John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

Post by foldr » Fri, May 23, 2025, 12:41 PM UTC

RetroTechie wrote: post #119

foldr wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're forgetting that a whole string of breakthroughs are all fairly recent (like in the last decade). Everyone , including the pro's, is treading new ground. In that context anyone can make progress in the field, as long as they understand what they're dealing with. Better regard mr. Carmack as an X factor. Maybe the experts will leave him in the dust. Or maybe he'll come up with something that none of the experts…

Post by ferguess_k » Fri, May 23, 2025, 12:44 PM UTC

johnb231 wrote: post #52

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…

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."

Post by fzzzy » Fri, May 23, 2025, 12:46 PM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #93

sigmoid10 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of context management is not that hard, even when building LLMs. Especially when you have huge windows like we do today. Look at how ChatGPT can remember things permanently after you said them once using a function call to edit the permanent memory section inside the context. You can also see that in Anthropic's latest post on Claude 4 where it learns to play Pokemon. The only remaining issue here is maybe…

Big context windows are a poor substitute for updating the weights. Its like keeping a journal because your memory is failing.

Post by jdross » Fri, May 23, 2025, 12:48 PM UTC

xnickb wrote: post #115

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…

Exactly. What I find surprising in this story though is not the OpenAI. It's investors not seeing through these blatant.. lets call them exaggerations of the reality and still trusting the company with their money. I know I wouldn't have. But then again, maybe that's why I'm poor.

Post by jjulius » Fri, May 23, 2025, 12:49 PM UTC

fmbb wrote: post #100

roflcopter69 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I was just commenting something similar here, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44071614 And I say this while most certainly not being as knowledgeable as this openai insider. So it even I can see this, then it's kinda bad, isn't it?

Can you explain which parts you think are bad and why?