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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

#41
post #26

i 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…

I think the real naive are the people who are doing it as a day job.

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

#42

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…

You forgot to mention, crucially, that neurons in close proximity affect each other, which is just one of the things that makes modeling of more than a few neurons in time domain a complete non-starter. It all results in enormous systems of PDEs which we don't know how to solve yet at all. You could say that we do not have the right mathematical apparatus to model any such thing.

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

#45
post #26

i 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…

He might as well casually work on Faster Than Light travel, or a Grand Unified Theory.

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

#47
post #12

I hope he'll go the hybrid symbolic and neural network way (causal and statistical), instead of just statistical. AGI needs a type system... I hope I'll achieve AGI before him but it's nice to know there's some real competition! (because, reader, there are almost 0 researchers seriously trying to achieve AGI in a not totally bullshit way. Only opencog and Cyc comes to mind).

You forgot "he who shall not be named"... /ok, maybe his project falls under "total bullshit"...

Who are you referring to? I feel out of the loop here.

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

#50

I don't understand how he could contribute to the field of AGI research from home, by himself, and maybe with his son. It's the kind of problem that requires incredible amounts of data, hardware, and theory to make any progress. Wouldn't it make more sense for him to join a cutting-edge team, like DeepMind or OpenAI?

Carmack built rockets and id bought $100Ks of NeXT machines to make Doom so I wouldn't put it past him to have incredible amounts of hardware... even at home. Considering his position at Facebook and that he is industry famous he probably has access to data and cloud resources that a researcher outside of OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, etc. normally wouldn't have access to. He could also raise money relatively easily to pursue more intense research.
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