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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#11
post #8

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?

Playing Atari games makes it easy to benchmark and compare and contrast his future research with Deepmind and more recent efforts.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#12
post #8

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?

IIRC Deepmind (and OpenAI and ...) have done this on software-only setups (emulators, TAS, etc); while this one has live input and actuators in the loop, so, kind of the same thing but operating in the physical realm.

I do agree that it is not particularly groundbreaking, but it's a nice "hey, here's our first update".

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#14
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.

I've never actually seen a brogrammer though, I've seen people who program only because they get money for it, I thought for a while those where it, but I'm not sure if I think they qualify either.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although Carmack is the quintessential not-a-brogrammer.

I've never actually seen a brogrammer though, I've seen people who program only because they get money for it, I thought for a while those where it, but I'm not sure if I think they qualify either.

It means “programmer I don’t like”. Very versatile insult and vague enough that it’s impossible to defend against.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#16
post #9

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.

And plenty of other people.

It's still a lot better to really learn and discover it yourself to really get it.

Also it's hard to determine how much time someone spent on particular topic.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#17
post #8

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?

He points that out in his notes and says DeepMind needed specialized training and/or 200M frames of training just to kinda play one game.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#18
post #9

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.

Reuse is not always necessary - sometimes things are just done for fun and exploration, not for appeasing thirsty VCs and grabbing that market share.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#20
post #15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never actually seen a brogrammer though, I've seen people who program only because they get money for it, I thought for a while those where it, but I'm not sure if I think they qualify either.

It means “programmer I don’t like”. Very versatile insult and vague enough that it’s impossible to defend against.

No, I'm pretty sure it's just a programmer that understands the world in terms of bros.
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