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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

#51

Post by robsun »

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…

Changing fields is though for everyone, no matter how talented you are. There is a great chance he will fail. On the other hand, he meets all requirements that are needed to succeed.

Carmack has proven his extraordinary technical skills. I recommend following his Twitter. Sometimes he posts non-obvious technical stuff. I read some interviews and to me, he doesn't seem to be a person who is driven by gaining popularity.

I think this news is very optimistic, as yet another intelligent, talented and hard-working person is joining the field. Moreover, he is a household name, which may lead to benefits like popularization of the topic, gaining investors attention and so on.

I will keep my fingers crossed for him :).

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

#52

Post by foldr »

fxtentacle wrote: post #42
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…

I got obsessed with his ideas after reading the Quake 3 source code. So many novel ideas, flawlessly executed, highly optimized, yet easy to understand and easy to modify and debug. My personal impression is that John Carmack has the ability to organize concepts in a way that few people can. So even if he's pretty clueless about the topic now, I would expect him to reduce some maths papers to their essence in a way t…

He’s been going on about AI for at least a couple of years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530860 It’s certainly possible that he will have a novel idea, but I haven’t seen anything come out of it yet.

I’m sure Carmack’s mathematical ability exceeds that of the average game developer (and certainly my own), but the AI field isn’t short of math whizzes.

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

#53

Post by jillesvangurp »

random314 wrote: post #11

> So, about four years ago, I went on one of my week-long retreats, where I just take a computer and a stack of reference materials and I spend a week kind of reimplementing the fundamentals of the industry. And getting to the point where it’s like, ‘All right, I understand this well enough to have a serious conversation with a researcher about it.’ And I was pretty excited about getting to that level of understandin…

Anything you study for a few months you can become the world's leading expert on. It's a lesson I learned while doing my Ph. D. That's all it takes. After a few weeks, you get to the point where there are only a few others in the world that have read and are able to understand what you've read. A few months on, you are generating new ideas and insights. They might be wrong. But they won't be uninformed.

John Carmack did not start from zero. He already has a firm grasp on algorithms related to linear algebra. Basically machine learning is a whole bunch of matrix manipulation. He's been doing that for 3 decades. The rest is just absorbing concepts about how to apply linear algebra to ML. I'd say he's probably uniquely qualified to really absorb a lot of knowledge quickly on this. It's not about publishing papers, it's about reading and understanding the right papers. I have no doubt he can chew his way through lots of research material in a week or so.

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

#54

Post by qup »

foldr wrote: post #52
fxtentacle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got obsessed with his ideas after reading the Quake 3 source code. So many novel ideas, flawlessly executed, highly optimized, yet easy to understand and easy to modify and debug. My personal impression is that John Carmack has the ability to organize concepts in a way that few people can. So even if he's pretty clueless about the topic now, I would expect him to reduce some maths papers to their essence in a way t…

He’s been going on about AI for at least a couple of years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530860 It’s certainly possible that he will have a novel idea, but I haven’t seen anything come out of it yet. I’m sure Carmack’s mathematical ability exceeds that of the average game developer (and certainly my own), but the AI field isn’t short of math whizzes.

The whole point was that the math didn't matter.

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

#55

Post by tiborsaas »

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…

Too bad people who make progress don't ask for permission to try new things and they probably don't even care what anyone thinks. They are not limited by decades of dogma and rules of the game that experts would take for granted you can't break. If they fail, then well, no problem, at least they tried. If they succeed, then it's a win for all.

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

#56

Post by jdlshore »

Macuyiko wrote: post #2

Fun interview but barely any meat for those in the field. Just very general questions and answers, saying that the road is murky, but nothing about e.g. if Transformers / attention are the way to go forward, multi-modal models, reinforcement learning + self-supervised learning.

It’s a puff piece in a general interest magazine. It’s not going to go into details. I also got the impression that Carmack was being cagey about the directions where he saw potential.

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

#58

Post by psychoslave »

>We do not yet have the learnable stream of consciousnesses of a co-worker in AI, but we do have kind of this oracular amount of knowledge that can be brought forward.

Except if there are some plane to make AGI agents have their own mundane-human-like life with issues unrelated to the businesses problem at stack they are supposed to do, where will they take serendipity inputs?

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

#59

Post by mejutoco »

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…

I am not a big fan of idolizing someone, but Carmack is so technically good, and explains himself so well, why not get inspiration from him? I read Masters of Doom and genuinely enjoyed it.

Let's say I strongly disagree on many levels in the comparison with the other person you mention. Just to mention two, the humbleness that Carmack shows, and how well he explains himself are key differentiators for me. Regarding the appeal to authority in AI knowledge, Carmack has shown again and again he can deliver software (AI is software after all), and we are in a forum with hacker in the name.

I a summary, not my hero, but when he says something I will listen. Maybe I learn something.

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

#60

Post by ggm »

I don't object to him doing this nor the immense amounts of investor money which will burn along the path. He's smart. Good things will come of this. Maybe even amazing things. But not AGI.

I do object to fetishists of AGI piling in and the equally silly assumptions he has some magic secret sauce which can get there.

Please do not be sucked into "to infinity and beyond" nonsense. I don't care if it's Musk, or Carmack or Kurzeweil, it's stupid.

If Malcolm Gladwell writes it up, it's peak stupid.

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