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John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

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Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#481

Post by p1esk »

rfhjt wrote: post #445
short_sells_poo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but let's not assume the the hundreds of other scientists in the field have just been twiddling their thumbs the whole time. It is preposterous to assume that someone largely new to a highly specialized field can somehow start pushing the envelope within a week. Yes, JC is nothing short of brilliant, but these sort of assumptions just set him up to disappoint and is also highly unfair to all the other hardworkin…

How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.

If you look at papers from corporate AI researchers (FAIR, Google Brain, DeepMind, OpenAI, etc) they pretty much do whatever they want.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#482

Post by rfhjt »

hestefisk wrote: post #461
rfhjt wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And programmers are probably not the ones who will come up with AI ideas. I'd bet on mathematicians that prove those Fermat's or ABC theorems.

That’s assuming maths is the fundamental building block of our brain, our consciousness. I happen to think there are some physical and chemical givens preceding it :)

I merely meant that top mathematicians are substantially smarter and can work with concepts that are beyond the reach of even top programmers. We are generally good at recombining existing building blocks and using existing tools. Mathematicians can build new concepts. If I had the money, I'd try to convince the top mathematicians to work on AI full time.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#483

Post by visarga »

fooker wrote: post #472
visarga wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know about math you're just as good at ML as a person who read everything about swimming is in swimming. You got to run experiments to see what happens, build an intuition, understand the problem from the inside. Math leaves you with a few pretty formulas and nothing else.

Ah, you've almost described the contemporary profession of being a Machine Learning Priest.

There are lots of ideas floating around. Everyone who has studied the field has ideas. Ideas are cheap, results matter. The problem is we don't know if any of these ideas would work, and proving an idea requires lots of data, simulations and compute.

Being good at grasping the theory is just the first step in a thousand mile journey. The problem of AI is not going to be solved with a neat math trick on paper, but with lots of experiments. Nature has taken a similar path towards intelligence.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#484

Post by cma »

ekianjo wrote: post #348
baddox wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack never struck me as the type to chase the money from fad tech to fad tech. On the contrary, he seems keen to chase his own interests, and by now I suspect he is financially secure enough to do so.

I did not mention Carmack in my comment. Corporations. Facebook probably decided that having Carmack working on a minuscule market that is barely growing (look at headset sales per year, it's virtually nothing and there is no "acceleration" in sight either) was a waste of his talent.

He’s not working on AGI with Facebook.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#485

Post by TeamSlytherin »

leesec wrote: post #311

Wow, there are a lot of people in this thread arguing whether or not John Carmack has the right skills to help AGI, or about the specifics of his knowledge. Do you all realize you're arguing about nothing? Good for him for doing something he seems excited about. Maybe we should all stop gossiping and go do something we're excited about too.

I've been excited about AGI for a while, mostly because it wasn't a very competitive field, until now.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#486

Post by rfhjt »

p1esk wrote: post #481
rfhjt wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.

If you look at papers from corporate AI researchers (FAIR, Google Brain, DeepMind, OpenAI, etc) they pretty much do whatever they want.

And I disagree violently. The deepmind folks are on salary and every year they need to prove that they are worth the money. This applies to Demis himself: he needs to prove that his org deserves this gaziliion of dollars per year.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#487

Post by rfhjt »

mr_mitm wrote: post #474
rfhjt wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.

Generating papers is research. I don't understand why you dismiss all papers as pointless.

The need to generate publishable papers means that a researcher can only participate in activity that leads to such a paper. He can't try to work on that idea for 5 years, because if no big papers follow, he's toast /he'd probably lose funding long before that).

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#488

Post by a1studmuffin »

guelo wrote: post #440
Animats wrote: post #313

This is encouraging. If you're going to work on artificial general intelligence, a reasonable context in which to work on it is game NPCs. They have to operate in a world, interact with others, survive, and accomplish goals. Simulator technology is now good enough that you can do quite realistic worlds. Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work. Robotics has the same issue…

Yes but it sounds weird to me because Carmack has spent his whole life involved with games but has not been known for an interest in game AI before.

Game AI has nothing to do with AGI (or even regular AI) beyond the surface level description OP provided. The reason game AI hasn't progressed in the last few decades isn't because technology is holding us back - after all we can already achieve impressive machine learning feats using current-gen GPUs - it's because bad NPC AI is by design, so players can learn to overcome them and succeed. Very few people want to play a game that always beats them. Most games use simple state machines or behaviour trees with predictable outcomes for their NPCs because it would be a waste of effort to do anything more, and actually negatively impact the game by making it less fun and burning engineering time on things the player won't benefit from.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#489

Post by Animats »

defterGoose wrote: post #448
nikki93 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I believe in this game / simulated world NPC idea too. To get the kind of complexity we want we either need sensors in the real world or interfacing in a virtual world that humans bring complexity to (probably both -- the humans are part of the sensing technology to start). Things like AlphaZero etc. got good cuz they had a simulatable model of the world (just a chess board + next state function in their case).…

Perhaps the first sentient program will be born in an MMORPG?

Read "Three Laws Lethal", by Walton.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#490

Post by cma »

sailingparrot wrote: post #201
soulofmischief wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be trite; You're well aware that hack in this context means to understand/make progress.

No, I actually understand it as solving it with unexpected tricks.

Like relu?
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