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This doesn't surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to beco

This doesn't surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) As recent as his last Oculus Connect keynote, he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical. He's clearly the type that is happiest when he's deep in a technical problem rather than bureaucracy, and he likes moving fast. On top of that, he likes sharing with the community with talks and such, and ever since going under the FB umbrella, he's had to clear everything he says in public with Facebook PR, which clearly annoyed him. He's hungry for a new hard challenge. VR isn't really it right now since it's more hardware-bound by the need for hard-core optical research than software right now. With the Quest, he (in my opinion) solidified VR's path to mobile standalones. It's time to try his hand at another magic trick while he's on his game. John's the very definition of a world-class, tried and true engineer/scientist. He's shown time and time again the ability to dive into a field and become an expert very quickly (he went from making video games to literally building space rockets for a good bit before inventing the modern VR field with Palmer). If there's anyone I'd trust to both be able to dive into AGI quickly and do it the right(tm) way, it's John Carmack.

mochomocha 7y ago
> He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). You must be joking, right? I'm as much of a Carmack fan as anyone here, but overstating the skills of one personal hero does no good to anyone.
- grumpy8 7y ago
  To be fair, a whole uninterrupted week of highly focussed work can get you pretty far (considering that you have the necessary background, which Carmack has, i.e. related to linear algebra, stats, programming, etc.)
  - short_sells_poo 7y ago
    Yes, but let's not assume the the hundreds of other scientists in the field have just been twiddling their thumbs the whole time. It is preposterous to assume that someone largely new to a highly specialized field can somehow start pushing the envelope within a week. Yes, JC is nothing short of brilliant, but these sort of assumptions just set him up to disappoint and is also highly unfair to all the other hardworking brilliant people in the field.
    - nitwit005 7y ago
      They didn't suggest he invented some new technique. Figuring out the basics of the math and how to use whatever tools they use at FB is doable in a week.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      Sometimes an outside perspective is just the ticket for getting past roadblocks that've stumped the experts. If any outsider could do this, it's John.
      - dimino 7y ago
        Sometimes, but mostly not.
        dingo_bat 7y ago
        But John is not most men.
    - rfhjt 7y ago
      How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.
      - mr_mitm 7y ago
        Generating papers is research. I don't understand why you dismiss all papers as pointless.
- carlosdp 7y ago
  I'm not saying he's LeCun, I'm just saying he gets up to speed absurdly fast. So it's not unreasonable to suppose that by now, he's learned enough to start seriously contributing to this kind of problem. edit: to be clear, all I'm saying is he can catch up to the body of research already out there quicker than the average bear, and he's shown a real knack for designing solutions and being crazy productive. I'm not pretending he's gunna be publishing insane novel research anytime soon, just that I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up being a real voice in the field.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    No, you can’t push the envelope in AGI after a week in the woods. That must come off as pretty insulting to the hundreds of world class scientists who have been working in the field for decades.
    - true_religion 7y ago
      To be fair, they said proficient and not world class or inventing new material.
    - carlosdp 7y ago
      I never said that, where the hell did I say he pushed anything? All I'm saying is he's shown to be insanely productive and effective and I think he can catch up to the body of research (created and shared by those hundreds of scientists) to become a real contributor very quickly.
      - monktastic1 7y ago
        FWIW, "seriously contributing to this kind of problem" sounds basically the same as "pushing the envelope" to me. They both suggest contributing something novel and useful.
        austhrow743 7y ago
        They are basically the same thing. What are not basically the same thing are "he started seriously contributing to this kind of problem after a week in the woods" and "he spent a week in the woods a year ago and is ready to start contributing now. A year after that week in the woods."
- Yajirobe 7y ago
  Huh? One week is more than enough to go through Siraj's videos.
  - b3kart 7y ago
    Please tell me this is sarcasm.
    - birdyrooster 7y ago
      It's HN so only the best sarcasm is allowed here. That is good sarcasm. Bask in it. Source: Commenter name is DBZ character
- echelon 7y ago
  What a weird future it would be if Carmack turns out to be the one to figure out the critical path and get it all working. An entire field of brilliant researchers be damned. History books (for as long as those continue to exist) would cite AGI as his major contribution to society, and his name would be more renowned than Edison or Tesla. An Einstein. None of his other contributions will matter, as the machines will replace it all. Just daydreaming, though.
  - derefr 7y ago
