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John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

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Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an interesting point. I can see that, as you say puberty and hormones impact brain function and hence behaviour, and those are inate and not learned. But at least superfically that would appear to be primarily broad behavioural effects, similar to what might be induced by medication. Rather than something that impacts pure abstract problem solving, which I guess is what the Atari games are supposed to represent?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#72
I wish he did this with VR environment instead like they mention at the start of the slides. A VR environment with a JPEG camera filter, physics sim, noise, robot simulation. If anyone could program that well its him.

Using real life robots is going to be a huge bottleneck for training hours no matter what they do.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an interesting point. I can see that, as you say puberty and hormones impact brain function and hence behaviour, and those are inate and not learned. But at least superfically that would appear to be primarily broad behavioural effects, similar to what might be induced by medication. Rather than something that impacts pure abstract problem solving, which I guess is what the Atari games are supposed to represen…

This is obviously wrong from genetic defects that cause predictable development problems in specialized areas. They are innate but not present at birth.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#74

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…

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."

This sounds like a problem that could be solved around the corner with a caveat.

Games generally are solvable for AI because they have feedback loops and a clear success or failure criteria. If the "picking up a Joystick" part is the limiting factor, sure. But why would we want robots to use an interface (especially a modern controller) heavily optimized for human hands; that seems like the definition of a horseless carriage.

I'm sure if you compared a monkey and a dolphins performance using a joystick you'd get results that aren't really correlated with their intelligence. I would guess that if you gave robots an R2D2 like port to jack into and play a game, that problem could be solved relatively quickly.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#75
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Disambigation: I believe "themselves" refers to the one insulting, not the one interested in their health.

It tripped me up too, to be fair.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#78
Honestly, having gone through the slides, it's a bit painful to see Carmack "rediscover" stuff I've learned in a reinforcement learning lecture like ten years ago.

But don't get me wrong! Since this is a long-term research endeavor of his, I believe really starting from the basics is good for him and will empower him to bring something new to the table eventually.

I'm surprised though that he "only" came so far as of now. Maybe my slight idolization of Carmack made me kinda of blind to the fact that this kind of research is a mean beast after all and there is a reason that huuuuge research labs dump countless of man-decades into this kind of stuff with no guaranteed breakthroughs.

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