John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#371

Post by mvkel » Sun, May 25, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

theptip wrote: post #365

mvkel wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great reply, thank you. For me, I just zoom out a little further and say: at the rate AGI is approaching, what is the utility in trying to regulate it ahead of time? Seems like advancement is slow enough that society can/will naturally regulate it based on what feels comfortable. And it's a global phenomenon that can't have rules applied at the protocol level like the internet, because it's so culturally su…

It’s a good point. For epistemic hygiene I think it’s critical to actually have models of the growth rate and what is implied. Eg we are seeing exponential growth on many capability metrics (some with doubling-times of 7 months), but haven’t joined this up to economic growth numbers. In models where the growth continues you could imagine stuff getting crazy quickly, eg one year AI contributes 0.5% GDP only measurable…

This is great food for thought.

I like your idea of developing a new economic model as a proxy for possible futures; that at least can serve as a thinking platform.

Your comment inspired me to look at historical examples of this happening. Two trends emerged:

1. Rapid change always precedes policy. Couldn't find any examples of the reverse. That doesn't discount what you're saying at all, it reiterates that we probably need to be as vigilant and proactive as possible.

and related:

2. Things that seem impossible become normative. Electricity. The Industrial Revolution. Massive change turns into furniture. We adapt quickly as individuals even if societies collectively struggle to keep up. There will be many people that get caught in the margins, though.

Consider me fully convinced!

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#372

Post by momocowcow » Sun, May 25, 2025, 8:05 AM UTC

nextaccountic wrote: post #370

LarsDu88 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995. The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM. It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more…

> Things like BSP for level partitioning have slowly been phased out of game engines Hey, can you say more / do you have a link about this? I mean, for what reason are BSP trees phased out, and what are they replaced with? (quad/oct tree? AABB trees? or something entirely different?)

Read the quake pvs article linked to in this thread.

On top of my head as I remember it.. one of the reasons for Quake's use of a bsp was to allow back to front rendering of the world geometry without the use of a zbuffer. This was required to get decent performance with the software rasterizer.

I'm not 100% sure what's most commonly used these days, but for a large open world requiring data streaming, I could see the use for something like an octree and even portals.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#373

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 25, 2025, 9:37 AM UTC

riehwvfbk wrote: post #368

johnb231 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is casually dismissing an entire major branch of RL research. Nothing to do with Carmack or any "cult" figure. This is not a solved problem. https://huggingface.co/learn/deep-rl-course/en/unitbonus3/of...

If anyone other than John Carmack would say "I'll burn a bunch of money to rebuild some demos from 10 years ago"... well, let's just say this thread would look very different.

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#374

Post by johnb231 » Sun, May 25, 2025, 9:39 AM UTC

riehwvfbk wrote: post #368

johnb231 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is casually dismissing an entire major branch of RL research. Nothing to do with Carmack or any "cult" figure. This is not a solved problem. https://huggingface.co/learn/deep-rl-course/en/unitbonus3/of...

If anyone other than John Carmack would say "I'll burn a bunch of money to rebuild some demos from 10 years ago"... well, let's just say this thread would look very different.

[flagged]

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#375

Post by crq-yml » Sun, May 25, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

nextaccountic wrote: post #370

LarsDu88 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995. The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM. It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more…

> Things like BSP for level partitioning have slowly been phased out of game engines Hey, can you say more / do you have a link about this? I mean, for what reason are BSP trees phased out, and what are they replaced with? (quad/oct tree? AABB trees? or something entirely different?)

The pipeline bottlenecks all changed in favor of bruteforcing the things that BSP had been solving with an elegant precomputed data structure - what BSP was extremely good at was eliminating overdraw and getting to where the scene could render exactly the number of pixels that were needed and no more. It's optimized around small, low-detail scenes that carefully manage occlusion.

More memory, bandwidth and cache means that more of your solutions are per-pixel instead of per-vertex and you can tolerate overdraw if it means you get to have higher polycount models. Likewise, the environment collision that was leveraged by the BSP process reduced the number of tests against walls, but introduced edge cases and hindered general-purpose physics features. Scaling physics leads in the direction of keeping the detailed collision tests at their original, per-poly detail, but doing things with sorting or tree structures to get a broadphase that filters the majority of tests against AABB or sphere bounds.

On a Wii(original Wii) 3D action game I helped ship, we just rendered the whole level at once, using only the most basic frustum culling technique; the hardware did the lifting, mostly through the z-buffer.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#376

Post by treebeard901 » Sun, May 25, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #267

hoosieree wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The error in this argument is that electricity is real .

Indeed, and I'd go even further. In addition to existing, electricity is also usefully defined - which helps greatly in establishing its existence. Neither unicorns nor AGI currently exist but at least unicorns are well enough defined to establish whether an equine animal is or isn't one.

LLMs are being irresponsibly marketed as AGI to the general public and many do not seem to understand the difference. Clearly there are limits to how far current methods can be taken. They can only train on so much data and add more compute capacity before running into diminishing returns.

AGI is really something else entirely. If this was clarified, especially for Wall Street, we would see some changes in valuations.