    I wonder how many historical figures went through the same thing? Who do we know for their contributions to field X, when 99% of their life was spent contributing to field Y?
    - jorblumesea 7y ago
      Very few, at least for STEM fields. If you look at notable scientists in any given field, their main contributions were in their expertise area before the thing that made them famous. Teller had already made serious contributions to physics before the atom bomb. Jennifer Doudna (CRISPR, CAS9) was the first to see the structure of RNA (except for tRNA) using an innovative crystalline technique. Planck is mainly known for quantum physics, but made huge contributions to the field in general. It's hard to think of many famous scientists that weren't already well known in their field. Some stand out. Einstein, for example, had a fairly lackluster career until his Annus Mirabilis papers. Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves) bounced to and from various jobs. But largely, the idea of the brilliant outsider is like the 10x engineer. It exists, but is rare.
      - zwaps 7y ago
        Even Einstein I would not say didn't have formal training. He had been in and around academia for most of his life. He was obviously far ahead of the curve, but he did accumulate the formal training. His stint in a regular job was more of an anomaly than his affinity to academia and physics.
- sdenton4 7y ago
  Yeah, but we really need to know who would win in a lightsaber fight between Carmack and Jeff Dean.
  - okareaman 7y ago
    I wonder what they would pick if each had to choose their weapon
- workthrowaway 7y ago
  funny i wanted to make the same comment last night but was too lazy. wasn't the first time John did what he did. and it's not the usual kind of learning either. he was learning by first principles. i truly love this idea of replaying in your own mind what went on when something was discovered (or at least come close to it). contrast that with how ML & AI are taught nowadays: thrown into a Jupyter notebook with all FAANG libraries loaded for you...
mortenjorck 7y ago
Carmack is unquestionably a genius, but I think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers. I wouldn't, however, bet against some kind of insanely clever development coming out of his new endeavor. Something like an absurdly efficient new object classifier, that reduces the compute requirements for self-driving cars by a non-trivial factor, would be a very Carmack thing.
- carlosdp 7y ago
  I keep re-reading my post and idk how it reads as a claim that Carmack is going to re-invent the field or something. All I'm saying is it's possible for him to become a player, just like you suggest.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway35784 7y ago
  He's not leap frogging it. He's leaping to the next level from its shoulders.
- fastball 7y ago
  The problem with the "field of researchers" is that most of us aren't geniuses. We're just plugging away at problems, like normal people. The opportunity for a genius is to come in, synthesize all existing information on the subject, and then come up with a novel approach to the whole thing. In some part, I think that is what Elon Musk has been able to do effectively. He comes into a field that already exists, reads everything he can get his hands on, and then outputs something novel. You can only do that effectively if you have the mental capacity to keep all that info in your head at once, I think.
  - eanzenberg 7y ago
    What, pray tell, did Elon do that is "novel"?
nradov 7y ago
Current ML technology probably has little or nothing to do with whatever technology will eventually be needed to produce true AGI.
- rfhjt 7y ago
  And programmers are probably not the ones who will come up with AI ideas. I'd bet on mathematicians that prove those Fermat's or ABC theorems.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Mathematically, AI is a pretty well modelled field. AGI is a philosophical problem.
    - sullyj3 7y ago
      you're possibly thinking of the problem of consciousness, which is a totally separate thing. AGI is just what it says on the tin - a general intelligence. That is, a problem solver that can operate at a human or greater level in a broad variety of domains. This ability is plausibly totally orthogonal to "having the lights on" - having subjective experience.
      - EamonnMR 7y ago
        The scary thing (imo) is that we don't know where the line is for consciousness - if there even is a line. We've got no problem swatting flies, wonder if it'll be the same with spinning up and spinning down fly-level AGIs.
        Scarblac 7y ago
        Continuous integration of the development branch would be mass murder?
        EamonnMR 7y ago
friendlybus 7y ago
He had a lot of help behind the scenes and has been credited with things that aren't his. I respect his achievements more as a regular smart guy than a bonafide genius. He described the math in rocketry as being basically solved in the 60s and video games being far more complex as a project, so that was really a step down in difficulty. His VR role is the same field as his primary skills, impressive work but not an entirely unique role. I'm glad to see he's aiming big with his billions and time. This is what rich people should be doing. Hl3 Gaben!
- dyarosla 7y ago
  Millions*- A cursory Google search suggests that he has a net worth of 50MM.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    Huh just assumed he got a bigger piece of the oculus sale.
