351–360 of 387 posts
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It's because humans (and other animals) have enormous innate capacities and knowledge which makes learning new things much much simpler than if you start from scratch. It's not really because of human's computational capacity.
> enormous innate capacities and knowledge Hundreds of millions of years of trial-and-error biological pre-training where survival/propagation is the reward function
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> There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it? We do have that, ever felt fear of heights? That isn't learned, we are born with it. Same with fear of small moving objects like spiders or snakes. Such things are learned/stored very different from memories, but its certainly…
Of course it is learned, and fear is triggered by anything unfamiliar, that causes a high reconstruction error. Because it means you don't understand it, and it could be dangerous. We are just not used to encoding anything so deep below the eye level, and it freaks us out.
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It's because humans (and other animals) have enormous innate capacities and knowledge which makes learning new things much much simpler than if you start from scratch. It's not really because of human's computational capacity.
There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it? It just isn't needed. Just like you can find let's say kangaroos in the latent space of an image generator, so we learn abstract concepts and principles of how things work as a bonus of learning to process the senses. Maybe a way…
DNA and the same way anything else is evolved? The body is insanely complicated, I don't see why innate knowledge is so unbelievable.
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>Every day has 86400 seconds during which a human brain constantly adapts to and learns from external That's not even remotely true. At least not in the sense that it is for context in transformer models. Or can you tell me all the visual and auditory inputs you experienced yesterday at the 45232nd second? You only learn permanently and effectively from particular stimulation coupled with surprise. That has a sample…
Your definition of "learning" is incomplete because you're applying LLM concepts to how human brains work. An LLM only "learns" during training. From that point forward all it has is its context and vector DBs. If an LLM and vector DB is not actively interacted with, nothing happens to it. However for the brain, experiencing IS learning. And the brain NEVER stops experiencing. Just because I don't remember my experie…
This is not just possible, it is already happening. It just gets drowned in the media noise about chatbots. Look at some current research in this area (e.g. by Nvidia last year).
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>Every day has 86400 seconds during which a human brain constantly adapts to and learns from external That's not even remotely true. At least not in the sense that it is for context in transformer models. Or can you tell me all the visual and auditory inputs you experienced yesterday at the 45232nd second? You only learn permanently and effectively from particular stimulation coupled with surprise. That has a sample…
> You only learn permanently and effectively from particular stimulation coupled with surprise. This is just, not true. A single 2min conversation with emotional or intellectual resonance can significantly alter a human’s thought process for years. There are some topics where every time they come up directly or analogously I can recall something a teacher told me in high school that “stuck” with me for whatever reaso…
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What this misses is that research is a competitive endeavor. To succeed as a researcher you don’t just need to know the bare minimum required to do research in your field. You need to be able to do it better than most of the people you’re competing against. I know that HN as a collective has near-unlimited faith in Carmack’s abilities (and he is no doubt Very Smart). But he’s competing with other Very Smart people wh…
The difference is Carmack is literally a T-shaped dude -- hell, he's a T-shaped dude with lots of vertical lines :P I believe all his in-depth experience in other areas will heavily unlock him to bring about another breakthrough. He's that good.
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The world seems to have rewritten history, and forgotten Ultima Underworld, which shipped prior to Doom..
I think that's because it had such high system requirements that very few people could run it, unlike Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
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I think that's because it had such high system requirements that very few people could run it, unlike Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
It was just about playable on a 25MHz 386. We used to put up with frame rates that would make your eyes bleed back in the early 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VdRXgWoShM
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Ever since Romero departed the id Software had shipped *checks notes* Quake II, Quake III, Doom 3 and Quake 4. Funnily enough Romero himself didn't ship much either. IMO it's one of the most iconic "duo breakups". The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Rage was Carmack's last big game at id Software before leaving. Romero is credited on 27 games since he left id Software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero#Games
If you examine the list it includes games like "Gunman Taco Truck" by his 12yo sun, SIGIL I/II (Doom mods) and a remake of Dangerous Dave. Most of the money he made post-id came from Facebook farming games.
I'm not saying he's doing nothing. He's extremely talented and achieved more than most of us could ever dream of. I'm just pointing out that after he departed from id neither id nor him managed to replicate the earlier success. Who knows, maybe times had changed and it would be the same even if he stayed.
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AGI is not enough. Seriously, imagine if they had an AGI in their ChatGPT interface. It’s not enough to do anything truly meaningful. It’s like a genius in the woods somewhere. For AGI to have an impact it needs to be everywhere.
Robotics to navigate the physical world seems more impactful than some pin/glasses product to provide a passive audio/visual interface to the chatbot doesn't seem so earth shattering either though. What would you do with a 10x or 100x smarter Siri/Alexa? I still don't see my life changing. Give me a robot that can legitimately do household errands like the dishes, laundry, etc.. now we are talking.