Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by foldr on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:07AM (#34638538)

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.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by qup on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:09AM (#34638555)

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

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by Jensson on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:27AM (#34638688)

Most math wizzes only learn to apply known methods, they don't invent new methods. The AI fields isn't full of people who are creative enough to invent new math methods instead of just applying methods they learned in school.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by sudosysgen on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:31AM (#34638722)

I disagree. I know of plenty of people in the AI field that might as well be mathematicians.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by Jensson on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:35AM (#34638745)

Most mathematicians aren't creative enough to invent new math methods either, they mostly just apply things they learned in school to find new results. Universities aren't good at finding nor nurturing creative individuals.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by candiodari on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:50AM (#34638846)

There are plenty of new scientific results that in both Math and Machine Learning that are essentially 6 months/a few years/a few decades of hard work away from discovery.

As a professor once told me: IF you're lucky, after 10 years in academia, you get to be creative and come up with 4-5 ideas once every 5 years or so (when coming up with the suggested list of research for new phd students to do). Then you get to be devastated when no-one picks up any of your more creative ideas, and everyone picks the 10 non-creative ideas on the list because they don't want to risk their phd.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by Jensson on Friday February 03, 2023 @04:14AM (#34639005)

Yeah, so a person like Carmack who takes the risk and spent his career doing technically creative things could maybe make a difference. Probably not, but as long as creativity is so de-incentivized we will never have too many creative individuals around.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by dragonelite on Friday February 03, 2023 @05:15AM (#34639394)

Even if those ideas are death ends its really important for the rest of the community to know at least some one has put some efforts and discovered several death branches in that creative direction.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by Herbstluft on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:53AM (#34638864)

What does that even mean?

Is that just your gut feeling, as in typical "bright people doing amazing things, surely they would succeed doing x" (which ultimately means nothing, that's just PR speak), or are you saying that based on your own understanding of advanced mathematics and mathematical research from which you are assessing the mathematical work those people you talk about do?

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by bbarnett on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:26AM (#34638676)

He’s been going on about AI for at least a couple of years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/

A whole couple of years, eh? Wow, this AGI thing is taking forever!

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by foldr on Friday February 03, 2023 @05:13AM (#34639377)

I'm just saying there's been no visible indication of progress. You're obviously free to believe that something will come of it over a longer time period. It also seems that we can add at least another year based on this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21531255

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by HWR_14 on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:55AM (#34638872)

I assume Carmack can pick up a lot about a new technical topic in a few years, similarly to how Bill Gates could learn a lot about vaccines and healthcare in a few years. "Hi, I'm (rich and nerd famous person) calling for (expert in field)." Probably spending most of that time being tutored by that experts PhD students.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by foldr on Friday February 03, 2023 @05:14AM (#34639389)

I'm sure he can, but has Bill gates done actual groundbreaking research into vaccines, or just made intelligent decisions about what kind of research to fund? I think the latter.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by rplst8 on Friday February 03, 2023 @05:30AM (#34639482)

Sometimes real progress is made only by finding the proper place to "push" on an otherwise stubborn problem that won't budge.

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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by foldr on Friday February 03, 2023 @05:47AM (#34639576)

Sure, I guess. My point is that Bill Gates is going something quite different from John Carmack (funding research outside his area of expertise, rather than doing the research himself), so that the comparison is not very illuminating.

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