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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#101

Post by neffy »

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.

This is exactly it. Biology is making massive use of hacked real time local network communication in ways we haven´t begun to explore.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#102

Post by throw310822 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #92

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?

Known entities are recurring patterns (we give names to things that occur more than once, in the world or in our thoughts). Concepts are recurring thought patterns. Abstractions, relations, metaphors, are all ways of finding and transferring patterns from one domain to another.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#103

Post by secondcoming »

foldr wrote: post #94
threeseed wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Why does it need to be competitive? Maybe the guy has enough money to let him do whatever he wants regardless of the outcome and he chose AI because it's interesting to him.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#105

Post by steveBK123 »

Another thought experiment - if OpenAI AGI was right around the corner, why are they wasting time/money/energy buying a product-less vanity hardware startup run by Ive?

Why not tackle robotics if anything. Or really just be the best AGI and everyone will be knocking on your door to license it in their hardware/software stacks, you will print infinite money.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#106

Post by jsheard »

xnickb wrote: post #91
throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 platfo…

It also wasn't even remotely close to learning Dota 2 proper. They ran a massively simplified version of the game where the AI and humans alternated between playing one of two pre-defined team compositions, meaning >90% of the games characters and >99.999999% of the possible compositions and matchups weren't even on the table, plus other standard mechanics were also changed or disabled altogether for the sake of the AI team.

Saying you've solved Dota after stripping out nearly all of its complexity is like saying you've solved Chess, but on a version where the back row is all Bishops.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#107

Post by epr »

qoez wrote: post #76

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

Actually no, it's not interesting at all. Vague dismissal of an outsider is a pretty standard response by insecure academic types. It could have been interesting and/or helpful to the conversation if they went into specifics or explained anything at all. Since none of that's provided, it's "OpenAI insider" vs John Carmack AND Richard Sutton. I know who I would bet on.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#108

Post by jappgar »

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…

A human would learn it faster, and could immediately teach other humans.

AI clearly isn't at human level and it's OK to admit it.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#109

Post by RetroTechie »

modeless wrote: post #25
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.

He says they will open source it which is cool. I agree that I don't understand what's novel here. Playing with a physical controller and camera on a laptop GPU in real time is cool, and maybe that hasn't specifically been done before, but it doesn't seem surprising that it is possible. If it is substantially more sample efficient, or generalizable, than prior work then that would be exciting. But I'm not sure if it…

Maybe that's exactly his goal: not to come up with something that beats the competition, but play with the architecture, get a feel for what works & what doesn't, how various aspects affect the output, and improve on that. Design more efficient architectures, or come up with something that has unique features compared to other models.

If so, scaling up may be more of a distraction rather than helpful (besides wasting resources).

I hope he succeeds in whatever he's aiming for.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#110

Post by Flamentono2 »

aatd86 wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Its hard to follow what you try to commounicate at least the last half.

Nonetheless, yes we do know certain brain structures like your image net analogy but the way you describe it, sounds a little bit of.

Our virtual cortex is not 'just a layer' its a component i would say and its optimized of detecting things.

Other components act differently with different structures.

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