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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#241

Post by fennecfoxy »

charcircuit wrote: post #217
nightski wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying we don't "need" AGI is like saying we don't need electricity. Sure life existed before we had that capability, but it would be very transformative. Of course we can make specialized tools in the mean time.

Can you give an example how it would be transformative compared to specialized AI?

Because it could very well exceed our capabilities beyond our wildest imaginations.

Because we evolved to get where we are, humans have all sorts of messy behaviours that aren't really compatible with a utopian society. Theft, violence, crime, greed - it's all completely unnecessary and yet most of us can't bring ourselves to solve these problems. And plenty are happy to live apathetically while billionaires become trillionaires...for what exactly? There's a whole industry of hyper-luxury goods now, because they make so much money even regular luxury is too cheap.

If we can produce AGI that exceeds the capabilities of our species, then my hope is that rather than the typical outcome of "they kill us all", that they will simply keep us in line. They will babysit us. They will force us all to get along, to ensure that we treat each other fairly.

As a parent teaches children to share by forcing them to break the cookie in half, perhaps AI will do the same for us.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#242

Post by throwup238 »

Jensson wrote: post #216
Nopoint2 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it? It just isn't needed. Just like you can find let's say kangaroos in the latent space of an image generator, so we learn abstract concepts and principles of how things work as a bonus of learning to process the senses. Maybe a way…

> There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it? We do have that, ever felt fear of heights? That isn't learned, we are born with it. Same with fear of small moving objects like spiders or snakes. Such things are learned/stored very different from memories, but its certainly…

> Like cats gets very scared of objects that are long and appear suddenly, like a cucumber, since their genetic instincts thinks its a snake.

After having raised four dozen kittens that a couple of feral sisters gave birth to in my garage, I’m certain that is nonsense. It’s an internet meme that became urban legend.

I don’t think they have ever even reacted to a cucumber, and I have run many experiments because my childhood cat loved cucumbers (we’d have to guard the basket of cucumbers after harvest, otherwise she’d bite every single one of them… just once).

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#243

Post by trial3 »

babyent wrote: post #239
ferguess_k wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't really need AGI. We need better specialized AIs. Throw in a few specialized AIs and they will leave some impact in the society. That might not be that far away.

Why not just hire like 100 of the smartest people across domains and give them SOTA AI, to keep the AI as accurate as possible? Each of those 100 can hire teams or colleagues to make their domain better, so there’s always human expertise keeping the model updated.

"just"

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#244

Post by ploden »

Why would AGI choose to be embodied? We talk about creating a superior intelligence and having it drive our cars and clean our homes. The scenario in Dan Simmons' Hyperion seems much more plausible: we invent AGI and it disappears into the cloud and largely ignores us.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#245

Post by jabits »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #225
Workaccount2 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday my dad, in his late 70's, used Gemini with a video stream to program the thermostat. He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat. You can call this hype, maybe it is all hype until LLMs can work on 10M LOC codebases, but recognize that LLMs are a shift that is totally incomparable to any previous AI advancement.

> He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat. Sounds like AI robbed you of an opportunity to spend some time with your Dad, to me

Or maybe instead of spending time with your dad on a bs menial task, you could spent time fishing with him…

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#246

Post by babyent »

trial3 wrote: post #243
babyent wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just hire like 100 of the smartest people across domains and give them SOTA AI, to keep the AI as accurate as possible? Each of those 100 can hire teams or colleagues to make their domain better, so there’s always human expertise keeping the model updated.

"just"

They’re spending 10s of billions. Yes, just.

200 million to have dedicated top experts on hand is reasonable.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#247

Post by fennecfoxy »

xnickb wrote: post #91
throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a problem that could be solved around the corner with a caveat. Games generally are solvable for AI because they have feedback loops and a clear success or failure criteria. If the "picking up a Joystick" part is the limiting factor, sure. But why would we want robots to use an interface (especially a modern controller) heavily optimized for human hands; that seems like the definition of a horseless…

Just like OpenAI early on promised us an AGI and showed us how it "solved" Dota 2. They also claimed it "learned" to play by playing itself only however it was clear that most of the advanced techniques were borrowed from existing AI and by observing humans. No surprise they gave up on that project completely and I doubt they'll ever engage in anything like that again. Money better spent on different marketing platfo…

To be fair humans have had quite a few million years across a growing population to gather all of the knowledge that we have.

As we're learning with LLMs, the dataset is what matters - and what's awesome is that you can see that in us, as well! I've read that our evolution is comparatively slow to the rate of knowledge accumulation in the information age - and that what this means is that you can essentially take a caveman, raise them in our modern environment and they'll be just as intelligent as the average human today.

But the core of our intelligence is logic/problem solving. We just have to solve higher order problems today, like figuring out how to make that chart in excel do the thing you want, but in days past it was figuring out how to keep the fire lit when it's raining. When you look at it, we've possessed the very core of that problem solving ability for quite a while now. I think that is the key to why we are human, and our close ancestors monkeys are...still just monkeys.

It's that problem solving ability that we need to figure out how to produce within ML models, then we'll be cooking with gas!

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#248

Post by Jensson »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #237
Jensson wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would seem our own generalized intelligence is an emergent property of many, _many_ specialized processes You can say that about other animals, but about humans it is not so sure. No animal can be taught as general set of skills as a human can, they might have some better specialized skills but clearly there is something special that makes humans so much more versatile. So it seems there was this simple little t…

Humans are the ceiling at the moment yes, but that doesn't mean the ceiling isn't higher. Science is full of theories that are correct per our current knowledge and then subsequently disproven when research/methods/etc improves. Humans aren't special, we are made from blood & bone, not magic. We will eventually build AGI if we keep at it. However unlike VCs with no real skills except having a lot of money™, I couldn'…

Question was if cobbling together enough special intelligence creates general intelligence. Monkeys has a lot of special intelligence that our current AI models can't come close to, but still aren't seen as general intelligence like humans, so there is some little bit humans has that isn't just another special intelligence.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#249

Post by bluefirebrand »

jabits wrote: post #245
bluefirebrand wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat. Sounds like AI robbed you of an opportunity to spend some time with your Dad, to me

Or maybe instead of spending time with your dad on a bs menial task, you could spent time fishing with him…

It's nice to think that but life and relationships are also composed of the little moments, which sometimes happen when someone asks you over to help with a "bs menial task"

It takes five minutes to program the thermostat, then you can have a beer on the patio if that's your speed and catch up for a bit

Life is little moments, not always the big commitments like taking a day to go fishing

That's the point of automating all of ourselves out of work, right? So we have more time to enjoy spending time with the people we love?

So isn't it kind of sad if we wind up automating those moments out of our lives instead?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#250

Post by cheschire »

WithinReason wrote: post #167
andy_ppp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is on Carmack.

"Graphics Carmack" is a genius but that doesn't mean that "AI Carmack" is too.

Carmack is always a genius, but like most people he requires luck, and like most people, the house always wins. Poor Armadillo Aerospace.
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