Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 387 posts

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#271

Post by cmpxchg8b »

kriro wrote: post #31
brador wrote: post #21

I feel top level AI creation is beyond his skill set. He’s a AAA software engineer but the prerequisites to build out cutting edge AI require deep formal math that is beyond his education and years at this point. Nothing to stop him playing around with AI models though.

I think you overestimate the level of math required in AI and at the same time I think you underestimate the math skills of John. AI runs on GPUs, Quake 2 engine was one of the first to optimized for GPUs (OpenGL). I'm pretty excited to see him in this domain. I think he'll focus on some DeepSeek style improvements.

GLQuake was released 11 months before Quake 2.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#272

Post by foobiekr »

j_timberlake wrote: post #156
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.

This line of thought doesn't work, because any company approaching AGI might be actively trying to hide that information from regulators and the military. Being the 1st AGI company is actually pretty risky.

However their actual actions resemble companies who know AGI isn’t even on the horizon and moreso they are acting as exactly as if they believe the AI hype bubble is coming to an end and they need to dump the stuff into the public markets asap.

There really isn’t any other way to interpret OpenAI’s actions for the last few months.

Sure it could all be a feint to hide their amazing progress. Or it could be what it looks like.

Given the hype cycles of the last 20 years, I’m going with the second.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#273

Post by Buttons840 »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #183
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…

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".

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#274

Post by cmpxchg8b »

blitzar wrote: post #43
prosunpraiser wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reuse is not always necessary - sometimes things are just done for fun and exploration, not for appeasing thirsty VCs and grabbing that market share.

Reinventing the exact same thing and shouting from the rooftops about it is exactly how you appease thirsty VCs and grab that market share.

Why would John Carmack who is so rich that he does things for shits, giggles and personal development, give a hoot what a VC cares about?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#275

Post by johnb231 »

bigyabai wrote: post #180
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This debate is exhausting because there's no coherent definition of AGI that people agree on. I made a google form question for collecting AGI definitions cause I don't see anyone else doing it and I find it infinitely frustrating the range of definitions for this concept: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScDF5_CMSjHZDDexHkc... My concern is that people never get focused enough to care to define it - seems li…

It is a marketing term. That's it. Trying to exhaustively define what AGI is or could be is like trying to explain what a Happy Meal is. At it's core, the Happy Meal was not invented to revolutionize food eating. It puts an attractive label on some mediocre food, a title that exists for the purpose of advertisement. There is no point collecting definitions for AGI, it was not conceived as a description for something…

Generalization is a formal concept in machine learning and is measurable.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#276

Post by Buttons840 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #29
johnb231 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atari games are widely used in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research as a standard benchmark. https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Arcade-Learning-Environ... The goal is to develop algorithms that generalize to other tasks.

They were highly used. OpenAI even included them in their RL Gym library back in the old days when they were still doing open research. But if you look at this leaderboard from 7 (yes, seven!) years ago [1], most of them were already solved way beyond human capabilities. But we didn't get a really useful general purpose algorithm out of it. As an AI researcher, I always considered Atari a fun academic exercise, but n…

My impression is that Atari was 80% solved, and then researchers and companies moved on.

A company solves self-driving 80% of the way and makes a lot of VC cash along the way. Then they solve intelligent chatbots 80% of the way and make a lot of VC cash along the way. Now they're working on solving humanoid robotics 80% of the way... I wonder why?

In the end, we have technology that can do some neat tricks, but can't be relied upon.

There are probably still some very hard problems in certain Atari games. Only the brave dare tackle these problems, because failure comes sharp and fast. Whereas, throwing more compute at a bigger LLM might not really accomplish anything, but we can make people think it accomplished something, and thus failure is not really possible.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#277

Post by gjadi »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #251
kilpikaarna wrote: post #183

Earlier 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…

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…

Hardware changes a lot in the time it takes to develop a game. When I read his plan files and interviews, I realized he seemed to spend a lot of time before developing the game thinking about what the next gen hardware was going to bring. Then design the best game they could think of whike targeting this not-yet-available hardware.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#278

Post by TheGRS »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #225
Workaccount2 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat. Sounds like AI robbed you of an opportunity to spend some time with your Dad, to me

For some of us that's a plus!

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#279

Post by johnb231 »

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.

> More people need to get away from training their models just with words.

They started doing that a couple of years ago. The frontier "language" models are natively multimodal, trained on audio, text, video, images. That is all in the same model, not separate models stitched together. The inputs are tokenized and mapped into a shared embedding space.

Gemini, GPT-4o, Grok 3, Claude 3, Llama 4. These are all multimodal, not just "language models".

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#280

Post by j_timberlake »

foobiekr wrote: post #272
j_timberlake wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of thought doesn't work, because any company approaching AGI might be actively trying to hide that information from regulators and the military. Being the 1st AGI company is actually pretty risky.

However their actual actions resemble companies who know AGI isn’t even on the horizon and moreso they are acting as exactly as if they believe the AI hype bubble is coming to an end and they need to dump the stuff into the public markets asap. There really isn’t any other way to interpret OpenAI’s actions for the last few months. Sure it could all be a feint to hide their amazing progress. Or it could be what it loo…

Name any other company acting like that besides OpenAI. Or any person besides Sam Altman, the guy who screwed up OpenAI's structure/board/funding. You just have a narrative you want to be true, and one company half fits into that narrative.
Post reply on HN