71–80 of 930 posts
This is a very artfully written statement. It avoids the most more devastating headline of “John Carmack Stepping Down”. (Yes, going part-time isn’t the same as leaving entirely, but still).
I don't understand how he could contribute to the field of AGI research from home, by himself, and maybe with his son. It's the kind of problem that requires incredible amounts of data, hardware, and theory to make any progress. Wouldn't it make more sense for him to join a cutting-edge team, like DeepMind or OpenAI?
Everything I've ever read about Carmack suggests he'll do his best on his own at home. Much of this work can be done on reasonable hardware, and he's always been really good at getting a lot out of reasonable hardware. Further, if he needs enormous compute resources, he can get it at any of several cloud providers.
This is exactly the experience of most teams I've spoken with, be they students or businesses, for all the pre-production phase. You simply can't and shouldn't spend on costly AI infrastructure before you've nailed your solution; in fact any kind of infra not just AI.
What you do is rent some cloud to power quickly through your tests — better have 10x worth of big Nvidia GPUs over 2 weeks than buy 1 or 2 max yourself and wait 5-10x more time — not even factoring that setting up clusters of GPU and running such workflows consistently over days, weeks requires pretty deep sysadmin/hardware knowledge and experience; it took me two years to really master that non-problem part on my home server (but now it's a skill I have so that was worth it, but certainly set my research and learning back by as much time).
Besides, there's a time when the familiarity, safety and general comfort of home simply can't be beat. Notwithstanding pool tables and free soda, lol.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're on the wrong site if you're wanting to criticize software development as a career and suggest it does more harm than good
Yes, join the echo chamber or get out.
I don't understand how he could contribute to the field of AGI research from home, by himself, and maybe with his son. It's the kind of problem that requires incredible amounts of data, hardware, and theory to make any progress. Wouldn't it make more sense for him to join a cutting-edge team, like DeepMind or OpenAI?
John Carmack is practically a machine. He's openly talked about his work ethic in a bunch of places. He's the type of guy who after a life time of coding calculated he's 100% efficient up until 13 hour work days and then he drops off[0]. Although he did mention working those long hours is often best working on multiple things instead of 1 topic but maybe with AGI there's a bunch of different avenues to explore. [0]:…
Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances. I wonder what kind of advances are needed for AGI. 1. Biological brains are non-differentiable spiking networks much more complicated than backpropagated ANNs. 2. Ion channels may or may not be affected by quantum effects. 3. The search space is huge (but organisms aren't optimal and natural selection is probably local search) 4. If it took ~3.8b years t…
The key, of course, is redefining life and intelligence as whatever the current state-of-the-art accomplishes. (Cue explanations that the brain is just a giant pattern matcher.) It makes drawing parallels and prophesying advancements so much easier. Of all our sciences, that's perhaps the one thing we've perfected--the science of equivocation. And we perfected it long ago; perhaps even millennia ago.
John Carmack seems like a guy that would've made fundamental contributions to science, had he been born a century before. Computer science now occupies the place physics once did, in its impact on moving the world forward. Best of luck to him, I look forward to seeing what he produces!
why would being born in the current century preclude one from making fundamental contributions? You are making a common mistake of assuming that just because someone is good at something like programing computers the same skill would translate identically to a completely different domain. If anything he is lucky to have been born in an era where his skill of programming computers could be put to use - otherwise his t…
And then he has the ability to power through learning what he needs to in order to build toward those solutions lightning fast.
Current narrow AI is all about data and computer power but I don’t see AGI coming out of more data / more power anytime soon.
I was wondering why his tweeting about graphics and VR went to 0. We've gone back into the part of the cycle where VR is an odd curiousity again, haven't we?
Unfortunately VR turned out to be an intensely nauseating puke fest for a lot of people.