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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

#371
post #241
post #213

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People can learn skills from books, which are entirely passive. The learning process ultimately resides within the student; issues of motivation, morale, direction, diligence, discipline, time, and mental health matter a lot more than just going through some material.

Try to learn Jiu-Jitsu from a book and then go into an actual fight to see how well it works.

You could learn jujitsu with a training partner and a sufficiently advanced virtual instructor, not being able to position students directly is a downside but not a dealbreaker.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that our culture gives us a lot. To use ML terms -- Humans have "Foundation Models" which are composed of: - Their Biological makeup - The culture into which they are raised

I'm not even talking about culture. DNA is only useful because the laws of physical reality are built a certain way. Without that context the information within DNA is meaningless.

Well sure but couldn't the same thing be said about a computer program?

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Shreveport, LA?

Industries tend to coalesce into a few centralized locations. New York and LA are known for fashion. Detroit, TN, and TX are known for automobile manufacturering. LA and Nashville are known for music. Tech isn’t any different. Isn’t Shreveport more known for natural resource extraction ie oil and gas?

That’s where Carmack and Romero started

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

#374
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can also translate "being useless" as "they having no reason to manipulate me into slaving as a cog in their machine/society/whatever"... I'd say uselessness should be our highest aspiration, when people higher up have no need to constantly brainwash you and social condition you into being just another cog in the machine you get true freedom.

We live in a capitalist society: workers produce wealth and capitalists control wealth. The day AI allow capitalists to produce wealth without workers is the day workers become useless. Of course one could imagine that AI allows to replace capitalism by something else, but for the moment that's not the way society is going too (more the reverse)

In what fairlyland do you live in that the AGI invented, created, owned, run, etc by the ownership class poses any threat to said ownership class? AI is absolutely not our Ally

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

None of us will have jobs at all soon enough.

Human made objects will become more of a status symbol, and "content" will still be directed/produced/edited by humans, it's just the art/writing/acting/sets/lighting/etc that will be handled by AI. Humans will always serve as "discriminators" of model output because they're better at it (and more transparent) than a model.

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

#376
post #2

Fun interview but barely any meat for those in the field. Just very general questions and answers, saying that the road is murky, but nothing about e.g. if Transformers / attention are the way to go forward, multi-modal models, reinforcement learning + self-supervised learning.

I do not question for a second that Carmack is a computing genius, but “murky” is an understatement. There is nothing of technical, scientific or business value in this interview. It’s just generic words strung together.

Why do people think he is a computing genius? He read contemporary papers in computer 3D rendering and implemented well understood concepts in a shitty dev environment (early x86 and VGA systems). When I do that for my company, I'm just a junior dev.

People really need to stop with this "Great person" nonsense. He's a pretty smart coder, and is gifted with geometry and other fields of math. He's not a genius. He didn't "master" calculus at age 15 like Einstein, he didn't invent anything particularly new in the field. Why the obsession people have with him? Why should we look to him for AI questions? What evidence is there that he has any new knowledge?

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

#377

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?

Do something so extraordinary that the entire world will remember you.

What did he do that was extraordinary? Was it implementing various graphical programming concepts from several papers that came out of SGI and academics? Was it cribbing another neat trick from those same people to do fast inverse square root? Was it firing Romero and releasing pretty mediocre games for 16 years as the rest of the industry made leaps of innovation in video game design that he basically ignored? Was it moving on to VR and revolutionizing that industry by.... selling an okay headset with massive subsidies and only releasing a few mediocre games that are comparable at best to garbage mobile games?

Carmack is a good coder, and has pretty good math chops. He was also cocky enough to think he could make a 486 do some of the 3D math required if they were careful and added some limitations. I don't know why anyone ascribes anything more to him. Your average data scientist produces more actual innovation than he did.

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say the same thing, but a few off the top of my head - attention is all you need - image is worth 16x16 words (vit) - openai clip - transformer XL - memorizing transformers / retro - language models are few shot learners (gpt) A few newer papers - recurrent block wise transformers - mobilevit (conv + transformer) - star (self taught transformer)

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…

Lol true, and I'm currently working on a project leveraging a clip model which is why my answer is largely skewed towards vision transformers. By no means a complete list :)

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t this be literal slavery? AGI = a person Instantiating people for work and ending their existence afterward seems like the virtual hell that Iain M Banks and Harlan Ellison wrote about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

People get used as an analogy, but in reality it'd just be a multimedia problem solving system that could learn from its own attempts. If this system communicated with you like a person it'd only be because it was programmed to convert some machine state into colloquial text from the perspective of an imaginary person. The interior experience leading to that expression is most likely completely different from that of…

All of that is arguably true about me, as a human, too.

If it seems to you I'm communicating as a person, it's only because of my lifetime training data and current state. My interior experience is a black box.

I might tell how I feel or what I think, but you have no reason to believe or disbelieve that I really feel and think.

It could all be merely the determinable output of a system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a capitalist society: workers produce wealth and capitalists control wealth. The day AI allow capitalists to produce wealth without workers is the day workers become useless. Of course one could imagine that AI allows to replace capitalism by something else, but for the moment that's not the way society is going too (more the reverse)

In what fairlyland do you live in that the AGI invented, created, owned, run, etc by the ownership class poses any threat to said ownership class? AI is absolutely not our Ally

I think you misunderstood me
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