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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

#411

Post by AlchemistCamp »

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…

According to Sriram Krishnan, John Carmack was at > 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.

Facebook's highest engineering level and achieved the top possible rating of "redefines expectations" for his level three years in a row. They had to create a new tier for him. Nobody else has ever reached that level. He replaced a "hundred person team" and maybe was better than that team.

I have no inside insight to the matter, but this seems like something beyond a "random senior engineer".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXbSOiqnQxQ&t=711s

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

#412

Post by thfuran »

p1esk wrote: post #399
pegasus wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historians agree (based for example on studying human remains) that they were much healthier, amongst other things. Check out the book "Against the Grain" for example.

Harsh conditions might serve as a filter to produce healthier population (the weak died shortly after birth).

Urban areas also had roughly 50% infant and childhood mortality until recently.

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

#413

Post by random314 »

WoodenChair wrote: post #336
random314 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, he must be faster than Geoff Hinton too and it took Hinton a life time. Funnily enough, I am able to publish ML papers - but John Carmack isn't. I wonder why. I would also like to learn more about all the computer graphics algorithms Carmack has invented before I trust him to invent AGI. Here is one example of a person I am familiar with - Math Olympiad bronze medalist. Princeton PhD in ML Theory. AI researcher…

Your OP and replies kind of just come across as jealous that John Carmack’s opinion on this stuff is taken seriously whereas relatively unknown folks’ (yourself, the researcher you mentioned) opinions, are not despite the fact that he’s not traditionally credentialed. Like I said in my original post, we should be skeptical of him and his claims. But the way you are dragging this thread out feels like sour grapes. Of…

I don't have any credentials really. If I had to be jealous I would be jealous of Carmacks work in id and oculus.

I am definitely irritated by the fact that he is able to pull 20M in funding. He has been giving interviews left right and center. We are upvoting Altman, sam Harris,Carmack but nobody cares about the actual AI researchers, all academics, who have brought about the Deep learning revolution.

Your comments about academic bubbles and researchers gives you away. All of the revolutions in AI have been brought about by the academics inside bubbles you are jeering at. The biggest example of academic inside a bubble is Geoff Hinton.

We have to sit here and listen to word salads from Carmack, Altman (Ilya - who doesn't get interviewed is the actual researcher behind chatgpt), Sam Harris etc, who have very little insights making bold AGI predictions.

I asked to learn about all the algorithms Carmack invented in computer graphics, but haven't heard back. But looks like he has a good grasp on solving AGI by 2030 according to himself. After all, he is a really great programmer.

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

#414

Post by random314 »

lostmsu wrote: post #398
random314 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is simply about linear algebra, can you please read this ML Paper[1], go through all the proofs and lemmas over a week? You already have a PhD in ML, should be easy. Every kid graduating in STEM understands/should understand linear algebra. Knowing linear algebra is such a low bar. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.09237

Frankly, one does not need this paper to get towards the AI. Adam the optimization algo you might need (and even there I am not sure). And it is very readable. The fact that this particular proof of Adam's convergence is complicated is largely irrelevant. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6980.pdf

Yes, if you set the bar low enough - everything is easy and can be learnt in a month.

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

#415

Post by osigurdson »

astine wrote: post #395
osigurdson wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is how accounting has not been completely automated at this point. AI isn't even strictly needed, just arithmetic. If we can't completely automate accounting, then there is no hope for any other field.

Because accounting is not the same thing as book keeping. Book keeping can, and in fact is, partially automated. Accounting however, is not just about data entry and doing sums, things which frequently are automated, but also about designing the books for a given organization. Every company is different in how it does business so every accounting system is a bespoke solution. There are a lot of rules and judgement ca…

>> Every company is different in how it does business so every accounting system is a bespoke solution

Who benefits from these bespoke solutions? Can you give a example of how one company would do its books vs another and why it would be beneficial?

>> accountants don't just track the numbers, they also validate them

What information do they use to validate numbers? Why is it not possible for today's AI to do it?

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

#416

Post by throwaway4aday »

TuringTest wrote: post #404
throwaway4aday wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah right, just like the elite are the only ones that have access to the courses from all the top universities, every book ever digitized, and software and hardware that allow you to operate a business out of your home now.

You seem to have missed the part about having a qualified human mentor guiding you through so that content. It will be hard to impossible to build career as a teacher with all that free content as a competitor, unless you're an extremely talented teacher who can sell your services to the wealthy.

Even now ChatGPT is pretty close to being able to tutor someone in a subject. You could build a product around it that would work off of a lesson plan, ask the student questions and determine if they answered correctly or not and be able to identify what part of their knowledge was missing and then create a lesson based around explaining that. It would need to have some capabilities that ChatGPT doesn't have by itself like storing the progress of the student, having some way of running a prepared prompt to kick off each lesson, and would probably require fine tuning the GPT model on examples of student-teacher interactions but all of that is well within the capabilities of a competent developer. I wouldn't be surprised if we see such a product come out in the next 12 months.

