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- John Carmack: The code for AGI could conceivably be written by one individual
John Carmack: The code for AGI could conceivably be written by one individual
After stepping down as CTO of Meta’s Oculus VR, legendary programmer John Carmack was trying to decide if he would work on nuclear fission or artificial general intelligence (AGI). He ultimately chose AGI.
“I think [fission] is possible,” John says. “Somebody should be doing this, but it’s going to involve some politics, decent-sized teams, and a bunch of cross-functional stuff that I don’t love. While artificial general intelligence seems to me like the highest-leverage moment for a single individual potentially in the history of the world.”
He explains:
“With the things we know about the brain and what we can do with artificial intelligence . . . I’m not a madman for saying that it is likely that the code for artificial general intelligence is going to be tens of thousands of lines of code — not millions of lines of code.”
He continues:
“This is code that conceivably one individual could write, unlike writing a new web browser or operating system. And based on the progress that machine learning has made in the recent decade, it’s likely that the important things that we don’t know are relatively simple. There’s probably a handful of things — my bet is there’s less than six key insights — that need to be made. Each one of them can probably be written on the back of an envelope. We don’t know what they are, but when they’re put together in concert with GPUs at scale and the data that we all have access to, we can make something that behaves like a human being or living creature and that can then be educated in whatever ways we need to get to the point where we can have universal remote workers where anything that somebody does mediated by a computer, that doesn’t require physical interaction, an AGI will be able to do.”
Carmack does not think this will be “unapproachably hard”:
“That’s incredibly hubristic to say, but what I said a couple of years ago was that there’s a 50% chance that somewhere there will be signs of life of an AGI in 2030, and I’ve probably increased that slightly — maybe 55-60% now because I do think there’s a little sense of acceleration.”