Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 387 posts

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#181

Post by koolala »

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…

Humans had 500 million * 8670 hours of Pre-Training.

I don't get why Carmack would say things should be learned in hours or upper bounds it to human lifetime.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#182

Post by orochimaaru »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #164
bluGill wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yesterday my dad, in his late 70's, used Gemini with a video stream to program the thermostat. He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat. You can call this hype, maybe it is all hype until LLMs can work on 10M LOC codebases, but recognize that LLMs are a shift that is totally incomparable to any previous AI advancement.

That is what open ai’s non-profit economic research arm has claimed. LLMs will fundamentally change how we interact with the world like the Internet did. It will take time like the Internet and a couple of hype cycle pops but it will change the way we do things.

It will help a single human do more in a white collar world.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#183

Post by kilpikaarna »

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…

I'm sure there were offline rendering and 3D graphics workstation people saying the same about the comparatively crude work he was doing in the early 90s...

Obviously both Carmack and the rest of the world has changed since then, but it seems to me his main strength has always been in doing more with less (early id/Oculus, AA). When he's working in bigger orgs and/or with more established tech his output seems to suffer, at least in my view (possibly in his as well since he quit both Bethesda-id and Meta).

I don't know Carmack and can't claim to be anywhere close to his level, but as someone also mainly interested in realtime stuff I can imagine he also feels a slight disdain for the throw-more-compute-at-it approach of the current AI boom. I'm certainly glad he's not running around asking for investor money to train an LLM.

Best case scenario he teams up with some people who complement his skillset (akin to the game designers and artists at id back in the day) and comes up with a way to help bring some of the cutting edge to the masses, like with 3D graphics.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#184

Post by akomtu »

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.

AI creation is more like Alchemy than science, and breakthroughs come not from math background, but from intuition and a bit of math skills. Transformers behind the chatbots isn't a rocket science and were discovered almost by accident. The next breakthrough will come a similar way. I'd frankly bet on someone like Carmack than on some theoretical researcher who is churning out papers.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#185

Post by Nopoint2 »

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.

There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it?

It just isn't needed. Just like you can find let's say kangaroos in the latent space of an image generator, so we learn abstract concepts and principles of how things work as a bonus of learning to process the senses.

Maybe a way to AGI could be figuring out how to combine a video generator with a LLM or something similar in a way that allows it to understand things intuitively, instead of doing just lots and lots of some statistical bullsit.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#186

Post by mistercheph »

rowanG077 wrote: post #169
jsheard wrote: post #106

Earlier 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…

I agree that restricting the hero pool is a huge simplification. But they did play full 5v5 standard dota with just a restricted hero pool of 17 heroes and no illusions/control units according to theverge ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/13/18309459/openai-five-dota... ). It destroyed the professionals. As an ex dota player, I don't think this is that far off from having full on, all heroes dota. Certainly not as fa…

Another issue with the approach is that the model had direct access to game data, that is simply an unfair competitive advantage in dota, and it is obvious why that advantage would be unfair in CS.

It is certainly possible, but i won't be impressed by anything "playing CS" that isn't running a vision model on a display and moving a mouse, because that is the game. The game is not abstractly reacting to enemy positions and relocating the cursor, it's looking at a screen, seeing where the baddy is and then using this interface (the mouse) to get the cursor there as quickly as possible.

It would be like letting an AI plot its position on the field and what action its taking during a football match and then saying "Look, The AI would have scored dozens of times in this simulation, it is the greatest soccer player in the world!" No, sorry, the game actually requires you to locomote, abstractly describing your position may be fun but it's not the game

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#187

Post by vlovich123 »

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’m not necessarily convinced despite my human bias that it’s a superior mechanism. Humans work the way they do and learn the way they do in no small part because of biological limitations and a physical reality. It’s not clear that a virtual entity needs to face the same limitations, although clearly learning from feedback that’s not available to an AI is important. It is true though that humans are more energy efficient learners, but letting the AI experiment with the real world and get feedback that’s way may be the only missing piece rather than a problem with the “blender” approach.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#188

Post by MattRix »

epr wrote: post #107
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.

It’s not vague, did you only see the first tweet or the entire thread?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#189

Post by koolala »

gregdeon wrote: post #97
sigmoid10 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 traini…

Is a highly specialized bespoke robot for a Atari controller really that different? If anyone cared about latency they could have added it to the emulated controls and video with random noise.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#190

Post by soci »

anthonypasq wrote: post #179
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.

Thank you. You are right, most likely the ones working in the field haven't switched. But the truth is that big bucks are in pretrained technologies. As Carmack himself said, "there are plenty of people advancing the state of the art there".
Post reply on HN