The great thing about a chatbot style LLM is that it can answer questions the student has about the lessons or assigned content. That's most of what a tutor is there for. It won't be as good at making modifications to the curriculum but you could work around that with some smart design e.g. evaluate the students response, if it's not great then expand on the lesson and ask more questions about the content to find out which parts the student doesn't understand then expand on those or provide additional resources as assignments, test and repeat.

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

#417

Post by throwaway4aday »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #401
throwaway4aday wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, isn't that the same as a biological person who needs to earn money to survive? Sure we could threaten an AI with taking them offline or inflicting pain but you can do that in the real world to real people as well, most of the world has put laws in place to prevent such practices. If we develop conscious AI then we will need to apply the same laws to them. They would have an advantage in presumably being much…

Not really- AGI doesn't need resources like we do. If they don't eat, they're fine. If they can't afford a house, a car or air-conditioning, they're fine. All they need is a substrate to run on and maybe internet access. You might argue that they should work for us to earn the use of the substrate we provide. But substrates are very cheap. At some point we can probably run an AGI on a handheld computer, using abut as…

Put it on AI welfare?

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

#418

Post by p1esk »

thfuran wrote: post #412
p1esk wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harsh conditions might serve as a filter to produce healthier population (the weak died shortly after birth).

Urban areas also had roughly 50% infant and childhood mortality until recently.

This argument is silly: given a choice between living in a cave, or in a forest, completely outside of any civilization, and living in a primitive village, I'd choose the village any day. As would (and did) vast majority of people. To me, the social and physical construct of the first village looks like a huge advancement in terms of living conditions, and the quality of life has been improving steadily every since.

Occasional hiking into some wilderness and sleeping in a tent for a few nights is okay, but I am not a wild animal, and I don't want to live like a wild animal, surrounded by wild animals.

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

#419

Post by WoodenChair »

random314 wrote: post #413
WoodenChair wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your OP and replies kind of just come across as jealous that John Carmack’s opinion on this stuff is taken seriously whereas relatively unknown folks’ (yourself, the researcher you mentioned) opinions, are not despite the fact that he’s not traditionally credentialed. Like I said in my original post, we should be skeptical of him and his claims. But the way you are dragging this thread out feels like sour grapes. Of…

I don't have any credentials really. If I had to be jealous I would be jealous of Carmacks work in id and oculus. I am definitely irritated by the fact that he is able to pull 20M in funding. He has been giving interviews left right and center. We are upvoting Altman, sam Harris,Carmack but nobody cares about the actual AI researchers, all academics, who have brought about the Deep learning revolution. Your comments…

> I don't have any credentials really. If I had to be jealous I would be jealous of Carmacks work in id and oculus.

Fair, you come across as jealous of him for something... could be that.

> I am definitely irritated by the fact that he is able to pull 20M in funding. He has been giving interviews left right and center. We are upvoting Altman, sam Harris,Carmack but nobody cares about the actual AI researchers, all academics, who have brought about the Deep learning revolution.

There it goes again. Fame is fame is fame is fame. Like I said earlier. That's just how it works. No reason to be against someone for being famous for their non-academic accomplishments if they have something valuable to contribute.

> Your comments about academic bubbles and researchers gives you away. All of the revolutions in AI have been brought about by the academics inside bubbles you are jeering at. The biggest example of academic inside a bubble is Geoff Hinton.

I didn't jeer at anybody I just tried to give you some perspective about how your comments came across. I appreciate all of the researchers but I also live in the real world and understand that people flock to personalities and front-people. That's not necessarily good, but that's the way it is. Just like nobody gives credit to under-secretary of state for coming up with a great new foreign policy.

Waving around great university A or great company B does not make someone any more right, just like being John Carmack doesn't make him any more right.

In fact I've written very critical comments of folks like Altman here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30750254

> We have to sit here and listen to word salads from Carmack, Altman (Ilya - who doesn't get interviewed is the actual researcher behind chatgpt), Sam Harris etc, who have very little insights making bold AGI predictions.

I agree with you. I never said they were right about AGI. Maybe you should be more generous with my replies and actually think I was trying to give you another perspective about how your comments came across.

> I asked to learn about all the algorithms Carmack invented in computer graphics, but haven't heard back. But looks like he has a good grasp on solving AGI by 2030 according to himself. After all, he is a really great programmer.

Again, you're confusing who he is (go back to my original comment in the thread where you jeered at him because he didn't publish any notable papers). He is not a researcher and he is not really a computer scientist. Engineers don't come up with novel algorithms for the most part. He builds things. And being a really good builder is a different but still valuable perspective. But that doesn't mean he's right about AGI.

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

#420

Post by serverholic »

marviel wrote: post #372
serverholic wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A good analogy is perhaps a config file for a computer program.

My interpretation is that Carmack is essentially confusing a config file for the computer program itself, then saying "look how small it is, this shouldn't be that hard to reverse engineer".

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