John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#1

Post by tosh » Fri, May 23, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
twitter.com

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#2

Post by kamranjon » Fri, May 23, 2025, 5:39 AM UTC

I was really excited when I heard Carmack was focusing on AI and am really looking forward to watching this when the video is up - but just from looking at the slides it seems like he tried to build a system that can play the Atari? Seems like a fun project, but curious what will come out of it or if there is an associated paper being released.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#3

Post by moralestapia » Fri, May 23, 2025, 5:57 AM UTC

Here's what they built, https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1925243539543265286

Quite exciting. Without diminishing the amazing value of LLMs, I don't think that path goes all the way to AGI. No idea if Carmack has the answer, but some good things will come out of that small research group, for sure.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#4

Post by dusted » Fri, May 23, 2025, 6:07 AM UTC

anywhere we can watch the presentation ? the slides alone are great, but if he's saying stuff alongside, I'd be interested in that too :)

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#5

Post by vasco » Fri, May 23, 2025, 6:12 AM UTC

Bro went his whole career and managed to somehow create a gig for himself where he gets the AI money while playing Atari. It's hard to increase the respect for someone who you already maxed out on but there we go. Carmack is a cool guy.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#6

Post by pyb » Fri, May 23, 2025, 6:16 AM UTC

"... Since I am new to the research community, I made an effort" This means they've probably submitted a paper too.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#7

Post by johnb231 » Fri, May 23, 2025, 6:16 AM UTC

kamranjon wrote: post #2

I was really excited when I heard Carmack was focusing on AI and am really looking forward to watching this when the video is up - but just from looking at the slides it seems like he tried to build a system that can play the Atari? Seems like a fun project, but curious what will come out of it or if there is an associated paper being released.

Atari games are widely used in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research as a standard benchmark.

https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Arcade-Learning-Environ...

The goal is to develop algorithms that generalize to other tasks.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#8

Post by petters » Fri, May 23, 2025, 6:16 AM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #3

Here's what they built, https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1925243539543265286 Quite exciting. Without diminishing the amazing value of LLMs, I don't think that path goes all the way to AGI. No idea if Carmack has the answer, but some good things will come out of that small research group, for sure.

Isn't that what Deepmind did 12 years ago?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#9

Post by xiphias2 » Fri, May 23, 2025, 6:17 AM UTC

A lot of the problems John mentioned (camera jpeg, latency, real time decisions) have been worked on by comma.ai for many years. He could have just used their stack and build on it the general learning parts that comma is not focusing on.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#10

Post by willvarfar » Fri, May 23, 2025, 6:21 AM UTC

vasco wrote: post #5

Bro went his whole career and managed to somehow create a gig for himself where he gets the AI money while playing Atari. It's hard to increase the respect for someone who you already maxed out on but there we go. Carmack is a cool guy.

Although Carmack is the quintessential not-a-brogrammer.