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John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

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Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#571

Post by martindbp »

godelski wrote: post #371
sailingparrot wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we didn't have the theory or the models, there was no path forward and so it was impossible to predict. Now we have a fairly concrete idea of what a potential AGI might look like - an RL agent that uses a large transformer. Who is we exactly? As someone working in AI research I know no one that would agree with this statement, so im quite puzzled by that statement.

> As someone working in AI research Being in the tail end of my PhD, I want to second this sentiment. I'm not even bullish on AGI (more specifically HLI) in 50 years. Scale will only take you so far and we have to move past frequentism. Hell, causality research still isn't that popular but is quite important for intelligence. I think people (especially tech enthusiasts) are getting caught in the gullibility gap.

> Being in the tail end of my PhD

That doesn't really qualify you to make these anti-predictions any more than tens of thousands of other people working in this field. There's also this phenomenon where experts close to a problem are worse at predicting the future because they are so intimately familiar with the problems that they can't see the forest for the trees.

To me there is one major signal that AGI is much closer than 50 years away and that is the breakthrough with Transformers. Now we have a general purpose architecture for predicting the future that works really well, which is a key component in the brain (cortical columns). Clearly we're still at the early stages, but 50 years is a loooong time. 50 years ago we didn't even have the Altair 8800.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#572

Post by MikusR »

bhdlr wrote: post #392
rebelos wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack sounds like someone who lives his job, so I don't think age/life stage is a factor here.

> Carmack sounds like someone who lives his job, so I don't think age/life stage is a factor here. He said on lex Fridman that he's going all in on it. He said he was tired of his 1 day a week consultancy at oculus and wanted to work full time on this.

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1560729196166529025 > "I am continuing as a consultant with Meta on VR matters, devoting about 20% of my time there."

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#573

Post by Tenoke »

jmyeet wrote: post #284
Jack000 wrote: post #116

I'm very optimistic for near-term AGI (10 years or less). Even just a few years ago most in the field would have said that it's an "unknown unknown", we didn't have the theory or the models, there was no path forward and so it was impossible to predict. Now we have a fairly concrete idea of what a potential AGI might look like - an RL agent that uses a large transformer. The issue is that unlike supervised training y…

I'm not. My evidence? OpenWorm [1]. OpenWorm is an effort to model the behaviour of a worm that has 302 mapped neurons. 302. Efforts so far have fallen way short of the mark. How many neurons does a human brain have? 86 billion (according to Google). I've seen other estimates that the computational power of the brain is roughly estimated as 10^15 operations per second. I suspect that's on the low end. We can't even r…

That's a poor example. We have plenty of models that vastly outperform OpenWorm on whatever task you choose. Their failure simply suggests AGI is unlikely to come from direct emulation of existing intelligence.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#574

Post by lagrange77 »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #301
lagrange77 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the point when an AGI is capable of constructing a slightly better version of itself and has the urge to do so, everything can happen very fast.

People don't really consider the immense risk of "speed superintelligences" as a very quick and relatively easy follow-on step to the development of AGI. Once developed, one solely needs to turn up the execution rate of an AGI, which would result in superhuman performance on most practical and economically meaningful metrics. Imagine if for every real day that passed, one experienced 100 days of subjective time. Woul…

> We really need to stop arguing about time scales for the arrival of AGI, and start societal planning for its arrival whenever that happens.

I think so, too.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#575

Post by K0balt »

godelski wrote: post #371
sailingparrot wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we didn't have the theory or the models, there was no path forward and so it was impossible to predict. Now we have a fairly concrete idea of what a potential AGI might look like - an RL agent that uses a large transformer. Who is we exactly? As someone working in AI research I know no one that would agree with this statement, so im quite puzzled by that statement.

> As someone working in AI research Being in the tail end of my PhD, I want to second this sentiment. I'm not even bullish on AGI (more specifically HLI) in 50 years. Scale will only take you so far and we have to move past frequentism. Hell, causality research still isn't that popular but is quite important for intelligence. I think people (especially tech enthusiasts) are getting caught in the gullibility gap.

Scale isn’t the problem. Very simple organisms display general intelligence. General intelligence is rampant in the insect world. It’s something along the lines of a repl vs compiled language paradigm shift.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#576

Post by lagrange77 »

treesprite82 wrote: post #213
lagrange77 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the point when an AGI is capable of constructing a slightly better version of itself and has the urge to do so, everything can happen very fast.

> capable of constructing a slightly better version of itself With just self-improvement I think you hit diminishing returns, rather than an exponential explosion. Say on the first pass it cleans up a bunch of low-hanging inefficiencies and improves itself 30%. Then on the second pass it has slightly more capacity to think with, but it also already did everything that was possible with the first 100% capacity - maybe…

I'm not just imagining self-improvement in the sense, that it optimizes its design to become more efficient or powerful by a few percent. A system, that can 'think out of the box' may come up with some disruptive new ideas and designs.

Just a thought: Isn't lacking intellectual capacity, what keeps us from understanding, how the human brain actually works? Maybe an AGI will eventually understand it and will construct the next AGI generation with biological matter.

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#577

Post by pfd1986 »

wcerfgba wrote: post #239

Does anyone else subscribe to the idea that AGI is impossible/unlikely without 'embodied cognition', i.e. we cannot create a human-like 'intelligence' unless it has a similar embodiment to us, able to move around a physical environment with it's own limbs, sense of touch, sight, etc. ? Any arguments against the necessity of this? I feel like any AGI developed in silico without freedom of movement will be fundamentall…

this point is brought again and again by the late John Holland (check out his books) and by his protege Melanie Mitchel...

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#578

Post by elcritch »

FL33TW00D wrote: post #556
WalterBright wrote: post #153

It will decide our fate in a microsecond: extermination.

It seems in the animal kingdom that empathy scales with intelligence - we can only hope the trend continues.

Unfortunately that could still be "they must be terminated for their own good to save them from XYZ".

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#579

Post by mhh__ »

celdon25 wrote: post #424
mhh__ wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does he have the expertise to pull it off as an individual?

I would say so. Most AGI work so far has been pursued by academics with a lack of software engineering best practices. Codebases get bloated and hard to understand. Ramp-up time measured in years. This hinders experimentation, which you have to optimize for with projects like this. I would suspect Carmack understands this, and also understands what resources to consult, and how to spot the bullshit artists in the fie…

I'm just skeptical of his technical skills in this area. I need to watch the lex thing but I don't really rate lex in this area either.

It's a fairly big shift from games.

Management might be OK but setting the direction of the company needs more inspiration than just writing good C++ code

Re: John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round

#580

Post by meowtastic »

otikik wrote: post #222

I'm slightly scared that they'll succeed. But not in the usual "robots will kill us" way. What I am afraid of is that they succeed, but it turns out similar to VR: as an inconsequential gimmick. That they use their AGIs to serve more customized ads to people, and that's where it ends.

The upshot is that the AGI might realise that companies are wasting money making annoying ads.
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