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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

#461

Post by mementomorti »

mkaic wrote: post #448
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.

Fellow AI researcher here who personal agrees with OP, there are some of us that are believers ;). I agree that most people in our industry are generally not very bullish about near-term AGI, I think it just comes down to how you perceive the complexity of the problem. Personally, I think it's solvable because passing a lengthy, adversarial Turing test reliably is all it would take to convince me of sentience in a mo…

I'm not in the field at all but just generally curious regarding #3. I'm under the impression that a lot of plasticity in our brains is related to sleep, are there areas of AI research following that thread, plasticity at downtime so to say?

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

#462

Post by godelski »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #451
godelski wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think your viewpoint is the more naive one and I think you have the burden of proof to argue why local trends are representative of global trends. This is because the non-local argument accepts a wider range of possibilities and the local argument is the the more specific one. Think of it this way, I'm saying that every function looks linear given the right perspective and you're arguing that a particular function _is_ linear. I'm arguing that we don't know that. The burden of proof would be on you to prove that this function were linear beyond what we have data for. (Path towards HLI doesn't have to be linear, exponential, nor logarithmic but you do have to make a pretty strong argument to convince others that the local trend is generalizable).

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

#463

Post by abecedarius »

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…

> Any arguments against the necessity of this?

Supposing it's needed, a universal computer can simulate physics. Now we're just haggling about the price.

It's possible that developing a robot is the most fruitful angle to take on the problem -- giving you the right subproblems in the right order, with economic value along the way. Hans Moravec thought so, writing a few decades back.

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

#464

Post by riku_iki »

nine_k wrote: post #398
godelski wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that transformers aren't always the best tool. They are powerful because they can capture large receptive fields but ConvNext even shows that a convolution can still out perform Transformers on some tasks. There's plenty of modern CNNs that have both small and large receptive fields that perform better than transformers. But of course there is no one size fits all architecture and it is fairly nai…

I wonder if combining different approaches works in current AI research. I suppose it should. A suppose something approaching AGI, an intelligent agent which can act on a _wide_ variety of input channels and synthesize these inputs into a general model of the world, could use channel-specific approaches / stages before the huge "integrating" transformer step.

> the huge "integrating" transformer step

why always transformer step?

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

#466

Post by jfoster »

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…

The AGI could just exploit security holes to take over compute resources around the world in order to make itself more performant & resilient.

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

#467

Post by darawk »

godelski wrote: post #433
darawk wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you defining "understands things"? Or more precisely, what are the observable consequences of understanding things that you are waiting to see?

"Understands things" means a lot. Mostly I'm referring the causality and generalization of inference though.

So, what would be the observable, empirical consequences of the kind of causal understanding and generalization of inference you're describing?

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

#468

Post by sigmoid10 »

godelski wrote: post #462
sigmoid10 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think your viewpoint is the more naive one and I think you have the burden of proof to argue why local trends are representative of global trends. This is because the non-local argument accepts a wider range of possibilities and the local argument is the the more specific one. Think of it this way, I'm saying that every function looks linear given the right perspective and you're arguing that a particular function…

You are arguing completely beside the original point. Gato was just meant as one surprising example out of many to show how much more the architectures we already have today are capable of. Whether you believe how the scaling curve for this very particular model will work in detail is totally irrelevant to me or anyone else and I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I was just pointing out that there is a clear direction for future research and if you think people like Carmack are on the wrong path - so be it. You don't have to pursue it as well. But I don't care and he certainly doesn't either.

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

#469

Post by beeboop »

saalweachter wrote: post #454
wruza wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not sure the point of this question - a brain size larger than a human's doesn't matter that much if the extra size isn't going to the right places. From what I can tell it's the size of the brain dedicated to higher cognition (cerebral cortex) and the "power" of the neurons it contains (humans spend more relatively more energy on their brain than an animal's brain of the same size). The answer to your question (how to make AGI dumber than humans) simply seems to be have fewer neurons in total, fewer neurons doing higher cognition, and have those neurons be less powerful.

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

#470

Post by ahefner »

danbmil99 wrote: post #185
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.

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

Rational self interest? Isn't "not losing my job to a computer" reason enough?
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