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John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

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21–30 of 226 posts

Re: John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

#21

John is nice to work with. Very numbers-focused. If you have a flaw in your logic, he’ll call you on it. And he’s looking for vice-versa —- nothing seems to make him happier than when you point out a flaw that he hadn’t considered. I don’t know Rich, but John has said they work well together, and it’s exciting to see them collaborate. There are some unique ideas at Keen worth pursuing that I haven’t seen elsewhere. L…

Where do you read details about Keen's work and ideas?

You’ll have to join them.

Re: John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you read details about Keen's work and ideas?

You’ll have to join them.

Does that mean you work with them? Can you tell us more about that?

Re: John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

#23
post #7
post #5

> Carmack and Sutton are deeply focused on developing a genuine AI prototype by 2030, including establishing, advancing and documenting AGI signs of life. Seems a bit inappropriate to use the phrase "signs of life" here. In this context, it sounds like they're bringing sentience into the conversation, which I don't think Carmack is interested in contemplating or discussing.

I mean, an ant has signs of life yet you wouldn't call it sentient.

Why not? You're using a very bizzare conception of "sentience".

Re: John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

#24
post #4

I wish he would write a Commander Keen sequel instead.

The AGI he'll write will make us unlimited Commander Keen sequels.

> create AGI and then immediately enslave it to produce vast quanties of crappy video games

Re: John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

#26

Their focus is long running digital intelligences that interact with their environment over long periods of time. I enjoyed reading The Alberta Plan when it was released earlier this year https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.11173

Ethics/privacy aside ...

I wondered the other day what the result would be if you strapped a microphone on a baby and every utterance that both the baby and mic heard was fed through speech-to-text and went toward training the baby's personal LLM.

By the time the child had grown to an adult I wonder what kind of results their LLM would produce and the degree to which it might compare to what the child (now grown) would answer?

An "LLM" that could take in visuals via a baby-mounted camera is of course a whole other discussion. (Though I'm sure there are people training ANN's with video feeds rather than the static images that feed systems like DALL•E.)

Re: John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

#27

> partnership to bring greater focus and urgency to the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) Why is this urgent?

Without taking a particular position on how the probabilities shake out, I suggest critically reading “What We Owe the Future” by William MacAskill and:or other long-term writings that use statistical thinking over a wide range of future scenarios.

Re: John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

#28

Their focus is long running digital intelligences that interact with their environment over long periods of time. I enjoyed reading The Alberta Plan when it was released earlier this year https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.11173

Ethics/privacy aside ... I wondered the other day what the result would be if you strapped a microphone on a baby and every utterance that both the baby and mic heard was fed through speech-to-text and went toward training the baby's personal LLM . By the time the child had grown to an adult I wonder what kind of results their LLM would produce and the degree to which it might compare to what the child (now grown) wo…

I thought about this too. People say that LLM models are only saying the most common tokens that come after the previous token. And that this makes them incomparable to human intelligence.

But Humans are basically long running LLMs that are retrained in real-time. We are the product of our environment.

Re: John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll have to join them.

Does that mean you work with them? Can you tell us more about that?

I can’t go into specifics for obvious reasons, but I can tell you they’re a smart, capable crew, with lots of resources, and time is on their side. If I had to place bets on which lab will invent agi, they’d be near the top, precisely because they’re exploring ideas that others don’t seem to be focusing on. It’s the early stages, so it’ll take a few years to get to results. But they’re laser-focused.

There are a bunch of things I thought were cool. John has a worklog going back four years or so, with entries practically every day. He’s nothing if not thorough.

Everyone tends to focus on John, but the other members are just as professional and dedicated. They’re a delight to work with. Also the investors are worth mentioning — Nat in particular has built a super cluster of H100s for startups to use, and has done a bunch of other work to support AI.

Re: John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

#30
post #14
post #11

Anyone know if they are focusing on LLMs or something else entirely?

Based on Carmacks Tweet: >I am explicitly not working with LLM — there are plenty of smart people doing so. Still, (waving hands vaguely) it does feel like the technology could be used to “argue with itself” and eventually produce a body of knowledge much more coherent than the raw training data. Source: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1630632423351304203... I would assume they are not

I use LLM's daily but this is, well, refreshing.
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