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      Oculus was acquired for $2.3 billion, so he'd need to have owned nearly 50% of the company to become a billionaire from it's sale.
      - mkl 7y ago
        Not exactly. The acquisition was mostly in the form of Facebook shares, which I expect have increased in value since.
        OnlineGladiator 7y ago
        It was a mix of cash and shares (not sure on the split), but I checked the stock price for fun - holy shit it has nearly tripled since the acquisition 5 years ago.
AccordingDay 7y ago
But there's 100s of world-class researchers working on this problem already.
- carlosdp 7y ago
  I bet those people don't read comments on HN, so I'm not too concerned.
- noonespecial 7y ago
  100s of world-class researchers are trying desperately to get papers into journals fast enough to keep their labs funded. Carmack may have other priorities. This can only be good.
- chapium 7y ago
  He will be surrounded by brilliant peers, sounds good.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  100s of world-class researchers may be good at coming up with new ideas and hypotheses towards AGI, but are they good enough programmers to test all of them in reasonable time, with relevant data sets?
braindeath 7y ago
> especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics I don't put learning state of the art ML past Carmack, at all. However, does ML tech of today lead to general AI? It's a strong assumption.
- laichzeit0 7y ago
  Whatever the solution is to AGI, fundamentally it will still have to be describable in the language of mathematics (and stochastics is still mathematics).
  - Ultimatt 7y ago
    I dunno. You're limiting your thought to computer science. I think it's more likely at this point in time biotech will produce an AGI, likely by accident. Worse one that competes directly with us for resource. We dont have a great mathematical description of our own intelligence, doing it for a tricked out slimemould would be just as hard.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > I think it's more likely at this point in time biotech will produce an AGI, likely by accident. Does a living thing count as AGI? In that case, I'd say that most parents are quite good at creating AGIs ;)
      - rat9988 7y ago
        I think you missed the artificial part of AGI.
drongoking 7y ago
> (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) This may be his biggest impediment. ML has gotten very far with looking at problems as linear algebraic systems, where optimizing a loss function mathematically yields a good solution to a precisely defined (and well circumscribed) classification or regression problem. These techniques are very seductive and very powerful, but the problems they solve have almost nothing in common with AGI. Put another way, Machine Learning as a field diverged from human learning (and cognitive science) decades ago, and the two are virtually unrecognizable to each other now. Human learning is the best example of AGI we have, and using ML tech as a way to get there may be a seductive dead end.
- visarga 7y ago
  Humans are not AGI's. We're specialised in human survival, not general intelligence. We're pretty limited in intelligence in many ways, actually, and the environment doesn't support generality. Without a proper challenge an agent would not become super intelligent. The cost of developing such an intelligence would conflict with the need to minimise energy for survival.
  - TeamSlytherin 7y ago
    It's best to think about AGI as... at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life (or do you even need high school). It's true that it's not a survival issue, but sadly, it's not a test of "pure knowledge" either. There is a great deal of social structure, even "fluff" that is only relevant for interaction (like getting an 80's reference).
    - visarga 7y ago
      > at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life That means you're specialised in survival. If you do well in life, you have a higher chance of procreation. Your genes survival depends on it. General Intelligence is like Free Will - a fascinating concept with no base in reality. A mental experiment.
throwaway34241 7y ago
> he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical Yes, he seemed to put a lot of effort to try to get things through FB internal politics, and not always successfully. I really wish his experiments with a scheme-based rapid prototyping environment / VR web browser had been allowed to continue [1]. VR suffers from a lack of content, and VR itself is well-suited to creating VR content, and his VR script would surely facilitate closing that loop among other things. Although now four years later I guess FB has a large team working on a locked-down, limited world building tool (closed platform, no programming ability). Oh well. I don't think this is the end of this wave of VR, but at this point I wouldn't be at all surprised if say Apple or someone else ends up bringing it to the mainstream instead of Facebook. [2] [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/RFlh0o6l3Ls/8InN7uz-Mv4J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/RFlh0o6l3... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/11/20959066/apple-augmented-reality-ar-headset-glasses-rumors-reported-release-date https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/11/20959066/apple-augmented...
- randomsearch 7y ago
