Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

451–460 of 643 posts

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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm definitely not saying this is already the ultimate solution. But if you look at their scaling experiments and extrapolate the results, it roughly shows how a model with number of parameters on the same order of magnitude as the human brain could more or less achieve overall human level performance. Of course that doesn't mean the architecture has to extrapolate, but it's definitely a path worth walking unle…

Except it is pretty naive to extrapolate like that. A high order polynomial looks flat if you zoom in enough. You can't extrapolate far beyond what you have empirical data for without potentially running into huge problems.

How do you know what the function looks like? Unless someone shows that this scaling behaviour breaks down, it is definitely worth pursuing, since the possible benefits are obvious. Everyone who just says it will break down eventually is almost certainly right, but this is also a completely trivial and worthless prediction by itself. The important distinction is that noone knows where the breakdown happens. And from what we can tell today, it's not even close.

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

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And consensus is never wrong!

Especially assertions of consensus provided without evidence of said consensus.

I don’t know that the consensus is right but the OP’s confidence of it being far off made me think they were unaware of the recent shifts (not just in consensus, but the upstream capabilities.)

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

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it maybe too much to ask but as a noob to this field I’d love to hear more about why AGI is not feasible even in 50 years.

I've seen a few posts here asking why it isn't possible. Research doesn't work like that, you can't just imagine something is possible and demand reasons why it isn't. How is it possible? It feels a bit like a lot of these fringe science things (electromagnetic fields causing harm etc) where people's argument is that nobody's shown it isn't true. Well if it's true, propose a mechanism and study it. You're not really…

Yeah this is a good point. I've been taking the bearish position of HLI here but that doesn't mean I don't think HLI is impossible. I very much do think it is possible (I'm not sure there are many researchers who think it is impossible) but just how close we are. But we don't even have good definitions, so really this is just laymen being privy to expert arguments. I also think there's this naive belief that complex topics can be distilled to laymen terms while maintaining accuracy. That's definitely not true here, as even our "in-group" doesn't have a consensus. But that's cutting edge research for you.

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

#454
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? B…

The gorilla has a brain 1/3 the size of a human brain with a very similar evolutionary history.

The sperm whale has a brain that is several times larger than ours.

What do you do differently in your AGI design to get a human, gorilla, or whale brain?

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so important to you that humans be the smartest beings on the planet?

Because if we aren’t, it leaves us liable to be exterminated or enslaved to suit the goals of the superior beings. (and I fundamentally believe that the existence of the human race is a good thing, and that slavery is bad).

Or we just don't want to die/be enslaved/etc

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

#456

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.

In the ideal case, an AGI makes solve-able problems that are either impossible, or will take a very long time, for us to solve. There are a lot of problems left to solve, or at least that a lot of people would like to solve, and who knows what new ones will come. If AGI lets them be solved a lot sooner, then there's a strong motivation to build it.

Terminator is of course fiction, but AGI being more agent-y than tool-y suggests we ought to be very careful in trying to design it so that its interests align with (even if not perfectly matching) our own interests. There are lots of reasons to be pessimistic about this at the moment, from outright control as you say being laughably unlikely, to the slow state of progress on formal alignment problems that e.g. MIRI has been working on for many years relative to the recent relatively fast progress in non-G AI capabilities that may help make AGI come sooner.

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

#457

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.

This is a classic case of scope creep caused by underspecified scope (evidenced by how little HLI improves the non-definition of AGI). If humans accurately exhibited causal reasoning in any but the most mind-numbingly obvious conditions we would be living in a very different world!

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

#458
post #350
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's the Turing Test, not necessarily a definition (or requirement) for AGI.

Where’s AGI defined? I’ve only seen it used in the context of “can pass the Turing test”

AGI isn't really explicitly defined (it wouldn't be a problem if it was) but it's essentially an artificial version of the "general" intelligence that humans have, aka we can do and learn many things we were not programmed or trained by evolution to do

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

#459

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.

but they're certainly indicative.

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

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big issue is how exactly we'll continue to scale. Exponential growth is hard to maintain. An example: In the Chinchilla paper [1], the authors suggest that most big transformer models are undertrained, and that we will probably see diminishing returns in scaling up the size of networks if we don't also scale up the size of the datasets. They have a subanalysis where they extrapolate out how big datasets will need…

The scaling laws of large language models are very specific to language models and the way they're trained. The important thing that LLMs demonstrate is that transformers are capable of this kind of scale (where other approaches have not) In the RL space, a sufficiently complex, stochastic environment is effectively a data generator.

I'm not sure I agree that there is a distinction between scaling laws and a model being "capable of scale." RNNs are Turing complete, so from that perspective they should in theory they should be sufficient for AGI. But of course they are not because their scaling with regards to network depth and the length of sequences is abysmal. LLMs do scale with depth and sequence length, if their scaling laws with regard to dataset size prevent us from training them adequately, then we are stuck nonetheless.

I haven't heard of any groups who are studying data constrained learning in the context of LLMs, but that will probably change as models get bigger. And at that point, architectures with better scaling laws may be right around the corner, or they may not. That's the pain of trying to project these things into the future.

Post reply on HN