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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#91

Post by xnickb »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #74
johnb231 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the notes: "A reality check for people that think full embodied AGI is right around the corner is to ask your dancing humanoid robot to pick up a joystick and learn how to play an obscure video game."

This sounds like a problem that could be solved around the corner with a caveat. Games generally are solvable for AI because they have feedback loops and a clear success or failure criteria. If the "picking up a Joystick" part is the limiting factor, sure. But why would we want robots to use an interface (especially a modern controller) heavily optimized for human hands; that seems like the definition of a horseless…

Just like OpenAI early on promised us an AGI and showed us how it "solved" Dota 2.

They also claimed it "learned" to play by playing itself only however it was clear that most of the advanced techniques were borrowed from existing AI and by observing humans.

No surprise they gave up on that project completely and I doubt they'll ever engage in anything like that again.

Money better spent on different marketing platforms.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#92

Post by andy_ppp »

I still don’t think we have a clear enough idea of what a concept is to be able to think about AGI. And then being able to use concepts from one area to translate into another area, what is the process by which the brain combines and abstracts ideas into something new?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#93

Post by mr_toad »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #33
mschuster91 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it still feels like some key ingredient is missing. Continuous training is the key ingredient. Humans can use existing knowledge and apply it to new scenarios, and so can most AI. But AI cannot permanently remember the result of its actions in the real world, and so its body of knowledge cannot expand. Take a toddler and an oven. The toddler has no concept of what an oven is other than maybe that it smells nice…

This kind of context management is not that hard, even when building LLMs. Especially when you have huge windows like we do today. Look at how ChatGPT can remember things permanently after you said them once using a function call to edit the permanent memory section inside the context. You can also see that in Anthropic's latest post on Claude 4 where it learns to play Pokemon. The only remaining issue here is maybe…

Big context windows are a poor substitute for updating the weights. Its like keeping a journal because your memory is failing.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#94

Post by foldr »

threeseed wrote: post #86
brador wrote: post #21

I feel top level AI creation is beyond his skill set. He’s a AAA software engineer but the prerequisites to build out cutting edge AI require deep formal math that is beyond his education and years at this point. Nothing to stop him playing around with AI models though.

John Carmack: So I asked Ilya, their chief scientist, for a reading list. This is my path, my way of doing things: give me a stack of all the stuff I need to know to actually be relevant in this space. And he gave me a list of like 40 research papers and said, 'If you really learn all of these, you'll know 90% of what matters today! And I did. I plowed through all those things and it all started sorting out in my hea…

What this misses is that research is a competitive endeavor. To succeed as a researcher you don’t just need to know the bare minimum required to do research in your field. You need to be able to do it better than most of the people you’re competing against. I know that HN as a collective has near-unlimited faith in Carmack’s abilities (and he is no doubt Very Smart). But he’s competing with other Very Smart people who have decades more experience of AI research.

To put it another way, the idea that John Carmack is going to do groundbreaking research in AI is roughly as plausible as the idea that Yann LeCun is going to make a successful AAA video game. Stranger things have happened, but I won’t be holding my breath.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#95

Post by epolanski »

mschuster91 wrote: post #85
epolanski wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans can use existing knowledge and apply it to new scenarios, and so can most AI Doesn't the article states that this is not true? AI cannot apply to B what it learned about A.

Well, ChatGPT knows about the 90s Balkan wars, a topic to which LWT hasn't made an episode that I'm aware of, and yet I can ask it to write a script for a Balkan wars episode that reads surprisingly like John Oliver while being reasonably correct.

Essentially Carmack pointed in the slides that teaching AI to play game a, b or c didn't improve AI at all at learning game d from scratch.

That's essentially what we're looking for when we talk about general intelligence, the capability to adapting what we know to what we know nothing about.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#96

Post by woolion »

johnb231 wrote: post #65
nlitened wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the human brain, of which we don't have a clear understanding of the compute capacity Neurons have finite (very low) speed of signal transfer, so just by measuring cognitive reaction time we can deduce upper bounds on how many _consecutive_ neuron connections are involved in reception, cognitive processing, and resulting reaction via muscles, even for very complex cognitive processes. And the number is just around…

> (100x matmul+tanh?) Biological neurons are way more complex than that. A single neuron has dentritic trees with subunits doing their own local computations. There are temporal dynamics in the firing sequences. There is so much more complexity in the biological networks. It's not comparable.

You could implement a Turing-machine with humans acting physically operating as logic gates. Then, every human is just a boolean function.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#97

Post by gregdeon »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #29
johnb231 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They were highly used. OpenAI even included them in their RL Gym library back in the old days when they were still doing open research. But if you look at this leaderboard from 7 (yes, seven!) years ago [1], most of them were already solved way beyond human capabilities. But we didn't get a really useful general purpose algorithm out of it. As an AI researcher, I always considered Atari a fun academic exercise, but n…

I watched the talk live. I felt that his main argument was that Atari _looks_ solved, but there's still plenty of value that could be gained by revisiting these "solved" games. For one, learning how to play games through a physical interface is a way to start engaging with the kinds of problems that make robotics hard (e.g., latency). They're also a good environment to study catastrophic forgetting: an hour of training on one game shouldn't erase a model's ability to play other games.

I think we could eventually saturate Atari, but for now it looks like it's still a good source of problems that are just out of reach of current methods.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#98

Post by CPLX »

tomaytotomato wrote: post #38
dusted wrote: 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.

From watching on the wall I've seen brogrammer used in various contexts (this is not an exhaustive list): - Someone who is a programmer but follows a hypermasculine cliche and makes sure everyone knows about it. - An insult used by other developers for someone who is more physically fit or interested in their health than themselves. - An insult used by engineers or other people who are not happy with the over represe…

A. A male programmer who uses the word "bro" unironically in conversation.

B. A person who is physically and culturally indistinguishable from A

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#99

Post by CPLX »

blitzar wrote: post #43
prosunpraiser wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Reinventing the exact same thing and shouting from the rooftops about it is exactly how you appease thirsty VCs and grab that market share.

Might I interest you in my new startup, that is a bus, but with technology?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#100

Post by fmbb »

roflcopter69 wrote: post #90
qoez wrote: post #76

Interesting reply from an openai insider: https://x.com/unixpickle/status/1925795730150527191

Funny, I was just commenting something similar here, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44071614 And I say this while most certainly not being as knowledgeable as this openai insider. So it even I can see this, then it's kinda bad, isn't it?

Can you explain which parts you think are bad and why?
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