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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#141

Post by xnickb »

jdross wrote: post #137
xnickb wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They already have 400 million daily users and a billion people using the product, with billions of consumer subscription revenue, faster than any company ever. They are also aggregating R&D talent at a density never before seen in Silicon Valley That is what investors see. You seem to treat this as a purity contest where you define purity

I'm speaking about past events. Perhaps I didn't make it clear enough

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#142

Post by tomaytotomato »

oersted wrote: post #75
diggan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone who is more physically fit or interested in their health than themselves Isn't "interested in their health" a signal that they are interested in themselves, rather than the opposite?

Disambigation: I believe "themselves" refers to the one insulting, not the one interested in their health. It tripped me up too, to be fair.

Apologies, grammar is hard.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#143

Post by kadushka »

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.

He did go into specifics and explained his point. Or have you only read his first post?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#144

Post by Forgeties79 »

bluGill wrote: post #138
ferguess_k wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Yeah “AI” tools (such a loose term but largely applicable) have been involved in audio production for a very long time. They have actually made huge strides with noise removal/voice isolation, auto transcription/captioning, and “enhancement” in the last five years in particular.

I hate Adobe, I don’t like to give them credit for anything. But their audio enhance tool is actual sorcery. Every competitor isn’t even close. You can take garbage zoom audio and make it sound like it was borderline recorded in a treated room/studio. I’ve been in production for almost 15 years and it would take me half a day or more of tweaking a voice track with multiple tools that cost me hundreds of dollars to get it 50% as good as what they accomplish in a minute with the click of a button.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#145

Post by tiahura »

soared wrote: post #113
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.

Or have your AGI design products

Does AGI necessarily mean super-genius? Was KITT AGI? I'm not sure he could design products?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#146

Post by epr »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #110
aatd86 wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Its hard to follow what you try to commounicate at least the last half. Nonetheless, yes we do know certain brain structures like your image net analogy but the way you describe it, sounds a little bit of. Our virtual cortex is not 'just a layer' its a component i would say and its optimized of detecting things. Other components act differently with different structures.

A bit confusing for sure, but I think (not sure) I get what they're saying. Training a nn (for visual tasks at least) consists of training a model with much more dimensions (params) than the input space (eg: controller inputs + atari pixels). This contrasts with a lot of what humans do, which is take higher dimensional information (tons of data per second combining visual, audio, touch/vibration, etc) and synthesizing much lower dimensional models / heuristics / rules of thumb, like the example they give of the 5 second per mile rule for thunder.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#147

Post by ActivePattern »

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 a OpenAI researcher that's worked on some of their most successful projects, and I think the criticism in his X thread is very clear.

Systems that can learn to play Atari efficiently are exploiting the fact that the solutions to each game are simple to encode (compared to real world problems). Furthermore, you can nudge them towards those solutions using tricks that don't generalize to the real world.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#148

Post by NL807 »

saejox wrote: post #51

What Carmack is doing is right. More people need to get away from training their models just with words. AI need the physicality.

>AI need the physicality.

which i found interesting, because i remember Carmack saying simulated environments are way forward and physical environments are too impractical for developing AI

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#149

Post by riehwvfbk »

criddell wrote: post #123
abc-1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that. Doing games in real time is just a performance problem that can be solved with more compute or inane optimizations. It’s not interesting research.

Here's a heuristic that somebody gave me a while ago: using the word "just" in the way you did is a signal that you don't understand the topic. John's document covers why he's doing what he's doing: > 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. T…

And this is different from the argument that's being pooh-poed and downvoted how? You are effectively saying "Carmack is smart and is working on cool stuff that'll most likely be useless" in different words.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#150

Post by zaphar »

jdross wrote: post #137
xnickb wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They already have 400 million daily users and a billion people using the product, with billions of consumer subscription revenue, faster than any company ever. They are also aggregating R&D talent at a density never before seen in Silicon Valley That is what investors see. You seem to treat this as a purity contest where you define purity

Also apparently still not making a profit.
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