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From chess to Go to Atari games, AI research has always been about games. You are unintentionally positioning yourself as more sophisticated than a huge number of AI luminaries, including Nobel and Turing winners.
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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
201–210 of 387 posts
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#202Interesting 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.
Do you have an X account, if you're not logged in you'll only see the first post in the thread.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never actually seen a brogrammer though, I've seen people who program only because they get money for it, I thought for a while those where it, but I'm not sure if I think they qualify either.
From watching on the wall I've seen brogrammer used in various contexts (this is not an exhaustive list): - Someone who is a programmer but follows a hypermasculine cliche and makes sure everyone knows about it. - An insult used by other developers for someone who is more physically fit or interested in their health than themselves. - An insult used by engineers or other people who are not happy with the over represe…
I always think of “bro” as being a hyper version of “dude.” It’s generically applied to any random person, but it’s also exclusively male. So using it implies “this ingroup is assumed to be 100% male.”
On the other hand, I’ve seen and heard “dude” and “guy” used by and applied to women by other women. Not common but it happens. But I’ve never heard “bro” used that way.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#204Earlier 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…
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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#205> 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. The blender approach can still be world-changingly valuable, but there are plenty of people advancing the state of the art there. It's a shame that pretrained approach leads to such good enough result…
> It's a shame that pretrained approach leads to such good enough result. The learning-from-experience, or what should be the "right" approach, will stagnate.
We’ll see. I’m skeptical that you’ll ever get novel theories like special and general relativity out of LLMs. For stuff like that I suspect you need the interactive learning approach, and perhaps more importantly, the ability to reject the current best theories and invent a replacement.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
From chess to Go to Atari games, AI research has always been about games. You are unintentionally positioning yourself as more sophisticated than a huge number of AI luminaries, including Nobel and Turing winners.
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Maybe, but many advances in science have come from individuals moving backward from the popular cutting edge and branching off in a new direction.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I'm pretty sure it's just a programmer that understands the world in terms of bros.
"in the terms of bros" what does that even mean? I think bro is a term that's used pretty widely, for different things, in different cultures and contexts, I call my brother bro.. I've heard people call their friends bro.. I've heard someone tell a police officer "don't tase me, bro"..
My co-worker's 7 year old daughter calls him "bruh"
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#208Earlier 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.
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.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#209Earlier 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.
Only if computation is the bottleneck. GPT-4.5 shows it’s not.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#210Earlier 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…
I agree that restricting the hero pool is a huge simplification. But they did play full 5v5 standard dota with just a restricted hero pool of 17 heroes and no illusions/control units according to theverge ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/13/18309459/openai-five-dota... ). It destroyed the professionals. As an ex dota player, I don't think this is that far off from having full on, all heroes dota. Certainly not as fa…
> It destroyed the professionals.
Only the first time, later when it played better players it always lost. Players learned the faults of the AI after some time in game and the AI had very bad late game so they always won later.