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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#261

Post by joshstrange »

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.

Once AGI is accomplished I can’t imagine what else it would do but bootstrap itself up which, depending on compute, could scale quite far. OpenAI would only need to feed it compute for the most part.

I don’t think AGI is close, but once it happens it’s hard to imagine it not “escaping” (whenever we want to define that as).

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#262

Post by lancekey »

qoez wrote: post #76

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

I think some replies here are reading the full twitter thread, while others (not logged in?) see only the first tweet. The first tweet alone does come off as a dismissal with no insight.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#263

Post by jwmcq »

ploden wrote: post #244

Why would AGI choose to be embodied? We talk about creating a superior intelligence and having it drive our cars and clean our homes. The scenario in Dan Simmons' Hyperion seems much more plausible: we invent AGI and it disappears into the cloud and largely ignores us.

Looking at other examples in sci-fi, perhaps to stop my body from pressing its off-switch?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#264

Post by CamperBob2 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #251
kilpikaarna wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suf…

The thing about Carmack in the 90s... There was a lot of research going on around 3d graphics. Companies like SGI and Pixar were building specialized workstations for doing vector operations for 3d rendering. 3d was a thing. Game consoles with specialized 3d hardware would launch in 1994 with the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation (in Japan only for one year) What Carmack did was basically get a 3d game running on…

If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?

I think so, because the thing about DOOM is, it was an insanely good game. Yes, it pioneered fullscreen real-time perspective rendering on commodity hardware, instantly realigning the direction of much of the game industry, yadda yadda yadda, but at the end of the day it was a good-enough game for people to remember and respect even without considering the tech.

Minecraft would be a similar example. Minecraft looked like total ass, and games with similar rendering technology could have been (and were) made years earlier, but Minecraft was also good. And that was enough.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#265

Post by johnb231 »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #192
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."

Is this supposed to be a gotcha? We know these systems are typically trained using RL and they are exceedingly good at learning games...

No it is not a “gotcha” and I don’t understand how you got that impression.

Carmack believes AGI systems should be able to learn new tasks in realtime alongside humans in the real world.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#266

Post by johnb231 »

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…

The Wikipedia article on AGI explains it well enough.

Researchers at Google have proposed a classification scheme with multiple levels of AGI. There are different opinions in the research community.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#267

Post by mrandish »

hoosieree wrote: post #255
nightski wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying we don't "need" AGI is like saying we don't need electricity. Sure life existed before we had that capability, but it would be very transformative. Of course we can make specialized tools in the mean time.

The error in this argument is that electricity is real .

Indeed, and I'd go even further. In addition to existing, electricity is also usefully defined - which helps greatly in establishing its existence. Neither unicorns nor AGI currently exist but at least unicorns are well enough defined to establish whether an equine animal is or isn't one.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#268

Post by mhh__ »

MrLeap wrote: post #172
WithinReason wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I would be long carmack in the sense that I think he will have good judgement and taste running a business but I really don't see anything in common between AI and graphics.

Maybe someone better at aphorisms than me can say it better but I really don't see it. There are definitely mid-level low hanging fruits that would look like the kinds of things he did in graphics but the game just seems completely different.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#269

Post by losvedir »

mschuster91 wrote: post #32
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…

> But it still feels like some key ingredient is missing. Continuous training is the key ingredient. Humans can use existing knowledge and apply it to new scenarios, and so can most AI. But AI cannot permanently remember the result of its actions in the real world, and so its body of knowledge cannot expand. Take a toddler and an oven. The toddler has no concept of what an oven is other than maybe that it smells nice…

> Continuous training is the key ingredient. Humans can use existing knowledge and apply it to new scenarios, and so can most AI. But AI cannot permanently remember the result of its actions in the real world, and so its body of knowledge cannot expand.

I think it depends on how you look at it. I don't want to torture the analogy too much, but I see the pre-training (getting model weights out of an enormous corpus of text) as more akin to the billions of years of evolution that led to the modern human brain. The brain still has a lot to learn once you're born, but it already also has lots of structures (e.g. to handle visual input, language, etc) and built-in knowledge (instincts). And you can't change that over the course of your life.

I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up in a "pre-train / RAG / context window" architecture of AI, analogously to "evolution / long term memory / short term memory" in humans.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#270

Post by cmpxchg8b »

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.

Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. People often fall into the trap of thinking that because they are highly intelligent and an expert in one domain that this makes them an expert in one or more other domains. You see this all the time.
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