Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have an X account, if you're not logged in you'll only see the first post in the thread.
x.com/... -> xcancel.com/...
I use a Chrome extension to auto replace the string in the URL, works very well.
John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
291–300 of 387 posts
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Thank you for clarifying. I don't have a Twitter account, and the linked tweet genuinely looks like a standalone object. Mea culpa.
Not your fault. They are the worst.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#293Earlier 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."
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.
I think to many AI enthusiasts, we're already at the "specialized AIs" phase. The question is whether those will jump to AGI. I'm personally unconvinced but I'm not an ML researcher so my opinion is colored by what I use and what I read, not active research. I do think though that many specialized AIs is already enough to experience massive economic disruption.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#294Earlier 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…
> his main strength has always been in doing more with less Carmack builds his kingdom and then runs it well. I makes me wonder how he would fare as an unknown Jr. developer with managers telling him "that's a neat idea, but for now we just need you to implement these Figma designs".
A key aspect of the Carmack approach (or similar 'smart hacker' unconventional career approach) is avoiding that situation in the first place. However, this also carries substantial career, financial and lifestyle risks & trade-offs - especially if you're not both talented enough and lucky enough to hit a sufficiently fertile oppty in the right time window on the first few tries.
Assuming one is willing to accept the risks and has the requisite high-talent plus strong work drive, the Carmack-like career pattern is to devote great care to evaluating and selecting opptys near the edges of newly emerging 'interesting things' which also: coincide with your interests/talents, are still at a point where a small team can plausibly generate meaningful traction, and have plausible potential to grow quickly and get big.
Carmack was fortunate that his strong interest in graphics and games overlapped a time period when Moore's Law was enabling quite capable CPU, RAM and GFX hardware to hit consumer prices. But we shouldn't dismiss Carmack's success as "luck". That kind of luck is an ever-present uncontrolled variable which must be factored into your approach - not ignored. Since Carmack has since shown he can get very interested in a variety of things, I assume he filtered his strong interests to pick the one with the most near-term growth potential which also matched his skills. I suspect the most fortunate "luck" Carmack had wasn't picking game graphics in the early 90s, it was that (for whatever reasons) he wasn't already employed in a more typical "well-paying job with a big, stable company, great benefits and career growth potential" so he was free to find the oppty in the first place.
I had a similarly unconventional career path which, fortunately, turned out very well for me (although not quite at Carmack's scale :-)). The best luck I had actually looked like 'bad luck' to me and everyone else. Due to my inability to succeed in a traditional educational context (and other personal shortcomings), I didn't have a college degree or resume sufficient to get a "good job", so I had little choice but to take the high-risk road and figure out the unconventional approach as best I could - which involved teaching myself, then hiring myself (because no one else would) and then repeatedly failing my way through learning startup entrepreneurship until I got good at it. I think the reality is that few who succeed on the 'unconventional approach' consciously chose that path at the beginning over lower risk, more comfortable alternatives - we simply never had those alternatives to 'bravely' reject in pursuit of our dreams :-).
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 position…
Did you read the paper? It had access to the dota 2 bot API, which is some gamestate but very far from all gamestate. It also had artifially limited reaction to something like 220ms, worse then professional gamers. But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that. It's perfectly valid to judge the best an AI can…
> But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that.
There are ~86 billion neurons in the human brain. If we assume each neuron stores a single bit a human also has access to gigabytes of working memory. If we assume each synapse is a bit that's terabytes. Petabytes is not unreasonable assuming 1kb of storage per synapse. (And more than 1kb is also not unreasonable.)
The whole point of the exercise is figuring out how much memory compares to a human brain.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ever since Romero departed the id Software had shipped *checks notes* Quake II, Quake III, Doom 3 and Quake 4. Funnily enough Romero himself didn't ship much either. IMO it's one of the most iconic "duo breakups". The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Rage was Carmack's last big game at id Software before leaving.
Romero is credited on 27 games since he left id Software.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way? Maybe. One aspect of Wolfenstein and Doom's popularity is that it was years ahead of everyone else technically on PC hardware. The other aspect is that they were genre defining titles that set the standards for gameplay design. I think Doom Deathmatch would have caught on in 1995, as there really were very few (just Command and Conquer?)…
I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995. The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM. It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more…
Sort of in the middle, id games always felt tight. The engines were immersive not only because of graphics, but basic i/o was excellent.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give an example how it would be transformative compared to specialized AI?
Because it could very well exceed our capabilities beyond our wildest imaginations. Because we evolved to get where we are, humans have all sorts of messy behaviours that aren't really compatible with a utopian society. Theft, violence, crime, greed - it's all completely unnecessary and yet most of us can't bring ourselves to solve these problems. And plenty are happy to live apathetically while billionaires become t…
I still don’t see an issue of billionaires becoming trillionaires and being able to buy hyper luxury goods. Good for them and good for the people selling and manufacturing those goods. Meanwhile poverty is in all time lows and there’s a growing middle class at global level. Our middle class life conditions nowadays have a level of comfort that would get Kings from some centuries ago jealous.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give an example how it would be transformative compared to specialized AI?
Because it could very well exceed our capabilities beyond our wildest imaginations. Because we evolved to get where we are, humans have all sorts of messy behaviours that aren't really compatible with a utopian society. Theft, violence, crime, greed - it's all completely unnecessary and yet most of us can't bring ourselves to solve these problems. And plenty are happy to live apathetically while billionaires become t…
Why on earth would you want an AI that takes away our autonomy? It's wild to see someone actually advocate for this outcome.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? Maybe. One aspect of Wolfenstein and Doom's popularity is that it was years ahead of everyone else technically on PC hardware. The other aspect is that they were genre defining titles that set the standards for gameplay design. I think Doom Deathmatch would have caught on in 1995, as there really were very few (just Command and Conquer?)…
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