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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

#341

Post by Zod666 »

carlosdp wrote: post #68

This doesn't surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) As recent as his last Oculus Connect keynote, he exto…

"With the Quest, he (in my opinion) solidified VR's path to mobile standalones"

Yes and I really wished he hadn't. Before he joined oculus they were working on the rift2, he steered them away from that to focus on mobile efforts.

I do see the appeal of mobile vr but at the end of the day it is basically an android phone in a vr headset.

PCvr is already 2 big steps back in graphical quality from desktop games. Mobile vr is like 10 steps back. 8 more steps than I'm willing to take even if it affords me mobility.

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

#342

Post by topmonk »

xamuel wrote: post #319

I've been dabbling in AGI and it seems like the field has a lot of low-hanging fruit. I'll bet Carmack can offer some significant contributions. I'll take an opportunity to plug a paper I recently published on comparing relative intelligence. The punchline will illuminate the low-hangingness of the fruit in this field. Suppose X and Y are AGIs and you want to know which is more intelligent. For any interactive reward…

All environments are not created the same, and therefore not equal. If you feed 100 environments that are nearly identical to each other but favor A, and 4 other environments that all favor B but are all dissimilar to each other, then although B is more generalized, A would still win.

Since you have no formal way to compare environments to each other, you can't prevent this from happening. Therefore you just pushed the subjectively as to which AI is smarter to which environments are chosen by the user to run against.

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

#343

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Wasn't his shadow volume technique quite hard and original ? He's not just plumbing things it seems.

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

#344

Post by mkl »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #326
friendlybus wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh just assumed he got a bigger piece of the oculus sale.

Oculus was acquired for $2.3 billion, so he'd need to have owned nearly 50% of the company to become a billionaire from it's sale.

Not exactly. The acquisition was mostly in the form of Facebook shares, which I expect have increased in value since.

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

#345

Post by ekianjo »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #245
ekianjo wrote: post #72

Other way to read this: big corporations are slowing down on VR. The market has not taken off as rapidly as they expected so we will see more moves away from heavy investment in VR.

https://qz.com/1739575/strong-oculus-quest-sales-boost-faceb...

180 000 units of VR headsets is pure pocket money for Facebook. And that does not even register in any kind of hardware sales charts. PC sales are more than 300 millions per year, and smartphones sales are more than 1.5 billions units per year. VR headsets don't sell at all.

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

#346

Post by randomidiot666 »

jobigoud wrote: post #334
randomidiot666 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR sickness still applies, even if you have perfectly realistic rendering, infinite frame rate, infinite resolution, perfect tracking, and zero latency. It's caused by a discrepancy between the visual and vestibular systems. That problem cannot be solved by higher quality rendering.

It's only a problem if you are moving in the virtual world using a different method than what your body is using in the real world. If the VR world is a simple 1:1 mapping and you can walk around in it as you do in the physical space, there is no vection.

Yes that's right. But that's a limited scenario. Not the true unbounded VR experience that we really wanted.

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

#347

Post by [deleted] »

zaroth wrote: post #109
carlosdp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying he's LeCun, I'm just saying he gets up to speed absurdly fast. So it's not unreasonable to suppose that by now, he's learned enough to start seriously contributing to this kind of problem. edit: to be clear, all I'm saying is he can catch up to the body of research already out there quicker than the average bear, and he's shown a real knack for designing solutions and being crazy productive. I'm not pr…

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.

[deleted]

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

#348

Post by ekianjo »

baddox wrote: post #231
ekianjo wrote: post #72

Other way to read this: big corporations are slowing down on VR. The market has not taken off as rapidly as they expected so we will see more moves away from heavy investment in VR.

Carmack never struck me as the type to chase the money from fad tech to fad tech. On the contrary, he seems keen to chase his own interests, and by now I suspect he is financially secure enough to do so.

I did not mention Carmack in my comment. Corporations. Facebook probably decided that having Carmack working on a minuscule market that is barely growing (look at headset sales per year, it's virtually nothing and there is no "acceleration" in sight either) was a waste of his talent.

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

#349

Post by cyberjunkie »

carlosdp wrote: post #68

This doesn't surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) As recent as his last Oculus Connect keynote, he exto…

I can trust John Carmack's words when he says in an interview, or on stage. There's a passion in his talks, a nervousness in blurting what he really feels, and those are really good traits, in my mind.

I genuinely felt a sense of disappointment when he moved to Facebook (via the Occulus acquisition). So yea, fuck you, Facebook and your manipulative, life values corrupting and PR machinery.

I place John Carmack miles above Zuckerberg.

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

#350

Post by xamuel »

topmonk wrote: post #342
xamuel wrote: post #319

I've been dabbling in AGI and it seems like the field has a lot of low-hanging fruit. I'll bet Carmack can offer some significant contributions. I'll take an opportunity to plug a paper I recently published on comparing relative intelligence. The punchline will illuminate the low-hangingness of the fruit in this field. Suppose X and Y are AGIs and you want to know which is more intelligent. For any interactive reward…

All environments are not created the same, and therefore not equal. If you feed 100 environments that are nearly identical to each other but favor A, and 4 other environments that all favor B but are all dissimilar to each other, then although B is more generalized, A would still win. Since you have no formal way to compare environments to each other, you can't prevent this from happening. Therefore you just pushed t…

The paper addresses this. Rather than (futilely) attempt to nail down the "one true electorate", the paper defines an infinite family of comparators, depending on a hyperparameter which is, essentially, the choice of which environments get to vote and how to count their votes. Crucially, this doesn't change the truth of the structural theorems (except that some of the theorems require the hyperparameter satisfy certain constraints).

Indeed, any attempt to come up with "one true comparison of intelligence" (as opposed to a parametrized family) should be viewed with skepticism, because it really must depend on a lot of arbitrary choices.

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