191–200 of 387 posts
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Why does it need to be competitive? Maybe the guy has enough money to let him do whatever he wants regardless of the outcome and he chose AI because it's interesting to him.
In research you have to succeed before your competitors. It’s not research if it’s already been done.
It's always a treat to watch a Carmack lecture or read anything he writes, and his notes here are no exception. He writes as an engineer, for engineers and documents all his thought processes and misteps in the exact detailed yet concise way you'd want a colleague to who was handing off some work. One question I would have about the research direction is the emphasis on realtime. If I understand correctly he's doing…
From the notes: "A reality check for people that think full embodied AGI is right around the corner is to ask your dancing humanoid robot to pick up a joystick and learn how to play an obscure video game."
I find it interesting that he dismisses LLMs. I would argue that if he wants to do AGI through RL, a LLM could be a perfect teacher or oracle. After all i'm not walking around as a human and not having guidance. It should/could make RL a lot faster leveraging this. My logical part / RL part does need the 'database'/fact part and my facts are trying to be as logical as possible but its just not.
What Carmack is doing is right. More people need to get away from training their models just with words. AI need the physicality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NijXqBESI
He also talks needing large amounts of compute to run the virtual environments where you'll be training embodied AI. Very much worth watching.
> Fundamentally, I believe in the importance of learning from a stream of interactive experience, as humans and animals do, which is quite different from the throw-everything-in-a-blender approach of pretraining an LLM. The blender approach can still be world-changingly valuable, but there are plenty of people advancing the state of the art there. It's a shame that pretrained approach leads to such good enough result…
Humans had 500 million * 8670 hours of Pre-Training. I don't get why Carmack would say things should be learned in hours or upper bounds it to human lifetime.
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This debate is exhausting because there's no coherent definition of AGI that people agree on. I made a google form question for collecting AGI definitions cause I don't see anyone else doing it and I find it infinitely frustrating the range of definitions for this concept: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScDF5_CMSjHZDDexHkc... My concern is that people never get focused enough to care to define it - seems li…
It doesn't really seem like there's much utility in defining it. It's like defining "heaven." It's an ideal that some people believe in, and we're perpetually marching towards it
Can we just use Morris et al and move on with our lives?
Position: Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI: https://arxiv.org/html/2311.02462v4
There are generational policy and societal shifts that need to be addressed somewhere around true Competent AGI (50% of knowledge work tasks automatable). Just like climate change, we need a shared lexicon to refer to this continuum. You can argue for different values of X but the crucial point is if X% of knowledge work is automated within a decade, then there are obvious risks we need to think about.
So much of the discourse is stuck at “we will never get to X=99” when we could agree to disagree on that and move on to considering the x=25 case. Or predict our timelines for X and then actually be held accountable for our falsifiable predictions, instead of the current vide based discussions.
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> This kind of context management is not that hard, even when building LLMs. It is, at least if you wish to be in the meatspace, that's my point. Every day has 86400 seconds during which a human brain constantly adapts to and learns from external input - either directly as it's being awake or indirectly during nighttime cleanup processes. On top of that, humans have built-in filters for training. Basically, we see so…
>Every day has 86400 seconds during which a human brain constantly adapts to and learns from external That's not even remotely true. At least not in the sense that it is for context in transformer models. Or can you tell me all the visual and auditory inputs you experienced yesterday at the 45232nd second? You only learn permanently and effectively from particular stimulation coupled with surprise. That has a sample…
This is just, not true. A single 2min conversation with emotional or intellectual resonance can significantly alter a human’s thought process for years. There are some topics where every time they come up directly or analogously I can recall something a teacher told me in high school that “stuck” with me for whatever reason. And it isn’t even a “core” experience, just something that instantly clicked for my brain and altered my problem solving. At the time, there’s no heuristic that could predict how or why that particular interaction should have that kind of staying power.
Not to mention, experiences that subtly alter thinking or behavior just by virtue of providing some baseline familiarity instead of blank slate problem solving or routine. Like how you subtly adjust how you interact with coworkers based on the culture of your current company over time vs the last without any “flash” of insight required.
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My bet is on Carmack.
What has he shipped in the last 20 years? Oculus is one thing, but that was firmly within his wheelhouse of graphics optimization. Abrash and co. handled the hardware side of things. Carmack is a genius no doubt. But genius is the result of intense focused practice above and beyond anyone else in a particular area. Trying to extend that to other domains has been the downfall of so many others like him.
I feel top level AI creation is beyond his skill set. He’s a AAA software engineer but the prerequisites to build out cutting edge AI require deep formal math that is beyond his education and years at this point. Nothing to stop him playing around with AI models though.
John Carmack: So I asked Ilya, their chief scientist, for a reading list. This is my path, my way of doing things: give me a stack of all the stuff I need to know to actually be relevant in this space. And he gave me a list of like 40 research papers and said, 'If you really learn all of these, you'll know 90% of what matters today! And I did. I plowed through all those things and it all started sorting out in my hea…
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This debate is exhausting because there's no coherent definition of AGI that people agree on. I made a google form question for collecting AGI definitions cause I don't see anyone else doing it and I find it infinitely frustrating the range of definitions for this concept: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScDF5_CMSjHZDDexHkc... My concern is that people never get focused enough to care to define it - seems li…
It doesn't really seem like there's much utility in defining it. It's like defining "heaven." It's an ideal that some people believe in, and we're perpetually marching towards it