  The VR vs AI comparison is interesting to me, because I think both technologies have come in “waves”. However, I think this is the last VR wave - it’s going to be on a steady gradient to ubiquity now - whilst I believe AI will winter again and there are many more waves to come, and decades (centuries?) to pass before AGI. Reasoning being: VR is just making what we have better. Better screens, better refresh, better batteries, better lenses etc etc. I don’t see any roadblocks. AGI, by contrast, is not going to be a better DNN. Harder to convince people but thinking is: brain neurons are vastly most sophisticated than digital; we don’t even fully understand what neurons do; we don’t have anything other than a vague understanding of what the brain does; it is apparent that we engage in plenty of symbolic reasoning, which DNN do not do; DNNs are fooled by trivial input changes that indicate they are massively overfitting data; from what I’ve heard from researchers at top AI companies/institutions DNN design is just a matter of hacking and trying stuff until you get that specific results on your given problem, so I don’t see where DL research is actually headed; improvements are correlated with compute power increases, indicating no qualitative gains in the study of learning. I’m incredibly impressed by DL’s achievements but I believe at best current methods could serve as data preprocessing for a future AGI. I’m actually quite glad that AGI is so far off, because I don’t think that it’s likely big tech companies will use it responsibly. VR OTOH is very close and is going to change everything (and IMO is likely a necessary step towards AGI).
Zod666 7y ago
"With the Quest, he (in my opinion) solidified VR's path to mobile standalones" Yes and I really wished he hadn't. Before he joined oculus they were working on the rift2, he steered them away from that to focus on mobile efforts. I do see the appeal of mobile vr but at the end of the day it is basically an android phone in a vr headset. PCvr is already 2 big steps back in graphical quality from desktop games. Mobile vr is like 10 steps back. 8 more steps than I'm willing to take even if it affords me mobility.
- CivBase 7y ago
  Wireless teathering is the future of VR. True mobility is pointless when you're realistically restricted to a dedicated space anyways.
  - Ultimatt 7y ago
    You should take more long haul flights if you think mobile is pointless.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      What class are you flying that you have enough free space around you for hands to make any use of a VR headset on the plane? (Also, even with the space, I'm not sure I'd be brave enough to try and use one in air - adding turbulence and random vibrations on top of the usual VR issues sounds pretty nauseating even as I type it.)
    - CivBase 7y ago
      I said mobility is pointless, not mobile. That's an important distinction. By mobility, I mean the ability to throw the headset around and walk anywhere without worrying about leaving the range of your tether. That sort of thing is important for AR, but I just don't see it mattering for VR in the long run. There is definitely a market for VR headsets for content delivered by a phone or builtin hardware. Those devices will realistically be limited to seated or standing-room-only experiences, though.
- 7y ago
cyberjunkie 7y ago
I can trust John Carmack's words when he says in an interview, or on stage. There's a passion in his talks, a nervousness in blurting what he really feels, and those are really good traits, in my mind. I genuinely felt a sense of disappointment when he moved to Facebook (via the Occulus acquisition). So yea, fuck you, Facebook and your manipulative, life values corrupting and PR machinery. I place John Carmack miles above Zuckerberg.
- nmfisher 7y ago
  I have to admit, I felt a bit disappointed too. Carmack and Facebook always struck me as an antithetical pairing - the creativity/independence of the former didn't seem to sit right with the maniacal/emotional exploitation of the latter.
  - me_me_me 7y ago
    I think Carmack just doesn't give a flying f* about Facebook or etc. he is interested in tech and he clearly works on stuff he is passionate about. He worked on VR and not work for Facebook. Facebook just happened to be paying for it.
throw231 7y ago
> about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) To be honest anyone who has a very good working knowledge of Linear Algebra can learn much of ML-math in a day. There really isn't anything mathematically super-sophisticated that is in popular use today.
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  ML is not AGI
- visarga 7y ago
  If you know about math you're just as good at ML as a person who read everything about swimming is in swimming. You got to run experiments to see what happens, build an intuition, understand the problem from the inside. Math leaves you with a few pretty formulas and nothing else.
  - fooker 7y ago
    Ah, you've almost described the contemporary profession of being a Machine Learning Priest.
    - visarga 7y ago
      There are lots of ideas floating around. Everyone who has studied the field has ideas. Ideas are cheap, results matter. The problem is we don't know if any of these ideas would work, and proving an idea requires lots of data, simulations and compute. Being good at grasping the theory is just the first step in a thousand mile journey. The problem of AI is not going to be solved with a neat math trick on paper, but with lots of experiments. Nature has taken a similar path towards intelligence.
      - Scarblac 7y ago
        The field of statistical inference is about mathematically proving how good various statistical ideas are. It's possible to do better than just throw trial and error on a new idea.
anonytrary 7y ago
