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…
This reminds me of a interesting armchair moral dilemma: Assume we have the tech to replicate/simulate a biological brain. Now say we want to study the effects of extreme pain/torture etc on the brain. Instead of studying living animals or humans we'd just simulate a brain, and simulate sending it pain signals and see what happens. But, if this is a 100% replicated brain, doesn't that mean its suffering is just as re…
John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
271–280 of 930 posts
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even rodents can outperform state of the art models at general tasks. Rodents? Try insects [1]. In the late 40s and early 50s, when neural networks were first explored with great enthusiasm, some of the leading minds of that generation believed (were convinced, in fact) that artificial intelligence (or AGI in today's terms) is five/ten years away; the skeptics, like Alan Turing, thought it was fifty years away. Sev…
This jumping spider has ~600k neurons in its brain - https://youtu.be/UDtlvZGmHYk They are creepy smart.
Just wanted to say holy crap that video was amazing - exciting and suspenseful!
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances. I think you'd be surprised how much progress is also being made outside those two factors. It's sort of like saying graphics only improve with more RAM and faster compute. We know there's more to it than that. In many cases, the cutting edge of a few years ago is easily bested by today's tutorial samples and 30 seconds of training. We're doing better w…
But not towards AGI. We're just improving on narrow AI after recent breakthroughs thanks to the hardware being powerful enough and large datasets being available.
The point the poster above is trying to make is that given the same amount of data, improvements in technique is leading to significant improvements in accuracy.
An illustrative example comes from the first lesson in fastai's deep learning course: an image classifier that would have been SOTA as late as 2012/13, can be built by the hobbyist in like 30 seconds.
That said, I don't disagree that this is all narrow AI, at best.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#274AGI 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…
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Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you can’t push the envelope in AGI after a week in the woods. That must come off as pretty insulting to the hundreds of world class scientists who have been working in the field for decades.
I never said that, where the hell did I say he pushed anything? All I'm saying is he's shown to be insanely productive and effective and I think he can catch up to the body of research (created and shared by those hundreds of scientists) to become a real contributor very quickly.
FWIW, "seriously contributing to this kind of problem" sounds basically the same as "pushing the envelope" to me. They both suggest contributing something novel and useful.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I understand, quantum effects being essential to the process is a fringe belief. Penrose is probably the most famous 'serious person' (sorry Deepak Chopra) to espouse the idea, but I'm inclined to believe that might be a Linus Pauling/Vitamin C sort of scenario. Penrose started from the perspective of believing there must be quantum effects, then began fishing for physical evidence of it.
Yeah, "quantum mechanics and cognition are very complex and therefore equivalent", sorry I don't know who to attribute the quote to.
I think you're recalling the end of this comic[1], which was on the front page of HN a couple weeks ago. So the quote is probably attributable to either Scott Aaronson or Zach Weinersmith.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#277I expect John Carmack to follow a trajectory of someone like David Ha who with little previous background started to write very creative and thought provoking papers (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=J1j92GsxVUMC&hl=en)
It won't be AGI by most definitions but I bet it'll be pretty cool and I'm happy to have that.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> leads me to believe he may already have some novel solutions on how to tackle the problem. > That's exhilarating but also terrifying. Our still-barbarian level human systems are still nowhere near ready to deal with the socioeconomic problems that may arise with AGI. I think you are reading way too much into his statement. It's extremly unlikely that he just magically figured out a way to tackle the problem (just k…
Carmack is a pragmatist- I'd doubt he'd be doing this if he didn't feel like he had some initial promising directions in mind, though I agree he's probably very early in the process still.
Or maybe when he is talking about making a dent on AGI, he is talking about a very long term objective (say 20-30 years) and he still has to figure out everything.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#279What 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.
There are few AI researchers (maybe around 5 or so) that could credibly claim technical accomplishments of any sort in the same ballpark as Carmack's. People with this level of track record should not be underestimated, there aren't many of them out there... They matter.
Carmack has had a lot of commercial success, which is great and I value his creativity in the space but working on a research question that is about ten paradigm shifts away is a different task than putting in hard labour to build games.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#280i say this with respect and humility, but i am very surprised at the naivete with which John addressed the subject of AGI. he is so casual about it -- not only the idea of working on it but also the idea of it existing at all. he seems oblivious to the gravity of that discovery. it is not just "very valuable," it will be earth shattering and probably wipe out humanity. and its his side-project. and his son will help…
You are saying "probably wipe out humanity" is a bad thing ?
I know of several million species that would strongly disagree. Especially if AGIv1 decides to tune the genetics of say most mammals to append 'sapient' to the end of their species name.
Perhaps more constructively consider that AGI is simply the next iteration of 'humanity', yea sure the old versions are redundant anarchisms and apart from some living reserve specimens functionally extinct, but nobody cares as you can sim one up at almost no cost.