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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

#411

Post by celdon25 »

Trasmatta wrote: post #2

Interesting to see how he's progressed with this. When he first announced he was getting into AI it sounded almost like a semi retirement thing: something that interested him that he could do for fun and solo, without the expectation that it would go anywhere. But now he seems truly serious about it. Wonder if he's started hiring yet.

> something that interested him that he could do for fun and solo

Really?

I don't think anybody who works on AGI (not AI) without being dead serious about it will be qualified to work on it. A bad AGI implementation is one of humanity's gravest risks, and this is well-known in the AGI field, has been for years. Elon was far from the first to say this.

Carmack isn't the type to get those kinds of details wrong.

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

#412

Post by godelski »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #403
godelski wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone working in AI research Being in the tail end of my PhD, I want to second this sentiment. I'm not even bullish on AGI (more specifically HLI) in 50 years. Scale will only take you so far and we have to move past frequentism. Hell, causality research still isn't that popular but is quite important for intelligence. I think people (especially tech enthusiasts) are getting caught in the gullibility gap.

As an AI researcher myself I can definitely see why people used to have these sentiments, but I also have to point out how the big papers of the last ~12 months or so have changed the landscape. Especially multi-modal models like Gato. To my surprise, a lot of people (even inside the community) still tend to put human intelligence on some sort of pedestal, but I believe once a system (or host of systems) achieves a s…

I'm not sure Gato actually demonstrates intelligence. It definitely does demonstrate the ability to perform a wide variety of tasks, but I don't think that is actually intelligence. Gato has yet to demonstrate that it understands things. I do think it is easy to fall prone to the gullibility gap (and also take too strong of an opposing view, which I may be victim to).

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

#413

Post by andreyk »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #403
godelski wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone working in AI research Being in the tail end of my PhD, I want to second this sentiment. I'm not even bullish on AGI (more specifically HLI) in 50 years. Scale will only take you so far and we have to move past frequentism. Hell, causality research still isn't that popular but is quite important for intelligence. I think people (especially tech enthusiasts) are getting caught in the gullibility gap.

As an AI researcher myself I can definitely see why people used to have these sentiments, but I also have to point out how the big papers of the last ~12 months or so have changed the landscape. Especially multi-modal models like Gato. To my surprise, a lot of people (even inside the community) still tend to put human intelligence on some sort of pedestal, but I believe once a system (or host of systems) achieves a s…

Gato is definitely cool, but it's worth remembering it was based on supervised learning with data from a bunch of tasks, so data availability is a strong bottleneck with that approach. Still, I'd agree the past year or two have made me more optimistic about HLAI (if not scary AGI).

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

#414

Post by silverlake »

sailingparrot wrote: post #227
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…

> 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. Who is we exactly? As someone working in AI research I know no one that would agree with this statement, so im quite puzzled by that statement.

I agree with you. However there’s a camp that thinks bigger models will lead to ~AGI (whatever that is). Another believes reinforcement learning will get there somehow. LeCun published an alternative vague idea because he thinks neither will get to AGI.

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

#416

Post by kastagg »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #188
colinmhayes wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s certainly the philosophy side of AGI, but there’s also the practical side. Does the Chinese room understand Chinese? If your goal is just to create a room that passes Chinese Turing tests that doesn’t matter.

The philosophy side of the matter seems meaningless, it interrogates the meaning of language, not the capabilities of technology. When people ask "Could machines think?" the question isn't really about machines, it's about precisely what we mean by the word 'think'. Can a submarine swim? Who cares! What's important is that a submarine can do what a submarine does. Whether or not the action of a submarine fits the mea…

The people who designed the first submarines had relatively specific engineering problems and applications in mind. They could bypass any philosophical interrogation of the word "swim" because they didn't define the problem as swimming and didn't need to.

"AGI" isn't like that. Nobody really knows what it means, and it's impossible to get down to brass tacks until you choose a problem definition. When philosophers point out the conspicuous lack of clarity here, they're doing us a service.

When the industry settled on marketing any application of deep learning as "AI," "AGI" became the terminological heir to the same set of ill-defined grandiose expectations that used to be "AI."

Choose a better-specified problem and you can ignore philosophical problems about words like "intelligence." The same choice will also excuse you from the competition to convince people that you have produced "AGI."

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

#417

Post by celdon25 »

nine_k wrote: post #394

So, with the help of legendary Mr Carmack, instead of a Doom timeline, we are going to end up in a Terminator timeline? This does not compute.

> This does not compute.

Of course it doesn't.

https://nautil.us/scary-ai-is-more-fantasia-than-terminator-...

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

#418

Post by [deleted] »

wcerfgba wrote: post #239

Does anyone else subscribe to the idea that AGI is impossible/unlikely without 'embodied cognition', i.e. we cannot create a human-like 'intelligence' unless it has a similar embodiment to us, able to move around a physical environment with it's own limbs, sense of touch, sight, etc. ? Any arguments against the necessity of this? I feel like any AGI developed in silico without freedom of movement will be fundamentall…

[deleted]

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

#419

Post by labrador »

godelski wrote: post #371
sailingparrot wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Who is we exactly? As someone working in AI research I know no one that would agree with this statement, so im quite puzzled by that statement.

> As someone working in AI research Being in the tail end of my PhD, I want to second this sentiment. I'm not even bullish on AGI (more specifically HLI) in 50 years. Scale will only take you so far and we have to move past frequentism. Hell, causality research still isn't that popular but is quite important for intelligence. I think people (especially tech enthusiasts) are getting caught in the gullibility gap.

> gullibility gap

Search turns up very little except a book by a Christian author. Could you define what you mean by gullibility gap?

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

#420

Post by chubot »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #302
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. But I don't really see the reason for being optimistic about 2030. It could just as easily be 2050, or 2100, etc. Well if you read between the lines of the Gato paper there may be no more hurdles left and scale is the only boundary left. >Not a recognition that we fundamentally still don't know how brains work! (or what intelligence is, etc.) This is a really bad…

I can acknowledge the point about planes, since I believe in tinkering/engineering over theory.

But I'd say planes are more like "narrow AI", and we already have that. Planes do a economically useful thing, just like narrow AIs do economically useful things. (But what birds do is also valuable and efficient, and it's still an open research problem to emulate them. Try getting a plane or drone to outmaneuver prey like an eagle.)

I'd consider the possibility that we WILL get AGI in 10, 30 or 100 years, but it won't be that impactful compared to the narrow AIs already running everything! It will be slow and suffer from Moravec's paradox (i.e. being much less efficient than a human, for a very long time)

---

"Solving AGI" isn't solving a well-defined problem IMO. If you want to say "well we'll just ask the AGI how to get to Mars and how to create nuclear fusion and it will tell us", well to me that sounds like a hacker / uninformed philosopher fantasy, which has no bearing in reality.

Nothing about deep learning / DALL-E-type systems is close to that. I think people who believe the contrary are mostly projecting meaning in their own minds onto computing systems -- which if they'd studied human cognition, they'd realize that humans are EXTREMELY prone to!

It seems like a lot of the same people who didn't believe that level 5 self-driving would take human-level intelligence. That is, they literally misunderstood what THE ACTIVITY OF DRIVING IS. And didn't understand that current approaches have a diseconomy where the last 1% takes 99% of the time. Now even Musk admits that, after Gary Marcus and others were telling him that since 2015.

(The point about evolution doesn't make sense, because people want AI within 10 years, not 100M or 1B years)

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