Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the logic seems flawed. He has built an AI system that fails to do X. That does not mean there isn't an AI system that can do X. Especially considering that a lot is happening in AI, as you say. Anyway, Carmack knows a lot about optimizing computations on modern hardware. In practice, that happens to be also necessary for AI. However, it is not __sufficient__ for AI.
> That does not mean there isn't an AI system that can do X. You are holding the burden of proof here...
There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
211–220 of 307 posts
Re: There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you please explain "the transfer function is negative"? I'm wondering whether one has tested with the same model but on two situations: 1) Bring it to superhuman level in game A and then present game B, which is similar to A, to it. 2) Present B to it without presenting A. If 1) is not significantly better than 2) then maybe it is not carrying much "knowledge", or maybe we simply did not program it correctly.
According to Carmack's recent talk [0], SOTA models that have been trained on game A don't perform better or train faster on game B. Even worse, training on game B negatively affects performance in game A when returning to it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pdlTMdo7pY
To mitigate this you have to include the other categories in your finetune training dataset so it doesn't lose the existing knowledge. Otherwise, the backpropagation and training will favour weights that reflect the new data.
In the game example having the weights optimized for game A doesn't help with game B. It would be interesting to see if training for both game A and B help it understand concepts in both.
Similarly with programming languages it would be interesting to see if training it with multiple languages if it can extract concepts like if statements and while loops.
IIUC from the observations with multilingual LLMs you need to have the different things you are supporting in the training set together. Then the current approach is able to identify similar concepts/patterns. It's not really learning these concepts but is learning that certain words often go together or that a word in one language is similar to another.
It would be interesting to study multilingual LLMs for their understanding of those languages in the case where the two languages are similar (e.g. Scottish and Irish Gaelic; Dutch and Afrikaans; etc.), are in the same language family (French, Spanish, Portuguese), or are in different language families (Italian, Japanese, Swahili), etc.
Re: There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
#213What John Carmack is exploring is pretty revealing. Train models to play 2D video games to a superhuman level, then ask them to play a level they have not seen before or another 2D video game they have not seen before. The transfer function is negative. So, in my definition, no intelligence has been developed, only expertise in a narrow set of tasks. It’s apparently much easier to scare the masses with visions of ASI…
Where can I read about these experiments?
Re: There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
#214Re: There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
#215Re: There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
#216What John Carmack is exploring is pretty revealing. Train models to play 2D video games to a superhuman level, then ask them to play a level they have not seen before or another 2D video game they have not seen before. The transfer function is negative. So, in my definition, no intelligence has been developed, only expertise in a narrow set of tasks. It’s apparently much easier to scare the masses with visions of ASI…
Re: There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
#217What John Carmack is exploring is pretty revealing. Train models to play 2D video games to a superhuman level, then ask them to play a level they have not seen before or another 2D video game they have not seen before. The transfer function is negative. So, in my definition, no intelligence has been developed, only expertise in a narrow set of tasks. It’s apparently much easier to scare the masses with visions of ASI…
There's something fascinating about this, because the human ability to "transfer knowledge" (eg pick up some other never before seen video game and quickly understand it) isn't really that general. There's a very particular "overtone window" of the sort of degrees of difference where it is possible. If I were to hand you a version of a 2d platformer (lets say Mario) where the gimmick is that you're actually playing t…
Except that's of course superficial nonsense. Position space isn't an accident of evolution, one of many possible encodings of spatial data. It's an extremely special encoding: The physical laws are local in position and space. What happens on the moon does not impact what happens when I eat breakfast much. But points arbitrarily far in momentum space do interact. Locality of action is a very very deep physical principle, and it's absolutely central to our ability to reason about the world at all. To break it apart into independent pieces.
So I strongly reject your example. It makes no sense to present the pictures of a video game in Fourier space. Its highly unnatural for very profound reasons. Our difficulty stems entirely from the fact that our vision system is built for interpreting a world with local rules and laws.
I also see no reason that an AI could successfully transfer between the two representations easily. If you start from scratch it could train on the Fourier space data, but that's more akin to using different eyes, rather than transfer.
Re: There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
#218What John Carmack is exploring is pretty revealing. Train models to play 2D video games to a superhuman level, then ask them to play a level they have not seen before or another 2D video game they have not seen before. The transfer function is negative. So, in my definition, no intelligence has been developed, only expertise in a narrow set of tasks. It’s apparently much easier to scare the masses with visions of ASI…
> What John Carmack is exploring is pretty revealing. Train models to play 2D video games to a superhuman level, then ask them to play a level they have not seen before or another 2D video game they have not seen before. Where can I read about these experiments?
Re: There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
#219What happens when we really run out of fresh, high-quality data? YouTube and robotics make sense as next frontiers, but they come with serious scaling, labeling, and privacy headaches
Re: There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
#220Models need to decide for themselves what they should learn.
Eventually, after entering the open world, reinforcement learning/genetic algorithms are still the only perpetual training solution.