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John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

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Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#141

Post by foldr »

b112 wrote: post #68
foldr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s been going on about AI for at least a couple of years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530860 It’s certainly possible that he will have a novel idea, but I haven’t seen anything come out of it yet. I’m sure Carmack’s mathematical ability exceeds that of the average game developer (and certainly my own), but the AI field isn’t short of math whizzes.

He’s been going on about AI for at least a couple of years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/ A whole couple of years, eh? Wow, this AGI thing is taking forever!

I'm just saying there's been no visible indication of progress. You're obviously free to believe that something will come of it over a longer time period. It also seems that we can add at least another year based on this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21531255

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#142

Post by foldr »

HWR_14 wrote: post #98
foldr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s been going on about AI for at least a couple of years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530860 It’s certainly possible that he will have a novel idea, but I haven’t seen anything come out of it yet. I’m sure Carmack’s mathematical ability exceeds that of the average game developer (and certainly my own), but the AI field isn’t short of math whizzes.

I assume Carmack can pick up a lot about a new technical topic in a few years, similarly to how Bill Gates could learn a lot about vaccines and healthcare in a few years. "Hi, I'm (rich and nerd famous person) calling for (expert in field)." Probably spending most of that time being tutored by that experts PhD students.

I'm sure he can, but has Bill gates done actual groundbreaking research into vaccines, or just made intelligent decisions about what kind of research to fund? I think the latter.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#143

Post by dragonelite »

Jensson wrote: post #113
candiodari wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of new scientific results that in both Math and Machine Learning that are essentially 6 months/a few years/a few decades of hard work away from discovery. As a professor once told me: IF you're lucky, after 10 years in academia, you get to be creative and come up with 4-5 ideas once every 5 years or so (when coming up with the suggested list of research for new phd students to do). Then you get to be…

Yeah, so a person like Carmack who takes the risk and spent his career doing technically creative things could maybe make a difference. Probably not, but as long as creativity is so de-incentivized we will never have too many creative individuals around.

Even if those ideas are death ends its really important for the rest of the community to know at least some one has put some efforts and discovered several death branches in that creative direction.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#144

Post by spaceman_2020 »

jasmer wrote: post #115

"So I asked Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, for a reading list. 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 head." Wow, that's going to be one of the more glib things I've read in a while. This is a bit of a Tom Cruise moment. I mean, I get i…

It would have been a Tom Cruise moment if he’d said, “I learned CSS over the weekend and got it right the first time”!

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#145

Post by yreg »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #135
yreg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on whether you believe it is sentient.

I’m not sure this really matters. Mammals are clearly sentient, as a whole, but we don’t treat them as people usually.

We believe they are less sentient than us. And hurting a mammal is much less socially acceptable than hurting an insect, since we consider insects even less sentient, if at all.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#146

Post by gary_0 »

Jensson wrote: post #122
jasmer wrote: post #115

"So I asked Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, for a reading list. 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 head." Wow, that's going to be one of the more glib things I've read in a while. This is a bit of a Tom Cruise moment. I mean, I get i…

The models aren't particularly hard to implement, so a person who has spent his life and is one of the best game engine programmers in the world I don't think it would take that long to implement the cutting edge of todays machine learning models. Compared to game graphics shaders and the complex interactions you have to work with to get those performant and work correctly and display all the gameplay that happens th…

> The hard part is ... not building them when you already know what to build.

Indeed. A somewhat sharp schoolchild could build a light bulb or an electric motor/generator, and understand the basic underlying principles, in a pretty short time. But how many decades did it take the first researchers and inventors of those things to get to that same point?

Heck, there was a high school kid who built a primitive semiconductor fab in their garage.[0]

But for novel advancements, even getting to the point where you have an idea of what isn't impossible is half the battle.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28176255

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#147

Post by Simon321 »

thom wrote: post #93

I don't want to be an utter bore, but 60% chance of AGI by 2030, taken at face value, would have prompted me as an interviewer to more urgently ask deeper questions about safety. For a long time I have tried to comfort myself that brains are complicated, AI is hard, and maybe there's just a complexity barrier that is going to prevent any sort of hard takeoff scenario. Maybe we can have subhuman AGI that can do lots o…

A hard take off is unlikely because stronger AI takes a lot of hardware and data collection. Building fabs is hard and takes a lot of capital and time. Intelligence can only take you so far.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#148

Post by janalsncm »

Selfishly the hype for AGI is good for an ML engineer like myself. But I have to say that there is no hope in solving a problem (especially by 2030!) that one cannot even define.

Problems of the form “create a machine that can do X” are tractable. AGI is not because no one can agree on what intelligence is.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#149

Post by perryizgr8 »

rl3 wrote: post #137

Carmack makes four points—some of which I agree with—that are unfortunately disturbing when taken in totality: a) We’ll eventually have universal remote workers that are cloud-deployable. b) That we’ll have something on the level of a toddler first, at which point we can deploy an army of engineers, developmental psychologists, and scientists to study it. c) The source code for AGI will be a few tens of thousands of…

> what’s stopping a random person from intentionally or unintentionally ending human civilization?

If AGI is really an intelligent agent, our random supervillain would have to do what any real-life villain would need to do: convince his minions of his plan using persuasion or money. I don't think the overall danger would increase at all.

If the AGI is something less than a human, then what are you worried about?

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#150

Post by rplst8 »

foldr wrote: post #142
HWR_14 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Carmack can pick up a lot about a new technical topic in a few years, similarly to how Bill Gates could learn a lot about vaccines and healthcare in a few years. "Hi, I'm (rich and nerd famous person) calling for (expert in field)." Probably spending most of that time being tutored by that experts PhD students.

I'm sure he can, but has Bill gates done actual groundbreaking research into vaccines, or just made intelligent decisions about what kind of research to fund? I think the latter.

Sometimes real progress is made only by finding the proper place to "push" on an otherwise stubborn problem that won't budge.
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