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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#171

Post by criddell »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #149
criddell wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a heuristic that somebody gave me a while ago: using the word "just" in the way you did is a signal that you don't understand the topic. John's document covers why he's doing what he's doing: > Fundamentally, I believe in the importance of learning from a stream of interactive experience, as humans and animals do, which is quite different from the throw-everything-in-a-blender approach of pretraining an LLM. T…

And this is different from the argument that's being pooh-poed and downvoted how? You are effectively saying "Carmack is smart and is working on cool stuff that'll most likely be useless" in different words.

Not sure what gave you that impression. It's definitely not what I was trying to say.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#172

Post by MrLeap »

WithinReason wrote: post #167
andy_ppp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is on Carmack.

"Graphics Carmack" is a genius but that doesn't mean that "AI Carmack" is too.

I wouldn't bet against him. "The Bitter Lesson" may imply an advantage to someone who historically has been at the tip of the spear for squeezing the most juice out of GPU hosted parallel computation.

Graphics rendering and AI live on the same pyramid of technology. A pyramid with a lot of bricks with the initials "JC" carved into them, as it turns out.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#173

Post by steveBK123 »

mindwok wrote: post #160
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.

Robotics to navigate the physical world seems more impactful than some pin/glasses product to provide a passive audio/visual interface to the chatbot doesn't seem so earth shattering either though.

What would you do with a 10x or 100x smarter Siri/Alexa? I still don't see my life changing.

Give me a robot that can legitimately do household errands like the dishes, laundry, etc.. now we are talking.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#174

Post by soci »

> Fundamentally, I believe in the importance of learning from a stream of interactive experience, as humans and animals do, which is quite different from the throw-everything-in-a-blender approach of pretraining an LLM. The blender approach can still be world-changingly valuable, but there are plenty of people advancing the state of the art there.

It's a shame that pretrained approach leads to such good enough result. The learning-from-experience, or what should be the "right" approach, will stagnate. I might be wrong, but it seems that aside from Carmack and a small team, "the world" is just not looking/investing on that side of the AI anymore.

However, I find it funny that Carmack is now researching for such approach. At the end of the day, he was the one who invented Portals, an algorithm to circumvent the need to reproduce the whole 3D world and therefore making 3D games computationally possible.

As a side note, I wonder what models are to come once we see the latest state of the art AI Video training technologies, in synch with the joystick movements from a real player. Maybe the results are so astonishing that even Carmack changes his mind on the subject.

EDIT::grammar & typos

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#175

Post by steveBK123 »

tiahura wrote: post #145
soared wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or have your AGI design products

Does AGI necessarily mean super-genius? Was KITT AGI? I'm not sure he could design products?

Is VC really funding a trillion dollars of GPU purchases to replace labor that could instead be bid out to developing world mechanical turks for $1/hr?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#176

Post by mvkel »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #168
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 debate is exhausting because there's no coherent definition of AGI that people agree on. I made a google form question for collecting AGI definitions cause I don't see anyone else doing it and I find it infinitely frustrating the range of definitions for this concept: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScDF5_CMSjHZDDexHkc... My concern is that people never get focused enough to care to define it - seems li…

It doesn't really seem like there's much utility in defining it. It's like defining "heaven."

It's an ideal that some people believe in, and we're perpetually marching towards it

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#177

Post by steveBK123 »

j_timberlake wrote: post #156
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.

VCs are far too conditioned as hype men to hide the ball like that.

After generations of boastful over-promising, do you really believe THIS time they are underpromising?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#178

Post by dylan604 »

criddell wrote: post #123
abc-1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that. Doing games in real time is just a performance problem that can be solved with more compute or inane optimizations. It’s not interesting research.

Here's a heuristic that somebody gave me a while ago: using the word "just" in the way you did is a signal that you don't understand the topic. John's document covers why he's doing what he's doing: > Fundamentally, I believe in the importance of learning from a stream of interactive experience, as humans and animals do, which is quite different from the throw-everything-in-a-blender approach of pretraining an LLM. T…

for systems that learn in real-time, is there a way for the humans to know/understand how/why the system came to the conclusion it has? there are examples of where humans ran experiments that came to a conclusion for the wrong reasons. if an AI system thinks it knows the answer for the wrong reason, wouldn't that then poison its reasoning later as well? can an AI system learn its reasoning is wrong and then update it when provided better evidence? that seems to be something a vast majority of humans cannot do.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#179

Post by anthonypasq »

soci wrote: post #174

> Fundamentally, I believe in the importance of learning from a stream of interactive experience, as humans and animals do, which is quite different from the throw-everything-in-a-blender approach of pretraining an LLM. The blender approach can still be world-changingly valuable, but there are plenty of people advancing the state of the art there. It's a shame that pretrained approach leads to such good enough result…

i think you're overstating this. Yann LeCun (chief scientist at Meta) is firmly in this camp, and i think most companies trying to bring AI into the real world via some sort of robotics technology are thinking about and testing this approach.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#180

Post by bigyabai »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #168
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 debate is exhausting because there's no coherent definition of AGI that people agree on. I made a google form question for collecting AGI definitions cause I don't see anyone else doing it and I find it infinitely frustrating the range of definitions for this concept: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScDF5_CMSjHZDDexHkc... My concern is that people never get focused enough to care to define it - seems li…

It is a marketing term. That's it. Trying to exhaustively define what AGI is or could be is like trying to explain what a Happy Meal is. At it's core, the Happy Meal was not invented to revolutionize food eating. It puts an attractive label on some mediocre food, a title that exists for the purpose of advertisement.

There is no point collecting definitions for AGI, it was not conceived as a description for something novel or provably existent. It is "Happy Meal marketing" but aimed for adults.

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