AI today is comparable to physics in the 1700s. Back then, it was a bunch of people tinkering with prisms and apples. Today, it's a bunch of people tinkering with hyperparameters. I suspect that we know as little about AGI today as someone in the 1700s knew about QFT. Not only did they not know about QFT, but they didn't even know that they didn't know it.
- emmanuel_1234 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be fun if the next Newton turns out to be the guy who wrote Doom and other FPS, games that were blamed for any kind of surge of violence until the GTA games show up?
  - codingslave 7y ago
    Yeah, weird to think that todays newton could be seen on Joe Rogans Podcast talking about the future of gaming
    - toxik 7y ago
      It would fit, Newton was apparently quite insufferable in social settings — Carjack has a stroke of that
  - TremendousJudge 7y ago
    Wouldn't be out of place -- Newton worked on alchemy, teology and managed the Royal Mint
- Iv 7y ago
  Too many people make this mistake of conflating machine learning with AI. I hope someone as external to the field as Carmack will see the value of rule based inference as well. The Good Old Fashioned AI as it used to be called
tomaskafka 7y ago
> he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical. Sigh. I assumed the whole point of hiring John Carmack is that you trust him to identify critical problems - and to find the best way to solve them.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  ... to the extent and up until it helps get the product off the ground. Beyond that, the primary benefit is PR - "oh, that's the gaming hardware made by Carmack himself, so it must be good".
- marvin 7y ago
  That's the classical plight of someone who's much smarter than those around them. It's not enough to see the right path, you'd also have to manage to convince everyone else that it's right. Technology moves by peak knowledge and insight, not the democratic average.
randomsearch 7y ago
What scientific work has Carmack done?
- randomsearch 7y ago
  This was downvoted, so I figured it must be obvious. I googled but as far as I can tell, Carmack is an engineer not a scientist. No formal scientific training, no scientific work.
  - Strom 7y ago
    The word you're looking for is academic. Carmack hasn't done academic work, but he has done plenty of scientific work. Scientific work is no less scientific if it isn't published in an academic journal. Academia doesn't hold a monopoly on the scientific method.
    - randomsearch 7y ago
      No, I mean scientific. What scientific work has Carmack done? I'm genuinely interested, because someone called him a scientist but I thought he was an engineer.
      - Strom 7y ago
        Are you in doubt that Carmack has used the scientific method to do anything? [1] If not, does your definition of scientist require something other than doing work using the scientific method? Perhaps some specific quantity of work? -- [1] One of his companies, Armadillo Aerospace, was pretty much just a series of scientifc experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
        randomsearch 7y ago
        Thanks for the explanation. We could debate whether that’s science or not, but I don’t think it’d be particularly productive and we’ve already gone a bit off topic. Final thought from me - I was thinking about your post and it is indeed difficult to discern science from engineering. One dichotomy that occurred to me (which may not hold under close scrutiny) is that scientists are interested in _the pursuit of truth_, whereas engineers are interested in _building things_.
buboard 7y ago
I dont know of his credentials as a scientist or mathematician to advance the field. But, he seems to be a ruthless optimizer, which can often leads to great leaps , even as a side effect. Neural networks are not difficult mathematically for any scientist to grasp really. And they are in actual need of compression and optimization. People are spoiled with general purpose tools that are not very efficient, even if computation is cheap.
deegles 7y ago
If he invents (births?) an AGI, will it be Facebooks property? Sounds like the beginning of a dystopian novel.
LegitShady 7y ago
It's funny people talk about Palmer and carmack in vr but Oculus was built on appropriated valve tech and neither Palmer or Carmack have succeeded in making VR a thing. As far as I can tell Carmack is an old engineer whose name gets thrown around for headlines. If there weren't articles about his stealing stuff to take to Oculus I don't think his presence there would be observable. Now people are talking like Carmack switching topics is going to change the world. It's just going to change his schedule. There are smarter engineers already working on this problem.
- mattmar96 7y ago
  Seems you aren't familiar with his seminal graphics work. He effectively kickstarted 3d gaming and created the FPS genre. I'd be cautious dismissing his potential influence in the field. He has a way of looking at problems differently.
  - LegitShady 7y ago
    I am familiar with it. I just don't see this massive string of successes in every field. I see his huge expertise in graphics engines and games. But it didn't help him with VR - in fact he got in trouble with VR and ended up landing with a company I have no respect for and he didn't make VR a thing. Many people have a way of looking at things differently. I just don't see the reason this is news, unless you own facebook shares or something. Even then zero effect. I say all this as the owner of two VR headsets (A vive for roomscale and a Lenovo Explorer for simracing/flying).

