Live data from Hacker News

John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

amii.ca

51–60 of 226 posts

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

#51
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

A common definition for the purposes of AGI is that it has to be self-aware. But as someone else mentioned, the sci-fi definition is popular too: human-level intelligence.

"AI" is a bit of a loaded word. It does tasks of human-level intelligence well. But as far as being self-aware, it probably scores worse than a car. It's remarkably tricky to measure, because it's trained to act intelligent and use human language, but it's still effectively an autocomplete machine.

An ant is fairly robotic as far as organisms go, but it's also quite self-aware. It can communicate danger or food, it withdraws from death and damage. It likely doesn't have a sense of self, though an ant hill may. Just as our cells don't have a self-identity, but the larger system does.

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

#52
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The claim that "humans are basically long running LLMs" oversimplifies the complexity of human cognition and experience.

Humans don't just process information; they experience emotions, desires, and subjective experiences that are deeply intertwined with their cognition. LLMs don't have feelings, motivations, or consciousness.

Humans have inner subjective experience, self-awareness, and the ability to reflect on our own existence. LLMs don't.

Humans can adapt to a wide range of environments and situations, drawing from a complex interplay of instincts, learned behaviors, emotions, and rational thought. LLMs are much more limited in their adaptability, since they focus primarily on the tasks they were designed for.

Human cognition has evolved over millions of years and is rooted in a complex biological system, the brain. Yes, both LLMs and human brains process information, but the underlying mechanisms, structures, and functions are vastly different.

I really wish people would stop this sort of cavalier reductionism of humans by saying we are basically LLMs. It isn't true.

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

#53
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that? What we can LLMs are a specific architecture that literally does predict the next token, one at a time. This isn’t the only way to generate text. Perhaps humans use a method that synthesizes all the text at once. Or some other, unimaginable way.

Not sure about everyone else, but I write one word at a time.

[deleted]

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

#54
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that? What we can LLMs are a specific architecture that literally does predict the next token, one at a time. This isn’t the only way to generate text. Perhaps humans use a method that synthesizes all the text at once. Or some other, unimaginable way.

Not sure about everyone else, but I write one word at a time.

But are you writing to write or are you writing to convey a thought?

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

#55
post #43

I like Carmack but is it really necessary to have a post about everytime he mentions AI (which is every week for the past year)? So far, his track record in AI research is non-existent.

It’s AGI. So far everyone’s track record is nonexistent.

No. The parent comment said "AI Research".

If you want "AGI" so badly, you certainly need to have an "AI research" background and a track record. Can't achieve your "AGI" without that.

Given that Carmack has a close to zero track record in this research, it makes total sense for him to partner with someone that does.

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

#56
post #12

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

Perhaps there is some belief in this that an AGI can save us from our biggest problems? Energy Crisis, Environmental Pollution, Waging Wars. But I agree with you ... it is not really urgent since we know answers for the most of the problems but do not like the solution.

A true AGI would determine the only solution to our crisis is the elimination of the human race...

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

#58
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re vastly oversimplifying humans.

That’s like saying a physics simulation is basically an entire sub universe on your computer.

It sounds true, but it’s just not. It’s a gross oversimplification

I think Gödel had a proof for how it’s impossible to fully describe a system from within that system. That’s the nail in the coffin for AGI.

No matter how much data we give it, no matter how big it is, it’ll never be “human intelligent” since it’s impossible for us to describe a loss function for being human or describe being human in a dataset.

We’ll never be able to evaluate it, since we can’t fully describe what it means to communicate because to do that we’d need to communicate it and that process can’t be fully self describing.

Not to say AI isn’t useful or impressive, but it’ll never be comparable to humans, truly.

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

#59
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there is some belief in this that an AGI can save us from our biggest problems? Energy Crisis, Environmental Pollution, Waging Wars. But I agree with you ... it is not really urgent since we know answers for the most of the problems but do not like the solution.

A “solution” that isn’t viable nor palatable isn’t a true solution; it is often merely a hope that people are not people.

You’re presupposing every problem has a nice solution. This is almost certainly false

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

#60
post #43

I like Carmack but is it really necessary to have a post about everytime he mentions AI (which is every week for the past year)? So far, his track record in AI research is non-existent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Sutton
Post reply on HN