"... Since I am new to the research community, I made an effort" This means they've probably submitted a paper too.
It states it's a research, not a product company.
John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
61–70 of 387 posts
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But it still feels like some key ingredient is missing. Continuous training is the key ingredient. Humans can use existing knowledge and apply it to new scenarios, and so can most AI. But AI cannot permanently remember the result of its actions in the real world, and so its body of knowledge cannot expand. Take a toddler and an oven. The toddler has no concept of what an oven is other than maybe that it smells nice…
> Humans can use existing knowledge and apply it to new scenarios, and so can most AI
Doesn't the article states that this is not true? AI cannot apply to B what it learned about A.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#63I 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.
The math around machine learning is very manageable, and a lot of research in that area is throwing heuristics at a wall to see what sticks
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#64Earlier 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…
Being highly used in the past is good, it's a benchmark to compare against.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#65It'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…
> the human brain, of which we don't have a clear understanding of the compute capacity Neurons have finite (very low) speed of signal transfer, so just by measuring cognitive reaction time we can deduce upper bounds on how many _consecutive_ neuron connections are involved in reception, cognitive processing, and resulting reaction via muscles, even for very complex cognitive processes. And the number is just around…
> (100x matmul+tanh?)
Biological neurons are way more complex than that. A single neuron has dentritic trees with subunits doing their own local computations. There are temporal dynamics in the firing sequences. There is so much more complexity in the biological networks. It's not comparable.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#66It'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…
It's because humans (and other animals) have enormous innate capacities and knowledge which makes learning new things much much simpler than if you start from scratch. It's not really because of human's computational capacity.
By innate do you mean evolved/instinctive? Surely even evolved behaviour must be expressed as brain function, and therefore would need a brain capable of handling that level of processing.
I don't think it's clear how much of a human brains function exists at birth though, I know it's theorised than even much of the sensory processing has to be learned.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because humans (and other animals) have enormous innate capacities and knowledge which makes learning new things much much simpler than if you start from scratch. It's not really because of human's computational capacity.
By innate do you mean evolved/instinctive? Surely even evolved behaviour must be expressed as brain function, and therefore would need a brain capable of handling that level of processing. I don't think it's clear how much of a human brains function exists at birth though, I know it's theorised than even much of the sensory processing has to be learned.
I'm not arguing against computational theory of mind, I'm just saying that innate behaviours don't require the same level of scale as learnt ones.
Existing at birth is not the same thing as innate. Puberty is innate but it is not present at birth.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#68It'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…
> the human brain, of which we don't have a clear understanding of the compute capacity Neurons have finite (very low) speed of signal transfer, so just by measuring cognitive reaction time we can deduce upper bounds on how many _consecutive_ neuron connections are involved in reception, cognitive processing, and resulting reaction via muscles, even for very complex cognitive processes. And the number is just around…
The granted is doing a lot of work there. In fact, if you imagine a computer being able to do similar tasks as human brain can in around 100 steps, it becomes clear that considering parallelism is absolutely critical.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#69"... Since I am new to the research community, I made an effort" This means they've probably submitted a paper too.
It states it's a research, not a product company.
To be fair, OpenAI is also a "research lab" rather than "product company" and they still sell products for $200/month, not sure the distinction matters in practice much today as long as the entity is incorporated somehow.
Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
#70Earlier 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…
> 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?