Interesting reply from an openai insider: https://x.com/unixpickle/status/1925795730150527191
My bet is on Carmack.
I suspect Carmack in the Dancehall with the BFG.
John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
111–120 of 387 posts
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#112I find it interesting that he dismisses LLMs.
I would argue that if he wants to do AGI through RL, a LLM could be a perfect teacher or oracle.
After all i'm not walking around as a human and not having guidance. It should/could make RL a lot faster leveraging this.
My logical part / RL part does need the 'database'/fact part and my facts are trying to be as logical as possible but its just not.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#113Another 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.
Or have your AGI design products
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#114Another 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.
Or have your AGI design products
All the more reason not to acquihire Ive for $6.5B, if true
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Exactly. What I find surprising in this story though is not the OpenAI. It's investors not seeing through these blatant.. lets call them exaggerations of the reality and still trusting the company with their money. I know I wouldn't have. But then again, maybe that's why I'm poor.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It was 6 years ago. I'm sure now there'd be no contest now if OpenAI dedicated resources to it, which it won't because it's busy with solving entirety of human language before others eat their lunch.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It was 6 years ago. I'm sure now there'd be no contest now if OpenAI dedicated resources to it, which it won't because it's busy with solving entirety of human language before others eat their lunch.
What do you base your certainty on? Were there any significant enough breakthroughs in the AGI?
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#118I 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.
Sure, I understand what the terminology means but I don't believe we get to AGI without some ability to translate the learning of say using a mouse to using a trackpad in a simple way. Humans make these translations all the while, you know how to use a new room and the items in it automatically but I personally see the systems we have built are currently very brittle when they see new environments because they can't simplify everything to its fundamentals and then extrapolate back to more complex tasks. You could train a human on using an Android phone and give them an iPhone and they would do pretty well, if you did this with modern machine learning systems you will get an extremely high error rate. Or say you train an model on how to use a sword, I'm not convinced it would know how to use and ax or pair of crutches as a weapon.
Maybe it will turn out to simply be enough artificial neurons and everything works. But I don't believe that.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#119Earlier 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…
You're forgetting that a whole string of breakthroughs are all fairly recent (like in the last decade). Everyone, including the pro's, is treading new ground.
In that context anyone can make progress in the field, as long as they understand what they're dealing with.
Better regard mr. Carmack as an X factor. Maybe the experts will leave him in the dust. Or maybe he'll come up with something that none of the experts cared to look into.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Exactly. What I find surprising in this story though is not the OpenAI. It's investors not seeing through these blatant.. lets call them exaggerations of the reality and still trusting the company with their money. I know I wouldn't have. But then again, maybe that's why I'm poor.
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