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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

#251

Post by m0zg »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #229
m0zg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to mention, crucially, that neurons in close proximity affect each other, which is just one of the things that makes modeling of more than a few neurons in time domain a complete non-starter. It all results in enormous systems of PDEs which we don't know how to solve yet at all. You could say that we do not have the right mathematical apparatus to model any such thing.

I don't follow that. What would prevent (perhaps quite slow) simulation of a larger system of such neurons? E.g. N-body problems are analytically beyond us, but can be simulated to arbitrary precision with certain trade-offs.

Time domain solutions do not exist for more than a dozen neurons. At least they did not when I took a computational neuroscience MOOC a couple of years ago. State of the art at the time was the nervous system of an earthworm. That is, if you consider what you actually need to do to simulate how potentials will change in the brain over time give a certain starting state and stimuli, the math gets so complicated (and awkward) so quickly that it's not really tractable with the mathematical (or simulation) apparatus we currently have to go beyond such trivial systems.

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

#252

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE »

DavidSJ wrote: post #166
derefr wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many historical figures went through the same thing? Who do we know for their contributions to field X, when 99% of their life was spent contributing to field Y?

Isaac Newton spent most of his life pursuing alchemy and obscure theological ideas, and found it a real nuisance whenever anyone pestered him about math or physics.

That's a great example. He also spent a long time at The Mint.

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

#253

Post by ineedasername »

drcode wrote: post #185
jacquesm wrote: post #168

AGI is not an engineering problem but a research problem. John Carmack is good at putting stuff together but how good he is at coming up with novel concepts for an open research problem remains to be seen. Even the rocketry example that is hailed here as a success mostly wasn't. That doesn't make me happy, it would have been far nicer if Armadillo had succeeded, more competition in that space is better. But for all t…

Carmack is someone who has proven to be an almost unequalled productivity machine when working on medium-difficulty problems... Now, for the first time, we'll see if his approach to problem solving can also work on a truly difficult problem. I agree it's very much an open question.

Is that really true though? It seems more like he's good at a medium difficulty problems in a narrow subdomain of software development, which is saying something a bit different. I might even say he's good at hard problems within that subdomain. How transferable those skills are is the most salient point. Assuming peak genius level intellect (which, I don't know, maybe?) It would still take something like 4 or 5 years to reach expert level knowledge in such a complex domain.

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

#254

Post by robryan »

starpilot wrote: post #236
nwsm wrote: post #195

What a joke. Carmack is going to sit at home and solve what teams of scientists can't do in decades. I'm complaining less about Carmack wanting to spend his time doing this and more about the comments here acting like he is some 10000x research scientist.

I wouldn't be that... mean. But if it's anything like his aerospace pursuits, yeah, I wouldn't bet on any breakthroughs.

To be fair aerospace was never really a full time thing and was budget restricted. Given fulltime and Bezos money who knows.

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

#255

Post by jacquesm »

carlosdp wrote: post #186
jacquesm wrote: post #168

AGI is not an engineering problem but a research problem. John Carmack is good at putting stuff together but how good he is at coming up with novel concepts for an open research problem remains to be seen. Even the rocketry example that is hailed here as a success mostly wasn't. That doesn't make me happy, it would have been far nicer if Armadillo had succeeded, more competition in that space is better. But for all t…

Bringing up armadillo wasn't meant as an example of success in business but rather as an example of ability to dive into new fields effectively. They did some cool stuff in their short run, and there's an offshoot company still going. But yea, I agree with your general point. I'd just note that having that ability to be insanely productive in working on things people haven't done before means to me that if it's possi…

I'm not in Carmack's league by any stretch of the imagination but I earn a living with being able to absorb a lot of data on a new field in a very short time so I have some idea of what that is like. When other people have already done all the hard work for you that's very easy going if you have some basic knowledge that you can integrate the new stuff with. But that's an entirely different matter compared to actually moving the needle on new stuff, this takes years at a minimum; and is not something that you can do by reading up and then rolling up your shirtsleeves. If only it were that easy. There are 100's of John Carmacks in various fields, I've met a couple and while in the past this sort of attitude was a prerequisite to being a scientist (in the 1800's every scientist was pretty much a polymath, there wasn't all that much knowledge to begin with) nowadays any science worth doing is going to require a lot of specialization first.

This is akin to the way - on topic - computer games have developed; in the early days almost all games were made by individuals. Now it is all studios and teamwork, very rarely does an individual still manage to break out of the mold and the level of expectation that we've set. But when it does happen (Minecraft, for instance) it can be a runaway success.

Anyway, I wish John the very best but I think the chances of an Armadillo repeat are somewhat higher than of him coming out of his closet with a working AGI, and just in case he does I'm not sure the rest of the world is going to be ready for that (entirely different discussion, there are plenty of SF books and movies exploring that theme).

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

#256

Post by azth »

buboard wrote: post #147
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…

> even rodents can outperform state of the art models at general tasks Rodents can't play Go or a lot of other humanly-meaningful tasks. We don't need to build an artificial cell. A cell is too many components that by blind luck happened to find ways to work together, this is as far from efficient design as can be. The same way we don't build two-legged airplanes, we don't need anything that's close to the wet spiky…

> A cell is too many components that by blind luck happened to find ways to work together

Can't tell if sarcasm.

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

#257

Post by Jach »

mrfusion wrote: post #174
echelon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird future it would be if Carmack turns out to be the one to figure out the critical path and get it all working. An entire field of brilliant researchers be damned. History books (for as long as those continue to exist) would cite AGI as his major contribution to society, and his name would be more renowned than Edison or Tesla. An Einstein. None of his other contributions will matter, as the machines will…

I don’t think there are many researchers in AGI. AFAIK it’s kind of a joke field because no one has any clue how to approach true AGI. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

People have approaches. There's no end to half-assed "I thought about this for 10 seconds, how hard could it be!" solutions, really old approaches from decades ago where the brightest academics thought they could lick the problem over a summer, and some new public or hidden approaches that might be promising but (I can't know of course) I predict will still look a lot different than the final thing.

I think a big reason there are few in AGI is due to PR success from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and friends. They make a good case that things are unlikely to end well for us humans if there's actually a serious attempt at AGI now that proves successful without having solved or mitigated the alignment problem first.

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

#259

Post by acdha »

buboard wrote: post #211
romwell wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the analogy is that the car, by far, is not a general transportation device. Practically, most cars are solving a very constrained transportation problem: moving on roads that humans made. We don't have anything remotely close to a wetware-enabled transportation device, something that can move on flat land, climb mountains, swim in bodies of water, crawl in caves, hide in trees. Within the constraine…

> constrained problem human AI also evolved by solving constrained problems, one at a time. Life existed before the visual system , but once this was solved it moved on to do other things. In AI we have a number of sensory systems seemingly solved: Speech recognition, visual object recognition, and we are closing to certain output (motor) systems: NLP text synthesis systems seem a lot like the central pattern generat…

> In AI we have a number of sensory systems seemingly solved: Speech recognition, visual object recognition,

Do you have examples of those systems which are competitive in general use rather than specialized niches? The cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, etc. are good in the specific cases they’re trained on but fall off rapidly once you get new variants which a human would handle easily.

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

#260

Post by wanderer2323 »

nwsm wrote: post #195

What a joke. Carmack is going to sit at home and solve what teams of scientists can't do in decades. I'm complaining less about Carmack wanting to spend his time doing this and more about the comments here acting like he is some 10000x research scientist.

I doubt he will sit at home working on it alone for long.
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