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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

John is nice to work with. Very numbers-focused. If you have a flaw in your logic, he’ll call you on it. And he’s looking for vice-versa —- nothing seems to make him happier than when you point out a flaw that he hadn’t considered.

I don’t know Rich, but John has said they work well together, and it’s exciting to see them collaborate. There are some unique ideas at Keen worth pursuing that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Looking forward to seeing more researchers join in the future.

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Where do you read details about Keen's work and ideas?

You’ll have to join them.

Does that mean you work with them? Can you tell us more about that?

I can’t go into specifics for obvious reasons, but I can tell you they’re a smart, capable crew, with lots of resources, and time is on their side. If I had to place bets on which lab will invent agi, they’d be near the top, precisely because they’re exploring ideas that others don’t seem to be focusing on. It’s the early stages, so it’ll take a few years to get to results. But they’re laser-focused.

There are a bunch of things I thought were cool. John has a worklog going back four years or so, with entries practically every day. He’s nothing if not thorough.

Everyone tends to focus on John, but the other members are just as professional and dedicated. They’re a delight to work with. Also the investors are worth mentioning — Nat in particular has built a super cluster of H100s for startups to use, and has done a bunch of other work to support AI.

How do people apply? They don't seem to have much of a web presence.

I think he sources from people he knows, so your best bet is an intro.

Thanks, I'm pretty interested, but don't have any direct connects.

I'd accept a massive pay cut to work with such legends :/

I don’t think spending is their primary constraint; they’re probably looking for talent, no matter the cost.

It seems more of a place that finds you if you are doing interesting work

If I had to place bets on which lab will invent agi

I'd bet against "invent AGI" being a coherent or agreed upon thing, and I'd also bet against the "wake-up" scenario of a system saying "I'm AGI"

Which lab invented deep learning? Certainly U Toronto had the breakthrough that made a 30+ year old field exciting, but there was a lot of work in Montreal, NYU, Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, and many other places

Hell,LLMs can and do output strings of "I'm AGI", so in some sense we're long past that. The problem is as humans we've never defined what it means for a system to be AGI.

My back of a napkin definition is that AGI, given the same information and tools as an IQ 100 human, is able to do all of the same tasks that you could ask a human to do, at the same quality level, as well as recall the experience some time later, like a human would likely be able to do.

The particular issue here is that is subjective as any other subjective definition. 100 IQ is subjective and a moving target. 100 IQ doesn't even mean you can survive and navigate in the real world. Even worse is all humans cannot do all tasks other humans can do and we'd consider them intelligent.

Furthermore this "must behave like a human" blindness represents both a danger, and a way to miss intelligence capabilities leaving them unused/under capitalized. Humans behave like humans because we have human bodies with particular sets of strengths and weaknesses. Other 'intelligent' actors with different embodiment will necessarily behave differently.

Couple that with humans have become far more intelligent and stronger by using tools, that the ability to 'universally' interface with external tooling, at least in my subjective opinion is what will be the defining factor of higher intelligences.

Could argue ChatGPT can already do a lot of this

Didn't Schmidhuber's lab predate all of those in their inventions except ReLU (which I've heard is now out of favor as compute outpaces memory bandwidth and other activation functions have better properties).

Yeah I should have mentioned him too as evidence of the point!

Can you share if the approach is more GOFAI or more neural network-type stuff? Just curious, and I understand if you can't say much, of course.

Richard Sutton has done fascinating RL research in the past.

Lately, though, he has been advocating for ending humanity, which is a bit more chilling[1]:

> Rather quickly, [AI] would displace us from existence. […] It behooves us to give them every advantage, and to bow out when we can no longer contribute…

[1]: https://youtu.be/NgHFMolXs3U?si=5sriRVFKw61K5yes&t=399

That is not, what he is advocating, at the timestamp you referred to.

>That is ... what he is advocating, at the timestamp you referred to.

There's no such thing as taking a quote out of context, only enhancing it!

There is no such thing as watching the same video and getting to wildly different conclusions :-) I could explain it, but I think would be condescending...

After watching the video, I agree with that summarization of Rich's arguments. Building AI so humanity can go gently into that good night seemed very much the theme of that talk.

What is your take on it?

Please watch it again then come back here...

Curious to hear your take. Sutton seems to present AI as worthy successors to humanity. What do you think he is saying?

He is only presenting the arguments of Hans Moravec and arguing for Succession Planning. He even mentions...when we can "no longer contribute" and we "enjoy a comfortable retirement". Almost mention the moral argument that we owe to allow a greater mind to evolve. A trans human might even be the only way humanity can survive. Then he contrasts it with the fearful view of the evolution of AI.

From an abstract on "The Age Of Robots": "...rowing computer power over the next half-century will allow this reptile stage will be surpassed, in stages_ _producing robots that learn like mammals, model their world like primates and eventually reason like humans._ _Depending on your point of view, humanity will then have produced a worthy successor, or transcended inherited_ _limitations and transformed itself into something quite new. No longer limited by the slow pace of human learning and_ _even slower biological evolution, intelligent machinery will conduct its affairs on an ever faster, ever smaller scale, until_ _coarse physical nature has been converted to fine-grained purposeful thought..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec

Now where is arguing for the end of Humanity? To quote from his presentation: "...Why don't we rejoice in their greatness as a symbol and extension of humanity greatness, and work together toward a greater and inclusive civilization"

Is Captain Jean-Luc Picard arguing for the end of humanity, is he less of an human?...Just for advocating for Data? - https://youtu.be/ol2WP0hc0NY

While I don't agree with your conclusion, as it seems Rich Sutton was simply paraphrasing Hans Moravec, I found the video pretty interesting.

Thank you for sharing it.

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