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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

#581

Post by bounded_agent »

arcturus17 wrote: post #574
Jaruzel wrote: post #518

Carmack's post in full: Starting this week, I’m moving to a "Consulting CTO” position with Oculus. I will still have a voice in the development work, but it will only be consuming a modest slice of my time. As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace, and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague “line of sight” to the sol…

Thanks it didn’t so much save me as it enabled me, since I have it blocked.

+1

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

#582

Post by buboard »

pyentropy wrote: post #163
buboard wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even rodents can outperform state of the art models at general tasks Rodents can't play Go or a lot of other humanly-meaningful tasks. We don't need to build an artificial cell. A cell is too many components that by blind luck happened to find ways to work together, this is as far from efficient design as can be. The same way we don't build two-legged airplanes, we don't need anything that's close to the wet spiky…

AlphaZero has coded all the rules for the respective three games, they do a tree search and their neural network output layer has exactly n neurons for max(n) possible moves. Although it's impressive they don't teach it heuristics and strategies, it's a very specific task. What about pigeons predicting breast cancer with 99% probability, rats learning to drive cars, monkeys building tools? Rodents stand a bigger chan…

The natural environment encodes "all the rules" for real animals, too. You need some constraints or else there is nothing to be learned. One could say that every survival task is also specific , but is a slight variation of previously learned one.

> pigeons predicting breast cancer with 99%

pigeons contain 340M neurons (with dendrites and all, giving them higher computational capacity than ANN units).

> Rodents stand a bigger chance at learning Go

They probably don't ; probably because they can't understand the objective function and their brain capacity is limited

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

#584

Post by buboard »

acdha wrote: post #259
buboard wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> constrained problem human AI also evolved by solving constrained problems, one at a time. Life existed before the visual system , but once this was solved it moved on to do other things. In AI we have a number of sensory systems seemingly solved: Speech recognition, visual object recognition, and we are closing to certain output (motor) systems: NLP text synthesis systems seem a lot like the central pattern generat…

> In AI we have a number of sensory systems seemingly solved: Speech recognition, visual object recognition, Do you have examples of those systems which are competitive in general use rather than specialized niches? The cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, etc. are good in the specific cases they’re trained on but fall off rapidly once you get new variants which a human would handle easily.

There are many vision models where classification is better than human. I m not sure what you mean 'fall of rapidly'; they do fail however for certain inputs where humans are better. But we 're talking about models that contain 6 to 7 orders of magnitude less neurons than an adult brain.

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

#585

Post by mkl »

srge wrote: post #558
voxl wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is actually being argued is the cult worship of a particular engineer. I am against cult worship, so find the fact that Carmack is entering this space simply not news worthy. Yet here it is. Do I wish him the best of luck and hope he cracks the problem? Of course, all the same I would wish that of an upstart PhD student. Yet, the announcements of a brilliant PhD student attending a university to work on AGI is s…

John Carmack is a genius in at least 3 different things and probably more: business, tech and expression (written or oral). He can explain very complicated things in such a graceful way. I personally consider anything he does to be newsworthy.

Carmack is amazing at computer graphics and related technologies, but I fail to see evidence of the other two areas. He's never been much of a businessman - he's always focused on the technical side and left the selling/operations to others. I'm not aware of much he's done in terms of educational explanations, and the talks of his I've seen have been rambling and convoluted (but fascinating!).

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

#586

Post by rapnie »

solipsism wrote: post #383
xamuel wrote: post #319

I've been dabbling in AGI and it seems like the field has a lot of low-hanging fruit. I'll bet Carmack can offer some significant contributions. I'll take an opportunity to plug a paper I recently published on comparing relative intelligence. The punchline will illuminate the low-hangingness of the fruit in this field. Suppose X and Y are AGIs and you want to know which is more intelligent. For any interactive reward…

For any interactive reward-giving environment E, you could place X into E and see how much reward X gets; likewise for Y. If X gets more reward, you can consider that as evidence of X being more intelligent. That's an odd definition of intelligence. By that definition, a bird is more "intelligent" than a human at the task of opening a nut. Seems like "fitness" would be a much more appropriate term. It seems especiall…

You'd be correct if the electorate held only one voter: the chessboard environment. But in any other environment the chess bot would fail miserably, no votes gained, whereas a future AGI would score well 'across the board' in many/most environments, win the election.

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

#587

Post by buboard »

carlosdp wrote: post #68

This doesn't surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) As recent as his last Oculus Connect keynote, he exto…

I dont know of his credentials as a scientist or mathematician to advance the field. But, he seems to be a ruthless optimizer, which can often leads to great leaps , even as a side effect. Neural networks are not difficult mathematically for any scientist to grasp really. And they are in actual need of compression and optimization. People are spoiled with general purpose tools that are not very efficient, even if computation is cheap.

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

#588

Post by bgilroy26 »

adrianN wrote: post #546
fastbeef wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work. Sounds like the start of a truly horrifying Black Mirror episode

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

The internet is so great

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

#589

Post by buboard »

nradov wrote: post #367
EamonnMR wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of this assertion. It mimics some bits and pieces of the only GI we know about right now; that's as good a start as any, right?

You can carve a block of wood into something that looks like a computer. That should be a good start on building a device that can run Linux, right?

the first computers were mechanical. Then somebody carved a facsimile with electricity and we got computing. Just because nature founded intelligence in carbon atoms doesn't mean its the only way or indeed the optimal one.

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

#590

Post by yitchelle »

voxl wrote: post #388
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.

What is actually being argued is the cult worship of a particular engineer. I am against cult worship, so find the fact that Carmack is entering this space simply not news worthy. Yet here it is. Do I wish him the best of luck and hope he cracks the problem? Of course, all the same I would wish that of an upstart PhD student. Yet, the announcements of a brilliant PhD student attending a university to work on AGI is s…

The difference between John and the PhD student is their history of Getting Stuff Done. I imagine that the PhD student list of Stuff Done is not as accomplished as John's.

Also the reason why guys like John and Elon are much admired as engineers. They Get Stuff Done. The chance of something remarkable occurring with these folks are a lot higher than it is with the PhD student.

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