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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

#441

Post by 93po »

kelipso wrote: post #228
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Does it ever get around to answering the question implicit in the title: what is it that he is going to do "different" to the rest? Seems more like he's talking to and following up with Altman, "Y Combinator conference" and the rest. Is that "bucking the trend", taking your own "path", really?

Lol I feel like this is going to be a high school valedictorian goes on to be an average student in Stanford kind if story.

The area of AI research isn't some outlier of super geniuses that don't exist anywhere else. Carmack has often worked around some of the best talent on the planet and he has always stood out.

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

#442

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…

> From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML...

I'd happily bet my entire net worth that he knows more about the technical details of ML than you do.

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

#443

Post by hipjiveguy »

JohnBooty wrote: post #322
seu wrote: post #214

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves…

The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic. I mean, what's the alternative? For a guy like Carmack to only comment on narrow areas in his field(s) of expertise? He's a human bein…

very nicely put. made me rethink somethings :D much appreciated.

ie - expand my domains

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

#444

Post by lostmsu »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #434
lostmsu wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.yout…

According to the scientific method, on which the rest of the natural sciences are currently based, GPT is a valid model of GPT's syntax.

There are "alternatives" for the method according to some philosophers, but AFAIK none of them are useful to any degree and can be considered fringe at this point.

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

#445

Post by 93po »

osigurdson wrote: post #220
poulpy123 wrote: post #209

I can't wait to become completely useless and to finish my life under a bridge begging for food. On a more technical point of few I'm always surprised to read these articles and never read the work reasoning

That seems like an unlikely future reality. Productivity will be off the charts, goods and services will be nearly free. Why would the average person be poor in such a future?

It's also unlikely unless AI owners manage to completely topple democracy. If 90% of people can't get work due to AI and we're all homeless and hungry, we're going to vote in ways that forces distribution of resources.

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

#446

Post by lostmsu »

foobarqux wrote: post #438
lostmsu wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact that you don't understand how GPT models language does not make it less of a model. It did learn the syntax, you are just incapable to grasp the formula it represents.

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

#447

Post by 93po »

jasmer wrote: post #162
tkgally wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reaction, too. For an interview as long and wide-ranging as that one, the lack of any mention of safety or ethical issues stood out. And the potential impact on employment was just waved away with “I am confident that the sum total of value and progress in humanity will accelerate extraordinarily with welcoming artificial beings into our community of working on things.”

My god man 'this is like slavery' (!!) and 'the ethnical issues'. It's software man. Stop it with this 'AGI' nonsense and even 'AI'. Let's call it 'adaptive algorithms' and see it for what it is, just a neat bit of algebra trained on corpus data. The biggest upset in the industrial revolution was the harnessing of fossil fuels, nothing will ever come close to that. We have not had a problem with 'employment' ever sin…

Stop calling humans intelligent, they're just a bunch of neurons responding to stimulus.

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

#448

Post by 93po »

skoczko wrote: post #409

With the utmost respect I have for John Carmack, this interview reads like a publicity piece for investors. Unless he already wrote the AGI and sent it to do interview for him I am not impressed.

Carmack is not taking more funding right now. It reads like a puff investor piece because that is the target audience for the publication.

He isn't trying to impress anyone. He's just being interviewed about his intentions.

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

#449

Post by 93po »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #172

I stopped reading after the passage “and works independently [to achieve AGI]”. In my book, it’s impossible to achieve such breakthrough by working alone, regardless who the man/woman is.

How can you claim something is impossible if you don't even know what's going to be achieved?

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

#450

Post by osigurdson »

poulpy123 wrote: post #325
osigurdson wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like an unlikely future reality. Productivity will be off the charts, goods and services will be nearly free. Why would the average person be poor in such a future?

productivity by who and for who ? AI will belong to a small number of people, and I will not be part of them

When do you expect that this will change? It certainly isn’t the case now. Rich folks don’t broadly have access to significantly better AI today.

This seems to be a common misconception - the rich and powerful have access to far more advanced technology than the average person. The economics just don’t support it.

Let’s say Bezos wanted a better computer chip, just for himself. Ok, fine, try to start a company, hire all the best people and buy all the fabs. It would be very expensive, not much fun and likely wouldn’t lead to good results.

Money actually doesn’t do as much as people think. It is great for buying things that already exist but the relationship between money and things that don’t yet exist is tenuous. Stop buying into the weakness thesis.

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