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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

#41

Post by bbor »

ipsum2 wrote: post #4
dr_dshiv wrote: post #3

What would be the difference between GPT3 and actual AGI? (Want to make sure we don’t keep moving goalposts)

AGI is usually defined as anything a normal human could do. Examples of some things that GPT is currently lacking: 1) Understanding images and video 2) Learning and remembering things outside the 2048 token context window 3) Interacting with the environment (either through a computer, or in the real world) 4) Doing basic math (1662 + 239 = ?) and logic

I’d argue “learning and remembering” is the core issue here, and the other things you’ve mentioned are just ways humans use that ability. I took a “Knowledge Based AI” course and it really opened my eyes to how central a knowledge system is to cognition. I wouldn’t call what LLMs have knowledge since it lacks structure, though I’m very much a novice on the exact details there.

Well actually #3 isn’t great bc what exactly would you call taking input from a human and displaying output, much less e.g. controlling a smart home? Seems like LLMs are plenty smart enough to interact with things.

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

#42

Post by fxtentacle »

loveparade wrote: post #26

I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different. From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months, and is just banking on PR…

I got obsessed with his ideas after reading the Quake 3 source code. So many novel ideas, flawlessly executed, highly optimized, yet easy to understand and easy to modify and debug.

My personal impression is that John Carmack has the ability to organize concepts in a way that few people can. So even if he's pretty clueless about the topic now, I would expect him to reduce some maths papers to their essence in a way that nobody else did.

I mean also for Oculus, reprojection in a pixel shader seems like an obvious and easy solution in hindsight. But nobody had tried that before he did. Plenty of people (myself included) knew the math. But we all missed its application to the issue at hand.

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

#43

Post by exitb »

labrador wrote: post #12

This paragraph took me aback: But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially arti…

What struck me here is that the idea of "five Franks and ten Amys" seems like a fundamentally wrong way to think about it. After all, if I do some work in an Excel sheet, I don't think of it, much less pay for it, as an equivalent of X accountants that could do the same job in the same amount of time without a computer. But then again, this is probably the best way to extract as much profit out of it.

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

#44

Post by Kbelicius »

loveparade wrote: post #26

I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different. From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months, and is just banking on PR…

> I put him into the same category as Elon Musk, who also understand nothing about technical details of AI, but was still able to hire a world class team at OpenAI.

I don't believe he had anything to do with hiring at openAI nor that he is anything more there than an investor/donor as others are.

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

#45

Post by loveparade »

Kbelicius wrote: post #44
loveparade wrote: post #26

I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different. From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months, and is just banking on PR…

> I put him into the same category as Elon Musk, who also understand nothing about technical details of AI, but was still able to hire a world class team at OpenAI. I don't believe he had anything to do with hiring at openAI nor that he is anything more there than an investor/donor as others are.

Perhaps not directly, but from the very start OpenAI was considered "Elon's AI company" and people wanted to work there because they wanted to work with Elon. That had a huge effect on what kind of talent OpenAI was able to hire.

Yes, I'm aware that Ilya had much more day-to-day impact, but if you're part of the ML research community and have worked with Ilya, or heard rumors of working with Ilya, that may have had more of a negative effect...

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

#46

Post by Zondartul »

inawarminister wrote: post #5

Carmack seems to be simulating a vtuber AI watching TV and playing video games. If anyone here is doing that too, I would recommend taking a quick look at Neuro-sama on Twitch. They're using RL to play OSU, Minecraft, and Pokemon, and voice input + video image analysis to react to Twitch streams and documentaries. While being watched by 6.5K people. The url is twitch.com/vedal

Good point, although some background info should be noted: Vedal worked on Neuro-sama for about 10 years, and for most of that time it was a NN with a singular task of playing "osu!". I think it's only this year that he implemented a chatbot with TTS for her debut on Twitch. Although Neuro-sama is an impressive application of several existing technologies to make a virtual entertainer, under the hood Neuro-sama is several specialized NNs (one to play Osu, one to play minecraft, one for chat, and one for TTS) that, for the most part, don't know what the other is doing as very little data is passed between them. There is no scientific innovation or any claims of higher intelligence, but I think it's still a very cool system from hobby-engineering point of view. Neuro-sama is a ditz, but a funny one.

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

#47

Post by Barrin92 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #3

What would be the difference between GPT3 and actual AGI? (Want to make sure we don’t keep moving goalposts)

All the stuff a human can do basically. Move through the world, plumb a toilet, have a conversation, paint a picture, dynamically update its own state (rather than just being a statically trained set of weights), set goals, strategize, have cognition and meta-cognition and so on.

ChatGPT is just a chatbot and still can't even reliable do a lot of logic, so we're pretty far away from having something resembling an AGI.

it's still a pretty open question how to integrate even one or two of the expert system like models that we have now that solve individual problems, let alone the hundreds if not thousands an individual human can tackle. And then we're not even yet at executive functions or self-awareness.

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

#48

Post by pete762 »

loveparade wrote: post #26

I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different. From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months, and is just banking on PR…

> From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months

What makes you think that? He literally says he tries to understand things bottom up by knowing about every little detail that happens under the hood

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

#49

Post by laluser »

Macuyiko wrote: 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 imagine this is a 10 year journey for him and he’s just getting started. Check back in 5 years.

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

#50

Post by milsorgen »

brutusborn wrote: post #24
peepee1982 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is great, but it can go only so far. We will always have to find things to do for the less gifted in order to provide them with some dignity. Even if they are not strictly needed for reasons of productivity or profitability. Anything else would be inhumane.

People can find their own outlets if given the basic necessities and enough time. I fear this attitude will lead to job programs where people work a 9-5 and achieve essentially nothing, I.e. bullshit jobs.

>People can find their own outlets if given the basic necessities and enough time.

This has not been my experience. People need something to do but not many people know that about themselves. It leads to a lot of... 'wasteful' behaviors, rather than enriching ones. I think it's going to be something that has to be taught to people, a skill like any other. Albiet a little more abstract than some.

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