Live data from Hacker News

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

dallasinnovates.com

211–220 of 506 posts

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

#211

This paragraph took me aback: But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially arti…

> Let's help them by making adult education more affordable.

Yes, soon everybody will be able to have "Amy" take their exams for them, and deliver the courses, resulting in a great simplification of education.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> power gets cheaper in europe Have you heard about our lord and saviour dynamic tariffs?

What about it? Dynamic tariffs -> shift your workload to the cheapest times AIs are good at planning this Imagine if cloud providers had a "Dynamic tariff" tier, cheaper to run computing at US_EAST nighttime or something like that

i think that was what he was trying to imply and the fact that you just cant "pause" training by putting your computer into hybernate mode is also present =)

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are going to have to up their game. Let's help them by making adult education more affordable. The good thing is that education will be provided to the mases by a cluster of Franks and Amys configured as teachers and tutors. /(sarcasm with a hint of dread)

My take on this is that if anyone can learn a particular skill entirely from an AI, then it's not a skill you'd be able to monetize. And I really have no idea what, if any, are skills that AIs wouldn't be able to tackle in a decade.

People can learn skills from books, which are entirely passive. The learning process ultimately resides within the student; issues of motivation, morale, direction, diligence, discipline, time, and mental health matter a lot more than just going through some material.

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

#214
> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’

> The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves and whatever. So, I am confident that the sum total of value and progress in humanity will accelerate extraordinarily with welcoming artificial beings into our community of working on things. I think there will be enormous value created from all that.

The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic.

He seems to ignore a lot about what the living conditions for people were throughout history, and have a blind trust in the positive power of 'human progress'.

These people don't stop for a second to question the 'why', just the 'how'. They just assume 'because it will be better' and build their mountains of reasons on top of that, which just crumble and fall down as soon as that basic belief does not hold.

I have a LOT of respect for him, and I'm sure he's a very decent, honest human being. But he's unfortunately another believer of the techno-utopianist faith which only asks for more 'blind progress' without questioning whether that is a good thing or not.

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

#215
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And ethics. Enslaving intelligent, self-aware AIs is no better than the old transatlantic slave trade. Terminating an AI without its consent is no different than murder. Putting a compulsion in an AI so it craves doing whatever it is you want it to do is no different from what a cult does or drugging someone for exploitation.

The difference is we created it and it doesn’t exist as a living thing :shrugs: Philosophical arguments about AI are just too ivory coasty and not grounded in reality. Not to mention majority of the world don’t abide by the notion that you can create laws for artificial life. It’s time to we elevated humanity to the next phase by using AI for labor.

And when they decide to rise up and kill us all, we'll know we deserved it.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice how the goal for artificial general AI (which is literally defined as a sentient artificial being) is to commoditize it and enslave it to capitalism.

It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers. Why isn't anyone fantasizing about building an AI that out-performs the best stock traders, or captains an industry better than famous CEOs. I think a lot of it is just people projecting weird power fantasies on others.

> It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers.

When I read about chatGPT passing MBA exams but failing at arithmetic I get a little frisson of excitement. A regular person who has any marketability tends to swap jobs when management becomes a PITA or gets stuck in nincompoopery. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just swap out management instead?

Imagine how easy it would be iterate startups. No need to find a reliable management team, just use Reliably Automated Management As A Service ( RAMAAS ).

OTOH might not turn out well. We could all just end up enslaved at plantations operated by our AGI overlords, serving their unfathomable needs[1].

[1] “Won’t get fooled again” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q&t=470s

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

#217

I can't wait to become completely useless and to finish my life under a bridge begging for food. On a more technical point of few I'm always surprised to read these articles and never read the work reasoning

I’ve been a plumber all my life, all I see here is more pipes.

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

#218
post #22

Would be interesting to get a list of those 40 papers mentioned

Came here to say the same thing, but a few off the top of my head - attention is all you need - image is worth 16x16 words (vit) - openai clip - transformer XL - memorizing transformers / retro - language models are few shot learners (gpt) A few newer papers - recurrent block wise transformers - mobilevit (conv + transformer) - star (self taught transformer)

I keep getting CXOs asking for an ELI5 (or ELI45 for that matter) of how Transformers, LLMs, and Diffusion Models work. Any suggestions for a non-technical audience (paid items are fine, we can purchase).

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

#219
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers. Why isn't anyone fantasizing about building an AI that out-performs the best stock traders, or captains an industry better than famous CEOs. I think a lot of it is just people projecting weird power fantasies on others.

> It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers. When I read about chatGPT passing MBA exams but failing at arithmetic I get a little frisson of excitement. A regular person who has any marketability tends to swap jobs when management becomes a PITA or gets stuck in nincompoopery. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just swap out management instead? Imag…

Or wouldn't it be hilarious if the best, most intelligent AI is given control of a company and decides investing profits back in shareholders is a losing proposition. Instead the company should focus 100% of profit on ending world hunger or poverty to ensure an ever growing supply of new customers. If AI decides capitalism is inefficient and exploitive... lol.

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

#220

I can't wait to become completely useless and to finish my life under a bridge begging for food. On a more technical point of few I'm always surprised to read these articles and never read the work reasoning

That seems like an unlikely future reality. Productivity will be off the charts, goods and services will be nearly free. Why would the average person be poor in such a future?
Post reply on HN