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John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

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Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#101

Post by zelly »

bronz wrote: post #26

i say this with respect and humility, but i am very surprised at the naivete with which John addressed the subject of AGI. he is so casual about it -- not only the idea of working on it but also the idea of it existing at all. he seems oblivious to the gravity of that discovery. it is not just "very valuable," it will be earth shattering and probably wipe out humanity. and its his side-project. and his son will help…

It would be easier to take the AI doomsayers' seriously if we were remotely close to AGI. For now it's treated the same way as some guy in a cape in Central Park trying to summon Satan. No one cares because everyone knows it's basically impossible.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#103

Post by K0SM0S »

The_rationalist wrote: post #11

I hope he'll go the hybrid symbolic and neural network way (causal and statistical), instead of just statistical. AGI needs a type system... I hope I'll achieve AGI before him but it's nice to know there's some real competition! (because, reader, there are almost 0 researchers seriously trying to achieve AGI in a not totally bullshit way. Only opencog and Cyc comes to mind).

> AGI needs a type system.

My brain bit on that remark; would you care to elaborate?

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#104

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bronz wrote: post #26

i say this with respect and humility, but i am very surprised at the naivete with which John addressed the subject of AGI. he is so casual about it -- not only the idea of working on it but also the idea of it existing at all. he seems oblivious to the gravity of that discovery. it is not just "very valuable," it will be earth shattering and probably wipe out humanity. and its his side-project. and his son will help…

> and probably wipe out humanity.

Probably? I do not think that word means what you think it means... or else I don't think the balance of probability lies where you think it does.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#105

Post by ralusek »

umvi wrote: post #92

There's no such thing as AGI in my opinion. There is no way to create a "conscious" machine. We might be able to come up with some reasonably impressive imitations, but nothing that is conscious or actually thinking like a human.

Your opinion is very likely incorrect.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#106

Post by The_rationalist »

cr0sh wrote: post #12
The_rationalist wrote: post #11

I hope he'll go the hybrid symbolic and neural network way (causal and statistical), instead of just statistical. AGI needs a type system... I hope I'll achieve AGI before him but it's nice to know there's some real competition! (because, reader, there are almost 0 researchers seriously trying to achieve AGI in a not totally bullshit way. Only opencog and Cyc comes to mind).

You forgot "he who shall not be named"... /ok, maybe his project falls under "total bullshit"...

Who are you referring to? SOAR?

Contrary to popular belief, both openai and deepmind have zero roadmap and specification of a cognitive architecture, not even a semantic parser.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#107

Post by whymauri »

catalogia wrote: post #62
pyentropy wrote: post #33

Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances. I wonder what kind of advances are needed for AGI. 1. Biological brains are non-differentiable spiking networks much more complicated than backpropagated ANNs. 2. Ion channels may or may not be affected by quantum effects. 3. The search space is huge (but organisms aren't optimal and natural selection is probably local search) 4. If it took ~3.8b years t…

From what I understand, quantum effects being essential to the process is a fringe belief. Penrose is probably the most famous 'serious person' (sorry Deepak Chopra) to espouse the idea, but I'm inclined to believe that might be a Linus Pauling/Vitamin C sort of scenario. Penrose started from the perspective of believing there must be quantum effects, then began fishing for physical evidence of it.

I was taught that the quantum theory of memory and cognition generally falls under Eric Schwartz's "neuro-bagging" fallacy [0]. That is:

>You assert that an area of physics or mathematics familiar to few neuroscientists solves a fundamental problem in their field. Example: "The cerebellum is a tensor of rank 10^12; sensory and motor activity is contravariant and covariant vectors".

So yeah, I feel that it's pretty fringe (as you suggested).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170828092031/http://cns-web.bu...

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#108

Post by 77pt77 »

umvi wrote: post #92

There's no such thing as AGI in my opinion. There is no way to create a "conscious" machine. We might be able to come up with some reasonably impressive imitations, but nothing that is conscious or actually thinking like a human.

So what goes beyond physics in the human brain?

Because we can simulate physics.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#109

Post by zaroth »

carlosdp wrote: post #100
mochomocha wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). You must be joking, right? I'm as much of a Carmack fan as anyone here, but overstating the skills of one personal hero does no good to anyone.

I'm not saying he's LeCun, I'm just saying he gets up to speed absurdly fast. So it's not unreasonable to suppose that by now, he's learned enough to start seriously contributing to this kind of problem. edit: to be clear, all I'm saying is he can catch up to the body of research already out there quicker than the average bear, and he's shown a real knack for designing solutions and being crazy productive. I'm not pr…

No, you can’t push the envelope in AGI after a week in the woods. That must come off as pretty insulting to the hundreds of world class scientists who have been working in the field for decades.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#110

Post by JaRail »

pyentropy wrote: post #33

Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances. I wonder what kind of advances are needed for AGI. 1. Biological brains are non-differentiable spiking networks much more complicated than backpropagated ANNs. 2. Ion channels may or may not be affected by quantum effects. 3. The search space is huge (but organisms aren't optimal and natural selection is probably local search) 4. If it took ~3.8b years t…

> Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances.

I think you'd be surprised how much progress is also being made outside those two factors. It's sort of like saying graphics only improve with more RAM and faster compute. We know there's more to it than that.

In many cases, the cutting edge of a few years ago is easily bested by today's tutorial samples and 30 seconds of training. We're doing better with less data and orders of magnitude less compute.

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