301–310 of 387 posts
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?
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"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.
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John Carmack: So I asked Ilya, their chief scientist, for a reading list. This is my path, my way of doing things: give me a stack of all the stuff I need to know to actually be relevant in this space. And he gave me a list of like 40 research papers and said, 'If you really learn all of these, you'll know 90% of what matters today! And I did. I plowed through all those things and it all started sorting out in my hea…
What this misses is that research is a competitive endeavor. To succeed as a researcher you don’t just need to know the bare minimum required to do research in your field. You need to be able to do it better than most of the people you’re competing against. I know that HN as a collective has near-unlimited faith in Carmack’s abilities (and he is no doubt Very Smart). But he’s competing with other Very Smart people wh…
I believe all his in-depth experience in other areas will heavily unlock him to bring about another breakthrough. He's that good.
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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…
Ultima Underworld is a true 3D game from 1992. An incredibly impressive game, in more ways than one.
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My bet is on Carmack.
"Graphics Carmack" is a genius but that doesn't mean that "AI Carmack" is too.
So, his initial tech was "Adaptive tile refresh" in Commander Keen, used to give it console style pixel-level scrolling. Turns out, they actually hampered themselves in Commander Keen 1 by not understanding the actual tech, and implemented "The Jolt", a feature that was not necessary. The actual hardware implemented scrolling the same way that consoles like the NES did, and did not need "the jolt", nor the limitations it imposed.
Then, Doom and Quake was mostly him writing really good optimizations of existing, known and documented algorithms and 3D techniques, usually by recognizing what assumptions they could make, what portions of the algorithm didn't need to be recalculated when, etc. Very talented at the time, but in the software development industry, making a good implementation of existing algorithms that utilize your specific requirements is called doing your job. This is still the height of his relative technical output IMO.
Fast Inverse Square Root was not invented by him, but was floating around in industry for a while. He still gets kudos for knowing about it and using it.
"Carmack's reverse" is a technique for doing stencil shadows that was a minor (but extremely clever) modification to the "standard" documented way of doing shadow buffers. There is evidence of the actual technique from a decade before Carmack put it in Doom 3 and it was outright patented by two different people the year before. There is no evidence that Carmack "stole" or anything this technique, it was independent discovery, but was clearly also just a topic in the industry at the time.
"Megatextures" from Rage didn't really go anywhere.
Did Carmack actually contribute anything to VR rendering while at Oculus?
People treat him like this programming god and I just don't understand. He was well read, had a good (maybe too good) work ethic, and was very talented at writing 386 era assembly code. These are all laudable, but doesn't in my mind imply that he's some sort of 10X programmer who could revolutionize random industries that he isn't familiar with. 3D graphics math isn't exactly difficult.
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"Graphics Carmack" is a genius but that doesn't mean that "AI Carmack" is too.
What has "Graphics Carmack" actually done since about 2001? So, his initial tech was "Adaptive tile refresh" in Commander Keen, used to give it console style pixel-level scrolling. Turns out, they actually hampered themselves in Commander Keen 1 by not understanding the actual tech, and implemented "The Jolt", a feature that was not necessary. The actual hardware implemented scrolling the same way that consoles like…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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.