality. Which is a good and healthy sign. It was abandonned the same way neural networks were at some point. Now that it becomes practical at scale, we can combine them all.

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

#379

Post by adastra22 »

stefs wrote: post #172
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.

the climate crisis might kill us all off if not some deus ex machina (i.e. AGI) comes up with some good solutions fast.

That’s a bit alarmist.

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

#380

Post by wruza »

version_five wrote: post #267
sailingparrot wrote: post #227

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.

> 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 a…

Can someone please explain like we are fifteen why AGI is impossible, at least right now? Or if not AGI, then something similar to a cat/etc mind?

As far as I am imagining it, current models are pipelines of various trained networks (and more traditional filters in the mix) that operate like request-reply. Why can’t you just connect few different pipelines in a loop/graph and make an autonomous self-feeding entity? By different I mean not looping gpt to itself, but different like object detection from camera vs emotion from a picture based on some training data. Is it because you don’t have data what is scary or not, or for a completely different reason?

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