mochomocha 7y ago

> He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). You must be joking, right? I'm as much of a Carmack fan as anyone here, but overstating the skills of one personal hero does no good to anyone.

grumpy8 7y ago
To be fair, a whole uninterrupted week of highly focussed work can get you pretty far (considering that you have the necessary background, which Carmack has, i.e. related to linear algebra, stats, programming, etc.)
- short_sells_poo 7y ago
  Yes, but let's not assume the the hundreds of other scientists in the field have just been twiddling their thumbs the whole time. It is preposterous to assume that someone largely new to a highly specialized field can somehow start pushing the envelope within a week. Yes, JC is nothing short of brilliant, but these sort of assumptions just set him up to disappoint and is also highly unfair to all the other hardworking brilliant people in the field.
  - nitwit005 7y ago
    They didn't suggest he invented some new technique. Figuring out the basics of the math and how to use whatever tools they use at FB is doable in a week.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Sometimes an outside perspective is just the ticket for getting past roadblocks that've stumped the experts. If any outsider could do this, it's John.
    - dimino 7y ago
      Sometimes, but mostly not.
      - dingo_bat 7y ago
        But John is not most men.
  - rfhjt 7y ago
    How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.
    - mr_mitm 7y ago
      Generating papers is research. I don't understand why you dismiss all papers as pointless.
carlosdp 7y ago
I'm not saying he's LeCun, I'm just saying he gets up to speed absurdly fast. So it's not unreasonable to suppose that by now, he's learned enough to start seriously contributing to this kind of problem. edit: to be clear, all I'm saying is he can catch up to the body of research already out there quicker than the average bear, and he's shown a real knack for designing solutions and being crazy productive. I'm not pretending he's gunna be publishing insane novel research anytime soon, just that I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up being a real voice in the field.
- zaroth 7y ago
  No, you can’t push the envelope in AGI after a week in the woods. That must come off as pretty insulting to the hundreds of world class scientists who have been working in the field for decades.
  - true_religion 7y ago
    To be fair, they said proficient and not world class or inventing new material.
  - carlosdp 7y ago
    I never said that, where the hell did I say he pushed anything? All I'm saying is he's shown to be insanely productive and effective and I think he can catch up to the body of research (created and shared by those hundreds of scientists) to become a real contributor very quickly.
    - monktastic1 7y ago
      FWIW, "seriously contributing to this kind of problem" sounds basically the same as "pushing the envelope" to me. They both suggest contributing something novel and useful.
      - austhrow743 7y ago
        They are basically the same thing. What are not basically the same thing are "he started seriously contributing to this kind of problem after a week in the woods" and "he spent a week in the woods a year ago and is ready to start contributing now. A year after that week in the woods."
Yajirobe 7y ago
Huh? One week is more than enough to go through Siraj's videos.
- b3kart 7y ago
  Please tell me this is sarcasm.
  - birdyrooster 7y ago
    It's HN so only the best sarcasm is allowed here. That is good sarcasm. Bask in it. Source: Commenter name is DBZ character
echelon 7y ago
What a weird future it would be if Carmack turns out to be the one to figure out the critical path and get it all working. An entire field of brilliant researchers be damned. History books (for as long as those continue to exist) would cite AGI as his major contribution to society, and his name would be more renowned than Edison or Tesla. An Einstein. None of his other contributions will matter, as the machines will replace it all. Just daydreaming, though.
- derefr 7y ago
  I wonder how many historical figures went through the same thing? Who do we know for their contributions to field X, when 99% of their life was spent contributing to field Y?
  - jorblumesea 7y ago
    Very few, at least for STEM fields. If you look at notable scientists in any given field, their main contributions were in their expertise area before the thing that made them famous. Teller had already made serious contributions to physics before the atom bomb. Jennifer Doudna (CRISPR, CAS9) was the first to see the structure of RNA (except for tRNA) using an innovative crystalline technique. Planck is mainly known for quantum physics, but made huge contributions to the field in general. It's hard to think of many famous scientists that weren't already well known in their field. Some stand out. Einstein, for example, had a fairly lackluster career until his Annus Mirabilis papers. Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves) bounced to and from various jobs. But largely, the idea of the brilliant outsider is like the 10x engineer. It exists, but is rare.
    - zwaps 7y ago
      Even Einstein I would not say didn't have formal training. He had been in and around academia for most of his life. He was obviously far ahead of the curve, but he did accumulate the formal training. His stint in a regular job was more of an anomaly than his affinity to academia and physics.
sdenton4 7y ago
Yeah, but we really need to know who would win in a lightsaber fight between Carmack and Jeff Dean.
- okareaman 7y ago
  I wonder what they would pick if each had to choose their weapon
workthrowaway 7y ago
funny i wanted to make the same comment last night but was too lazy. wasn't the first time John did what he did. and it's not the usual kind of learning either. he was learning by first principles. i truly love this idea of replaying in your own mind what went on when something was discovered (or at least come close to it). contrast that with how ML & AI are taught nowadays: thrown into a Jupyter notebook with all FAANG libraries loaded for you...