At a certain point, it depends on how you define human reasoning capabilities. Maybe a collection of refined and specialized AI can get close. One counter argument could be that we are not far off from highly advanced robotics that have increasingly powerful reasoning abilities even without AGI.

After the automobile was created, global horse population fell dramatically. Who knows if the wealthy classes will need all these people to do the work for them in the near future.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#377

Post by LarsDu88 » Sun, May 25, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

crq-yml wrote: post #375

nextaccountic wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things like BSP for level partitioning have slowly been phased out of game engines Hey, can you say more / do you have a link about this? I mean, for what reason are BSP trees phased out, and what are they replaced with? (quad/oct tree? AABB trees? or something entirely different?)

The pipeline bottlenecks all changed in favor of bruteforcing the things that BSP had been solving with an elegant precomputed data structure - what BSP was extremely good at was eliminating overdraw and getting to where the scene could render exactly the number of pixels that were needed and no more. It's optimized around small, low-detail scenes that carefully manage occlusion. More memory, bandwidth and cache mean…

Adding to this, the nice thing about the bsp partitioning was you could also leverage it to make off screen monsters go to sleep or reduce their tick rate. Was helpful for optimizing AI as well as rendering. DOOM not only had some of the first pseudo 3d but also huge numbers of enemies... something that a lot of other games still cut down on

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#378

Post by mistercheph » Sun, May 25, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #214

mistercheph wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue with the approach is that the model had direct access to game data, that is simply an unfair competitive advantage in dota, and it is obvious why that advantage would be unfair in CS. It is certainly possible, but i won't be impressed by anything "playing CS" that isn't running a vision model on a display and moving a mouse, because that is the game. The game is not abstractly reacting to enemy position…

Did you read the paper? It had access to the dota 2 bot API, which is some gamestate but very far from all gamestate. It also had artifially limited reaction to something like 220ms, worse then professional gamers. But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that. It's perfectly valid to judge the best an AI can…

It's fine if the computer has access to gigabytes of working memory, it can use all of the "natural" advantages that it has to play the game, that's perfectly fair, but there is no comparison to make when you give models bespoke machine interfaces to play games whose core mechanics revolve around perception and physical coordination, it may be impressive, but they are playing a different game, something akin to HvH Counter Strike.

And you can try to play some game where you create disadvantages to try to balance out all of the advantages of the machine interface, but again, hard to reason about the edge cases, and easy to create a misleading headline like "artificially limited reaction time worse than professional gamers" while in practice being able to react to information much more quickly than a human player because of its exclusive interface to game state. All of that is fair and well, and doesn't take anything away from the very cool achievements of google et al., but when you change the core mechanics of the game to accommodate a uniquely challenged player, you're playing a different game! Chess is ~mostly not about physically moving the pieces on the board, but Counter Strike is about little more than that! (And dota is somewhere in between.)

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#379

Post by mistercheph » Sun, May 25, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #342

lukeschlather wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that. There are ~86 billion neurons in the human brain. If we assume each neuron stores a single bit a human also has access to gigabytes of working memory. If we assume each synapse is a bit that's terabytes. Petabytes is not unreasonable assuming 1kb of storage per…

No human can, or would, flush their entire brain to use every single neuron as working memory for chess. By doing that you would even forget the rules of chess. At best a tiny subset of neurons could be used for that. I wouldn't have expected for anyone to even attempt to argue a human can beat, or even approach, a computer on working memory. Wikipedia is just 24.05gb. You are somehow claiming here that a human can h…

It depends on what you mean by "memory". Pure data recall? Sure, a computer has humans beat, but that's not really the purpose of human memory. I can freely reason about mathematical theorems I learned decades ago, and there are many mistakes that I've only made once, and will never make again.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#380

Post by lukeschlather » Sun, May 25, 2025, 10:20 PM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #342

lukeschlather wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that. There are ~86 billion neurons in the human brain. If we assume each neuron stores a single bit a human also has access to gigabytes of working memory. If we assume each synapse is a bit that's terabytes. Petabytes is not unreasonable assuming 1kb of storage per…

No human can, or would, flush their entire brain to use every single neuron as working memory for chess. By doing that you would even forget the rules of chess. At best a tiny subset of neurons could be used for that. I wouldn't have expected for anyone to even attempt to argue a human can beat, or even approach, a computer on working memory. Wikipedia is just 24.05gb. You are somehow claiming here that a human can h…

> No human can, or would, flush their entire brain to use every single neuron as working memory for chess.

We don't know what this means. Each neuron connects to thousands of synapses. I would assume that there is some quantity of information encoded in each pairwise connection of synapse-paths through a neuron. I would assume this is more than a bit, and also that it has something that might be described as a lossy fractal compression with each pathway adding or subtracting from whatever structures store information so that each path can use the same physical things - though not with perfect fidelity.

But the nuts and bolts are somewhat beside the point. The point is that if you look at Leela zero it only needs like 3GB of RAM to run and we have no evidence this is more memory than human grandmasters use to play chess. Yes, humans have imperfect recall but that's not relevant because neural net based chess engines do not work based on perfect recall.