John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence
upstart writes:
Carmack sees a 60% chance of achieving initial success in AGI by 2030:
[Ed note: This interview is chopped way down to fit here. Lots of good stuff in the full interview. --hubie]
Inside his multimillion-dollar manse on Highland Park's Beverly Drive, Carmack, 52, is working to achieve AGI through his startup Keen Technologies, which raised $20 million in a financing round in August from investors including Austin-based Capital Factory.
This is the "fourth major phase" of his career, Carmack says, following stints in computers and pioneering video games with Mesquite's id Software (founded in 1991), suborbital space rocketry at Mesquite-based Armadillo Aerospace (2000-2013), and virtual reality with Oculus VR, which Facebook (now Meta) acquired for $2 billion in 2014. Carmack stepped away from Oculus' CTO role in late 2019 to become consulting CTO for the VR venture, proclaiming his intention to focus on AGI. He left Meta in December to concentrate full-time on Keen.
Many are predicting stupendous, earth-shattering things will result from this, right?
I'm trying not to use the kind of hyperbole of really grand pronouncements, because I am a nuts-and-bolts person. Even with the rocketry stuff, I wasn't talking about colonizing Mars, I was talking about which bolts I'm using to hold things together. So, I don't want to do a TED talk going on and on about all the things that might be possible with plausibly cost-effective artificial general intelligence.
[...] You'll find people who can wax rhapsodic about the singularity and how everything is going to change with AGI. But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have 'universal remote employees' that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, 'I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we're going to deploy them on these jobs,' and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that-that's the most prosaic, mundane, most banal use of something like this.
If all we're doing is making more human-level capital and applying it to the things that we're already doing today, while you could say, 'I want to make a movie or a comic book or something like that, give me the team that I need to go do that,' and then run it on the cloud-that's kind of my vision for it.
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