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John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

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

#111
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGI he'll write will make us unlimited Commander Keen sequels.

If we're lucky, the AGI will be the player and we'll be Commander Keen. If we're unlucky, we'll be the marine from Doom. God mode with 7 billion lives!

Let’s just hope we’re not the dopefish

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

#112
post #70

I often wonder if the pursuit of AGI is going to require a greater focus on new hardware architecture. All the sci-fi seems think this. I have seen Intel chips from the 80s that implemented neuron like behavior on a chip. We are still waiting on a practical memristor.

I doubt it - modern computers are already pretty fast at brute-forcing all sorts of things and the first AGI will be perfectly functional even if it takes a full day to respond, and AGI research requires you to fully understand what you're creating before you create it so full-system testing is something you'd only want to do near the end of the project anyway. At which point you basically want an ASIC.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would probably be the simplest solution to a naive super intelligent agi. Just take a look at how humanity dealt with dangerous animals. They are mostly no longer around unless in a zoo.

Humans don't put ants in zoos because the ants overconsume their localized habitat though. A naive super intelligent agi has no reason to care if global warming makes the planet 150 degrees F on average, if it's self-interested it would surely be able to be "ok" on a planet under those conditions.

Sure, but at some point it will be asked to solve those problems and if it's not properly built, could easily arrive at that conclusion from a problem solving perspective. Self interest doesn't have to come into play at all here.

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

#114
post #103
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to place bets on which lab will invent agi I'd bet against "invent AGI" being a coherent or agreed upon thing, and I'd also bet against the "wake-up" scenario of a system saying "I'm AGI" Which lab invented deep learning? Certainly U Toronto had the breakthrough that made a 30+ year old field exciting, but there was a lot of work in Montreal, NYU, Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, and many other places

Didn't Schmidhuber's lab predate all of those in their inventions except ReLU (which I've heard is now out of favor as compute outpaces memory bandwidth and other activation functions have better properties).

Yeah I should have mentioned him too as evidence of the point!

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

#115
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.

I agree with the sentiment and I've been watching his tweets on AI to see if Carmack has any relevant input on the field. But what I think is very interesting is that, from my totally lay-person perspective, the current challenge is scaling out the AI systems we have. We know what systems like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 require to run and it is now an engineering challenge to scale up those systems (or drastically reduce thei…

If Carmack started contributing to llama.cpp, we'd probably see something tangible in a few weeks lol.

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

#116
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Can't achieve your "AGI" without that. Can I ask, what makes you so confident on that? For all I know (which is admittably not much), current AI may be going to a direction completely orthogonal to achieving AGI.

The current trend in AI isn't all of AI, and any kind of work with the goal of producing AGI would definitionally be classified as AI.

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

#117
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.

From what I have read, John had a genius for what you might call relentless optimization. Even if they just improve the performance or reduce the hardware requirements of executing an already trained LLM that would be a huge win. Current progress in that regard focuses on reducing the fidelity of the LLM to make it easier to execute, which isn’t ideal.

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

#118
post #27

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

Without taking a particular position on how the probabilities shake out, I suggest critically reading “What We Owe the Future” by William MacAskill and:or other long-term writings that use statistical thinking over a wide range of future scenarios.

I don't get to meet the people who spend time on HN. But I'm curious: who doesn't see the value in _critically_ reading long-term thinking over a wide range of future scenarios?

Too busy coding? Reading about something for _your_ career? In service of _your_ family? Trying to get ahead? Yeah, I get it. But tell me: isn't thinking long-term worth something akin to a few hours a month?

You don't need to be doom-and-gloom about it. Sure, get stuff done. Be in the moment. All good.

Wouldn't it be nice to have some confidence that we're setting up future generations to have the possibility to at least have what we do, if not better?

P.S. FWIW, the morality of valuing future generations is _not_ properly addressed by most moral philosophies.

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

#119
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.

I agree. The guruism on HN about this guy is crazy. Yeah, he made some really cool games 20-30 years ago, but do we really need a front page post every time he tweets? I'd prefer to hear about the company once they actually get something done.

There aren’t enough John Carmack submissions. He has great insight and has lived quite a full life in the industry.

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

#120
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richard Sutton has done fascinating RL research in the past. Lately, though, he has been advocating for ending humanity, which is a bit more chilling[1]: > Rather quickly, [AI] would displace us from existence. […] It behooves us to give them every advantage, and to bow out when we can no longer contribute… [1]: https://youtu.be/NgHFMolXs3U?si=5sriRVFKw61K5yes&t=399

That is not, what he is advocating, at the timestamp you referred to.

After watching the video, I agree with that summarization of Rich's arguments. Building AI so humanity can go gently into that good night seemed very much the theme of that talk.

What is your take on it?

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