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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

#261

As someone who works in IT for 20 years but has a bachelor in economic psychology, i do believe that we have not solved AGI yet because the creators of the models have the generalized view of the universe that you are "one person" and there are just so many detailed facets to that. Basically the assumption is that if you cram enough data into your gpt model, it should know everything. Which is of course not true, it…

Street-smart AI.

well yes and no. This AI would be more street-smart than GPT but only because it would grasp the concept of what "danger" actually is!

I think of it more in a way that learning is more abstract than fact learning. From experience, we think that there are fact learners and principle learners but there are also a mixtures of the two!

The general accepted model entails that in order to do high level math, for instance, you need to understand the basics, but for me much of those concept actually clicked in college. This did not stop me from applying them with success a lot earlier though. For instance multiplication in Kindergarten is fact learning too!

In Germany we also have the term "Fachidioten", which loosely translates to people that are so smart in their field, that they are unable to see problems from different directions. This is more of less what i think a mega gtp model turns into. especially because of selection bias in the training data.

Validity of output (truth) can only be achieved through the trust of the source which is always relative to the context of the topic. Henceforth a selectively trained model will always return the data you feed it including all biases. Even if you have it crawl all of the internet and the library of Alexandria and every written word on the planed you can find, it will still return to you the general accepted consensus.

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

#262
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fear this attitude will lead to job programs where people work a 9-5 and achieve essentially nothing, I.e. bullshit jobs. We already have plenty of those in the most profitable industries today.

Then better to remove such bullshit jobs even further.

So that those people won't have any jobs at all?

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these papers you list are about the model, and there is the original Transformer paper, and most of the others are some variations of the Transformer. I think to get into the field, to get a good overview, you should also look a bit beyond the Transformer. E.g. RNNs/LSTMs are still a must learn, even though Transformers might be better in many tasks. And then all those memory-augmented models, e.g. Neural Tur…

We should have an Ask HN where the people in the know can agree on 40 papers that the rest of us idiots can go out and consume.

This idiot would love it explained to me as well.

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

#264
post #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…

Creative destruction (see https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp) is a core to the United States

The problems are the generational suffering that occurs with said creative destruction: There's no incentive to distribute or share out wealth and the results are brutal.

On your point: Note that in the US there's a separation of technical and engineering prowess (MIT, Caltech, ...) and power players (Yale, Harvard). It's almost like our system doesn't want our best engineers thinking about consequences or seeing what the political and wealthy are really like.

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

#265

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…

Legitimately think that if you haven’t secured yourself financially in the next 5-8 years, its going to be a rough ride.

The thing is that you can't - securing yourself financially assumes that the society around your will be stable enough for the things you have secured (money, any other assets) to remain valuable and safe, which they won't be if you have huge societal disruptions and the majority of people are unemployable.

To oversimplify it - you'll either be breaking someone's window for food, or you'll be the one having their window broken. Chilling out and withdrawing a stable 4% out of your stock portfolio won't be an option.

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

#266
For a long time, there have been two general approaches to AI. The first was focused on algorithms and heuristics, giving us everything from Eliza and somewhat-useful expert systems to Doug Lenat's Cyc project. Then came "AI winter" and everything (except some robotics) was pretty much on hold for a decade. Finally we got "cheap and deep" neural-net stuff as we know it today. I think we need both before we can reach true AGI. Whoever unifies them will have achieved the equivalent of grand unification in physics. And probably also created Skynet.

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

#267
> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What makes our brain, what makes our intelligence, is not all that much code.

Nice thought

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

#268
post #67

I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different. From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months, and is just banking on PR…

I beg to differ. It's unbiased people like Carmack who tend to think out of the box. I don't think we can state that he did invent the FPS genre, but at the very least he was one of the initial catalysts. People who work in the field for a long time tend to have a certain bias towards a solution. Often these people are stuck in a local maxima. Outsiders can offer a new perspective that results in a breakthrough, usua…

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

#269

> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…

Well, we could also simply be a lot of RAM interacting with itself until the power runs out.

Following that trail of thought, intelligence is an achievement and not a physicality.

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

#270
Not AGI related but this has always bothered me.

I know he’s super talented but I always wonder how many other equally talented software engineers never get noticed and toil away at crappy jobs. What’s the trick to becoming a celebrity if you’re talented?

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