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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#151

Post by xnx »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #48
MrScruff wrote: post #41

It's always a treat to watch a Carmack lecture or read anything he writes, and his notes here are no exception. He writes as an engineer, for engineers and documents all his thought processes and misteps in the exact detailed yet concise way you'd want a colleague to who was handing off some work. One question I would have about the research direction is the emphasis on realtime. If I understand correctly he's doing…

It's because humans (and other animals) have enormous innate capacities and knowledge which makes learning new things much much simpler than if you start from scratch. It's not really because of human's computational capacity.

> enormous innate capacities and knowledge

Hundreds of millions of years of trial-and-error biological pre-training where survival/propagation is the reward function

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#152

Post by dcre »

jjulius wrote: post #132
qoez wrote: post #76

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

I appreciate how they don't tell us what lesson they learned.

It is a thread. You may have only seen the first tweet because Twitter is a user-hostile trash fire.

“The lesson: on a fundamental level, solutions to these games are low-dimensional. No matter how hard you hit them with from-scratch training, tiny models will work about as well as big ones. Why? Because there's just not that many bits to learn.”

https://unrollnow.com/status/1925795730150527191

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#154

Post by bluesroo »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #59
mschuster91 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This kind of context management is not that hard, even when building LLMs. It is, at least if you wish to be in the meatspace, that's my point. Every day has 86400 seconds during which a human brain constantly adapts to and learns from external input - either directly as it's being awake or indirectly during nighttime cleanup processes. On top of that, humans have built-in filters for training. Basically, we see so…

>Every day has 86400 seconds during which a human brain constantly adapts to and learns from external That's not even remotely true. At least not in the sense that it is for context in transformer models. Or can you tell me all the visual and auditory inputs you experienced yesterday at the 45232nd second? You only learn permanently and effectively from particular stimulation coupled with surprise. That has a sample…

Your definition of "learning" is incomplete because you're applying LLM concepts to how human brains work. An LLM only "learns" during training. From that point forward all it has is its context and vector DBs. If an LLM and vector DB is not actively interacted with, nothing happens to it. However for the brain, experiencing IS learning. And the brain NEVER stops experiencing.

Just because I don't remember my experiences at second 45232 on May 22, doesn't mean that my brain was not actively adapting to my experiences at that moment. The brain does a lot more learning than just what is conscious. And then when I went to sleep the brain continued pruning and organizing my unconscious learning for the day.

Seeing if someone can go from token to freeform physical usefulness will be interesting. I'm of the belief that LLMs are too verbose and energy intensive to go from language regurgitation machines to moving in the real world according to free form prompting. It may be accomplishable with the vast amount of hype investment, but I think the energy requirements and latency will make an LLM-based approach economically infeasible.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#155

Post by [deleted] »

zaphar wrote: post #150
jdross wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already have 400 million daily users and a billion people using the product, with billions of consumer subscription revenue, faster than any company ever. They are also aggregating R&D talent at a density never before seen in Silicon Valley That is what investors see. You seem to treat this as a purity contest where you define purity

Also apparently still not making a profit.

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#156

Post by j_timberlake »

steveBK123 wrote: post #105

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.

This line of thought doesn't work, because any company approaching AGI might be actively trying to hide that information from regulators and the military. Being the 1st AGI company is actually pretty risky.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#157

Post by danielbln »

bluGill wrote: post #138
ferguess_k wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't really need AGI. We need better specialized AIs. Throw in a few specialized AIs and they will leave some impact in the society. That might not be that far away.

Specialized AIs have been making an impact on society since at least the 1960s. AI has long suffered from every time they come up with something new it gets renamed and becomes important (where it makes sense) without giving AI credit. From what I can tell most in AI are currently hoping LLMs reach that point quick just because the hype is not helping AI at all.

Bitter lesson applies here as well though. Generalized models will beat specialized models given enough time and compute. How much bespoke NLP is there anymore? Generalized foundational models will subsume all of it eventually.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#158

Post by brotein »

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…

Brogrammer here. I recognize that I spend 12 hours a day writing code (and loving it) as a fun thing but also a danger if I do it all sitting down. I stay busy and incorporate workouts into my day.

I don’t take it as a pejorative, it’s an acknowledgement of my efforts to be even considered in this category. For those wondering I have a family, and have healthy activities otherwise. No cool diets or bioscience, just code, physical activity and coffee/water.

This isn’t a lifestyle I’m saying everyone should do, only that people should do what makes them happiest and most fulfilled for their set of goals.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#159

Post by ramesh31 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #80
qoez wrote: post #76

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

My bet is on Carmack.

What has he shipped in the last 20 years? Oculus is one thing, but that was firmly within his wheelhouse of graphics optimization. Abrash and co. handled the hardware side of things.

Carmack is a genius no doubt. But genius is the result of intense focused practice above and beyond anyone else in a particular area. Trying to extend that to other domains has been the downfall of so many others like him.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#160

Post by mindwok »

steveBK123 wrote: post #105

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.

AGI is not enough. Seriously, imagine if they had an AGI in their ChatGPT interface. It’s not enough to do anything truly meaningful. It’s like a genius in the woods somewhere. For AGI to have an impact it needs to be everywhere.
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