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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

#431

Post by sn9 »

yifanl wrote: post #366
vacuumcl wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is saying that the "base code" / DNA which makes up the brain might be only 40MB (for example). Not that what eventually emerges from that (such as our memories and learned abilities) can be captured with just 40MB. It's similar to how the Game of Life can be implemented in just a few lines, but very complex behavior can emerge from that. The key is to find a sufficiently simple but general model from which intell…

That seems... just deeply wrong? How much knowledge is gained from observation after birth as opposed to just being innate in your brain?

He's talking about sentience.

He admits that the equivalent of years of "training" would still be needed to take an toddler-level consciousness to something approaching an adult human.

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

#432

Post by sn9 »

m3kw9 wrote: post #314
seanhunter wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A really good example of a smart person reasoning from completely made up assumptions to a punchy-sounding but almost-certainly wildly wrong conclusion. Just because our DNA can be efficiently encoded doesn't mean that our brain is a tiny proportion of that encoding. Your DNA doesn't change much from when you're born to when you die (random degredation aside) and yet your cognative abilities change beyond all recogni…

The brains structure is derived from dna but it contains learning capabilities that comes after the initial creation. Pretty much like how 5 lines of code can get you image recognition, of course it uses lots of libs, but I can still do that myself with 5 lines. The training is the hard part

Is the training the hard part?

Is that not what humanity has developed from centuries/millennia of experience with all the approaches to child raising and education?

Engineering something trainable is clearly the difficult part given the entire conversation is about whether or not it's even possible.

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

#433

Post by sn9 »

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #303
marviel wrote: post #267

> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…

We also have to import the "physics" package, so maybe it requires more than the estimated 40mb after all.

Nah that's just the standard library. Anyone can access it.

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

#434

Post by cactusplant7374 »

lostmsu wrote: post #426
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be linguistics, philosophy, or knowing enough of the history of those fields that make one an expert. I think Chomsky's argument on AI and specifically cognition and the brain is quite useful. Yet, you never hear Altman or Carmack talking about cognition or how computers can understand the meaning of something like a human. They aren't interested in such questions. But to conduct an experiment don't you have…

I generally have pretty low regard for philosophy, and consider Popper + current scientific method to be SoTA. Its relationship to the nature of cognition overall seems pretty dubious. As for linguistics, IMHO the existence and success of GPT pretty much puts Chomsky into the proven wrong bucket, so again, not a good example. (his whole point used to be that statistical model can't learn syntax in principle, and GPT'…

> As for linguistics, IMHO the existence and success of GPT pretty much puts Chomsky into the proven wrong bucket, so again, not a good example. (his whole point used to be that statistical model can't learn syntax in principle, and GPT's syntax is close to impeccable)

What do you disagree with? He appears to be correct. The software hasn’t learned anything. It mixes and matches based on training data.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ndwIZPBs8Y4

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

#435

Post by cactusplant7374 »

jasmer wrote: post #80

AGI is a bit of a glib concept ... our technology will not be like an 'autaumaton'. Everything we make is 'systems' oriented, and is not at all like our human conception of 'intelligence' dervied from the fact that we humans are effectively independant from our surroundings. 'Siri', backed by ChatGPT and the 'world's data' will probably pass some 'AGI' threshold, but is 'Siri' an individual AGI? Are we all talking to…

> It's also entirely feasible that if ChatGPT represents all possible forms of human communication, then it will perfectly emulate a human. Ok, it's really just a fancy neural network that is not theoretically 'thiking' but how does that matter? If it can rationlize sufficiently to make such interactions, who is to say it's not 'AGI'?

Doesn’t AGI need to be able to make discoveries as a human would? How else can it move us forward as a society?

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

#436

Post by Balgair »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #394
Balgair wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neuroscientist-y person here. We know a LOT about how neurons organize. Not even close to everything we 'should' know, but we do know a lot. Most of this is in the development of the brain. How you get from one cell to the trillions that make up a person. The real quick and dirty explanation is that cells follow multiple chemical gradients to find their 'home'. This is a HUGE topic though, and I'm being terse as I ha…

Ok, are those chemical gradients encoded in DNA?

Short answer: No.

Medium answer: Kinda. The chemical gradients cause a signaling cascade that modifies transcription of DNA (it's really complicated). This transcription change then causes the cell to become a XXX_neuron. However, there are many many waves of this process occurring with a lot of cell death along the way. When those cells are not the 'final' cell of the nervous system, these transcriptions can cause further and more complicated chemical gradients to exist in the fetus. These complicating recursive loops can also self-affect cells and cause them to change yet again.

We're still discovering a lot here.

Also, this is largely how ALL cells in a body work, not just neurons. Be careful though, this is very very complicated stuff and everything I've written has a caveat.

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

#437

Post by arcturus17 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #376
arcturus17 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok!

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

#438

Post by foobarqux »

lostmsu wrote: post #426
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be linguistics, philosophy, or knowing enough of the history of those fields that make one an expert. I think Chomsky's argument on AI and specifically cognition and the brain is quite useful. Yet, you never hear Altman or Carmack talking about cognition or how computers can understand the meaning of something like a human. They aren't interested in such questions. But to conduct an experiment don't you have…

I generally have pretty low regard for philosophy, and consider Popper + current scientific method to be SoTA. Its relationship to the nature of cognition overall seems pretty dubious. As for linguistics, IMHO the existence and success of GPT pretty much puts Chomsky into the proven wrong bucket, so again, not a good example. (his whole point used to be that statistical model can't learn syntax in principle, and GPT'…

LLMs haven't "learned" syntax, that's the point. It doesn't matter if you just want to predict syntax (engineering) only if you want to understand the human language faculty (science) and nearly no one is interested in the latter.

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

#439

Post by 93po »

eloff wrote: post #198
qbasic_forever wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still have a form of slavery in the US. Prison labor is forced work that earns pennies a day: https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...

Why is that a bad thing? Most of those people are a burden to society. Let them pay it down a little. I mean I’d rather they were getting free education and preparing themselves for reintegration into society, but it’s not a perfect world. Prisons in the US are oriented towards punishment and labor can be a part of that. They should be oriented towards rehabilitation.

> Most of those people are a burden to society.

This is both extremely dehumanizing and also not true.

Forced prison work isn't paying anything back to society. It's lining the pockets of people who are profiting from forced labor.

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

#440

Post by 93po »

mrguyorama wrote: post #376
arcturus17 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why should we look to him for AI questions? What evidence is there that he has any new knowledge?

He covers this in the article. He doesn't. He's just trying stuff out with a different approach than others because he believes (and is probably correct) that there is a chance that the most efficient path forward to AGI isn't the work that OpenAI and others are doing.

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