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John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

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Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#341

Post by nighthawk454 »

mywittyname wrote: post #219
tux1968 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentioned, in his Lex Friedman interview, that accepting investor money was a way to keep himself serious and motivated. He feels an obligation to those putting their money in.

Ah, I was thinking that $20MM doesn't seem like a lot of money for someone like Carmack. Surely he could have self-funded a business himself. This explains why he didn't.

yeah, his follow up tweet is pretty clear:

> This is explicitly a focusing effort for me. I could write a $20M check myself, but knowing that other people's money is on the line engenders a greater sense of discipline and determination. I had talked about that as a possibility for a while, and I am glad Nat pushed me on it.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#342

Post by nomel »

O__________O wrote: post #158
nomel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> saying the code for AGI will be simple To be fair, it will most likely be some python imports, for the most of it, with complex abstractions tied together in relatively simple ways. Just look at most ML notebooks, where "simple" code can easily mean "massive complexity, burning MW of power, distributed across thousands of computers".

No, not what he means, he means code will be simple enough that a single person would be able to write it, if then knew what to write and will bootstrap itself into existence for that simple code and vast amounts of external resources viable via humans, data, etc.

> a single person would be able to write it

I don't understand the distinction. A single person can't really write a code now, if you'll disallow ML libraries. You need a complier, libraries, an OS, etc. The vast majority of us work in the highest levels of abstraction possible. That's where the practicality and productivity is. I don't think he's saying "Anyone will be able to sit down and write it in assembly". I think he's saying, it will make sense when it's written, with the abstractions as they are, with hindsight clarity of "we just had to...".

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#343

Post by kastagg »

tmpz22 wrote: post #333
grimgrin wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong in the moral sense? He's still there though, right? edit: he is not still edit: he is still a consulting CTO

* To his credit Carmack is a one-person brand and attaching your (good) brand to a tainted brand (Facebook) isn't great * Many believe Occulus isn't succeeding fast enough, and so the years Carmack spent on Occulus/Metaverse could have been spent on any number of interesting projects. Although I'm sure the money was amazing and I can't object to him taking it. * If Occulus/Metaverse succeeds it will be a ultra-moneti…

Carmack joined Oculus before the Facebook acquisition, so it's misleading to say he attached his brand to Facebook's.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#344

Post by Rackedup »

Jack000 wrote: post #116

I'm very optimistic for near-term AGI (10 years or less). Even just a few years ago most in the field would have said that it's an "unknown unknown", we didn't have the theory or the models, there was no path forward and so it was impossible to predict. Now we have a fairly concrete idea of what a potential AGI might look like - an RL agent that uses a large transformer. The issue is that unlike supervised training y…

I hope I'm dead before this happens...

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#345

Post by chubot »

nuclearnice1 wrote: post #124
chubot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember him saying we don't have "line of sight" to AGI, and there could just be "6 or so" breakthrough ideas needed to get there. And he said he was over 50% on us seeing "signs of life" by 2030. Something like being able to "boot up a bunch of remote Zoom workers" for your company. The "6 or so" breakthroughs sounds about right to me. But I don't really see the reason for being optimistic about 2030. It could ju…

> The "6 or so" breakthroughs sounds about right to me. What’s your logic? Or his if you know it?

Yeah he didn't elaborate on this in the interview, which I would have liked.

I should amend my comment to say that "6 or so breakthroughs" sounds a lot more plausible to me than "1 breakthrough" or "just scaling", which you will see some people advocate, including in this thread. That's what I meant.

I believe the latter is fundamentally mistaken and those people simply don't understand what they don't understand (intelligence). The views of Gary Marcus and Steven Pinker are closer to my own -- they have actually studied human cognition and are not just hackers and uninformed philosophers pontificating.

Jeff Hawkins is another AI person from an unconventional background, and I respect him because he puts his money where his mouth is and has been funding his own research since early 2000's. I read his first book in 2006, and the most recent one a couple years ago.

But I feel Jeff Hawkins has had the "one breakthrough" feeling for 10-15 years now. TBH I am not sure if they have even made what qualifies as one breakthrough in the last 10-15 years, and I don't mean that to be insulting, since it's obviously extremely difficult and beyond 99.99% of us, including me.

I am not sure that even deep learning counts as a breakthrough. We will only know in retrospect. Based on Moravec's paradox, my opinion is there's a good chance that deep learning won't play any role in AGI, if and when it arrives. Some other mechanism could obviate the technique.

So to me "6 or so breakthroughs" simply sounds more realistic than the current AI zeitgeist. But nobody really knows.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#347

Post by dinosaurdynasty »

trention wrote: post #307
gwern wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it isn't immediately clear that current RL algorithms will neatly scale with data & parameter count It may not be immediately clear, but it is nevertheless unfortunately clear from RL papers which provide adequate sample-size or compute ranges that RL appears to follow scaling laws (just like everywhere else anyone bothers to test). Yeah, they just get better the same way that regular ol' self-supervised or supervi…

That scaling will eventually hit a wall. What was it about nerds and S-curves?

Sure, most everything does.

The question is if it hits that wall before or after human-level (and/or dangerous) capabilities.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#348

Post by packetslave »

trention wrote: post #258

AGI will be more dangerous that nuclear weapons. People are not allowed to start a nuclear weapon company. At all. Why are people allowed to casually start an AGI company?

Because we still have lawmakers who have their secretaries print out their emails and think the internet is a series of tubes.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#350

Post by dymk »

mod wrote: post #204
dymk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliably trick a humans into thinking it's a human. That's it.

I believe that's the Turing Test, not necessarily a definition (or requirement) for AGI.

Where’s AGI defined? I’ve only seen it used in the context of “can pass the Turing test”
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