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Carmack is clearly a brilliant guy, but it feels like he's fallen into the trap of overfitting on his previous successes and believing they generalise into othe
by mogacom 4y ago
Carmack is clearly a brilliant guy, but it feels like he's fallen into the trap of overfitting on his previous successes and believing they generalise into other domains. No doubt his experience and innovations in computer graphics gives him a good insight into problems in vision, etc. but I don't see anything particularly original or orthogonal in what he's saying with regards to "general AI".
- haswell 4y agoWhat makes this a case of overfitting success vs. one of applying a lifetime of experience? I’m not claiming the first can’t exist, but I see no reason to conclude that is the case here.
- mogacom 4y agoI'm not intending to sound overly negative, I really hope he makes progress and think he has a chance (certainly more so than most). As someone who's been in the field for a long time though I constantly see people trivialise the problem of AGI and lose perspective, viewing everything as system design and architecture. Making the required conceptual contributions is a different thing entirely, but it seems his real goal might be the humbler one of scaling and integrating existing ideas.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoI kind of agree, but when you're trying to research truly new stuff, a priori you don't know which are the promising avenues. Newton spent most of his life studying teology and alchemy, which now we know would never take him anywhere compared to physics, optics, or even running the Royal Mint, but at the time there was no way for him to know this.
- m3kw9 4y agoWould you bet on me over Carmack? He obviously has famous engineering chops to have a punchers chance pull this off
- danrocks 4y agoAGI is not an engineering problem.
- cactusplant7374 4y agoThe experts in the field say we need a philosophical breakthrough. Isn't everyone else inexperienced in this regard? https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artificial-intelligence https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artifici...
- lostmsu 4y ago> David Deutschis a physicist at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society. What field were you referring to?
- cactusplant7374 4y agoIt could be linguistics, philosophy, or knowing enough of the history of those fields that make one an expert. I think Chomsky's argument on AI and specifically cognition and the brain is quite useful. Yet, you never hear Altman or Carmack talking about cognition or how computers can understand the meaning of something like a human. They aren't interested in such questions. But to conduct an experiment don't you have to know what you are looking for? Does a chemist do experiments by mixing 1 million compounds at a time?
- lostmsu 4y agoI 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's syntax is close to impeccable) Re: a chemist. Well sort of. Because technically speaking a molecule of the same compound in a certain location and with certain energy is different from another molecule in a different location and with different energy. And even if you disregard that, why would you think that doing 1 million compounds could not significantly move material sciences forward? It is not like they don't want to do that, it is more of that they can't in practice at this time.
- Tepix 4y agoI wouldn't underestimate him. He's failed with this rocket startup so it's not like it has only been successes.