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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

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its safe to say that all sentient beings inherently want to do whatever they please. So youre talking about manufacturing desire. So it follows that you yourself are okay having your own desires manufactured by external systems devised by other sentient beings. Do unto others...

To be fair, all human desires have been manufactured by an external system: evolution. We might imagine that we do what we please, in reality we're seeking pleasure/ reinforcement within a predetermined framework, yet most people won't complain when taking the first bite of a delicious, fattening dessert.

I dont understand evolution to be a sentient being though

I was thinking more Stanford students taking behavioral psych classes then going into the industry to help propagate ad driven platform capitalism

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

#522
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good lord. I dislike cats, but this is vile. Totally lost any respect I had for Carmack.

Don't meet your heroes.

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, his follow up tweet is pretty clear: > 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. I had talked about that as a possibility for a while, and I am glad Nat pushed me on it.

It seems like bad logic. If he gets bored/throw in towel, he can just pay back with his money and move on. Also, if you need to create such artificial constraints in order to go to work, a main ingredient called “drive” is missing. I respect Carmack a lot but I don’t trust old centi-millionaires to work with same passion as their younger poorer selves. Finally, $20M is too low. AGI is not a solo endeavor and doesn’t…

> Just to train a large model once will eat up 20% of this money.

Fascinating point. It has seemed like AI could produce a sort of arms race by players with the most resources because it is so compute intensive upfront.

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

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard some people of old lived by "turn the other cheek". Maybe you must not work on it, even if you think the other guy is.

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

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 da…

The scaling laws for LLMs depend heavily on the quality of data. For example, if you add an additional 100gb of data but it only contains the same repeating word, that will hurt the model. If you add 100gb of completely random words, that will also hurt the model. Between these two extremes (low and high entropy), human language has a certain amount natural entropy that helps the model gauge the true co-occurrence frequency of the words in the sentence. The scaling laws for LLMs aren't just a reflection of the model but the conditional entropy of human-generated sentences.

RL is such a different field that you can't apply these scaling laws directly. eg. agents playing tictactoe and checkers would stop scaling at a very low ceiling.

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

#526
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is upside down. First - we already have software that can unequivocally do the things you just highlighted. Learn? Check. Replicate? Trival. But what does that have to do with AGI? Solve Problems Humans Cannot. Check. So we already have 'AGI' and it's a simple computer program. Thinking about 'AGI' as a discrete, autonomous system makes no sense. We will achieve highly intelligent systems with distributed system…

> Replicate? Trival. But what does that have to do with AGI? If you see it as copying an existing model to another computer, yes it is trivial. But an AGI trying to replicate itself in the real world has to also make those computers. Making modern computer chips is one of the most non-trivial things that humans do. They require fabs that cost billions, with all sorts of chemicals inside, and extreme requirements on t…

"trying to replicate itself in the real world has to also make those computers."

? Why ?

And why does each 'AI' have to map to a single 'computer'?

This is narrow automaton thinking.

'Intelligence' in humans has nothing necessarily to do with real intelligence.

We are automatons with brains with very limited networking capability because of the limits of biology.

And of course what does 'replication' have to do with anything anyhow.

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

#527
post #322

I believe to create AI, we need to first simulate the universe. It's the only way that makes sense to me apart from some magical algorithm people think will be discovered. I'm doubtful we'll reach it in our lifetimes, true AI running on supercomputers, it seems like the final, end all mission. Like switching your Minecraft world from survival to creative mode.

I had a similarly nihilistic thought just a couple of days ago. It's like the conundrum among the lines of "a map of sufficient detail ends up being the same size as the terrain being mapped". To know the variables required for "intelligence" we need to recreate the universe in which intelligence came to be.

I've also thought this, and I wish people would at least approach the subject with a little bit more humility.

It did take evolution 3.5 billion years to do it after all, so I'm not sure what makes us think we can do it in a fraction of that time.

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

#528
post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The common current example? A text prompt of "A horse riding an astronaut" without prompt engineering. Though I don't think the successful production of this image will demonstrate intelligence/causal understanding either (but it is a good counter example). Causal understanding is going to be a bit difficult to prove tbh.

Counter-argument: DALL-E is smart enough to understand that an astronaut riding a horse makes more sense than a horse riding an astronaut, and therefore assumes that you meant "a horse-riding astronaut" unless you go out of your way to specify that you definitely do, in fact, want to see a horse riding an astronaut.

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

#529

Personally I hope this fails because of the disaster AGI would be for low/entry level jobs. The last thing the world needs is to give technocrats such power. I know it’s an interesting problem to solve but think of who will own that tech in the end… I hope AGI is never figured out in my lifetime.

I never understand this line of thinking. If a job becomes unnecessary, that’s a gain for humanity, not a loss.
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