mortenjorck 7y ago

Carmack is unquestionably a genius, but I think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers. I wouldn't, however, bet against some kind of insanely clever development coming out of his new endeavor. Something like an absurdly efficient new object classifier, that reduces the compute requirements for self-driving cars by a non-trivial factor, would be a very Carmack thing.

carlosdp 7y ago
I keep re-reading my post and idk how it reads as a claim that Carmack is going to re-invent the field or something. All I'm saying is it's possible for him to become a player, just like you suggest.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway35784 7y ago
He's not leap frogging it. He's leaping to the next level from its shoulders.
fastball 7y ago
The problem with the "field of researchers" is that most of us aren't geniuses. We're just plugging away at problems, like normal people. The opportunity for a genius is to come in, synthesize all existing information on the subject, and then come up with a novel approach to the whole thing. In some part, I think that is what Elon Musk has been able to do effectively. He comes into a field that already exists, reads everything he can get his hands on, and then outputs something novel. You can only do that effectively if you have the mental capacity to keep all that info in your head at once, I think.
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  What, pray tell, did Elon do that is "novel"?

nradov 7y ago

Current ML technology probably has little or nothing to do with whatever technology will eventually be needed to produce true AGI.

rfhjt 7y ago
And programmers are probably not the ones who will come up with AI ideas. I'd bet on mathematicians that prove those Fermat's or ABC theorems.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Mathematically, AI is a pretty well modelled field. AGI is a philosophical problem.
  - sullyj3 7y ago
    you're possibly thinking of the problem of consciousness, which is a totally separate thing. AGI is just what it says on the tin - a general intelligence. That is, a problem solver that can operate at a human or greater level in a broad variety of domains. This ability is plausibly totally orthogonal to "having the lights on" - having subjective experience.
    - EamonnMR 7y ago
      The scary thing (imo) is that we don't know where the line is for consciousness - if there even is a line. We've got no problem swatting flies, wonder if it'll be the same with spinning up and spinning down fly-level AGIs.
      - Scarblac 7y ago
        Continuous integration of the development branch would be mass murder?
        EamonnMR 7y ago

friendlybus 7y ago

He had a lot of help behind the scenes and has been credited with things that aren't his. I respect his achievements more as a regular smart guy than a bonafide genius. He described the math in rocketry as being basically solved in the 60s and video games being far more complex as a project, so that was really a step down in difficulty. His VR role is the same field as his primary skills, impressive work but not an entirely unique role. I'm glad to see he's aiming big with his billions and time. This is what rich people should be doing. Hl3 Gaben!

dyarosla 7y ago
Millions*- A cursory Google search suggests that he has a net worth of 50MM.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  Huh just assumed he got a bigger piece of the oculus sale.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    Oculus was acquired for $2.3 billion, so he'd need to have owned nearly 50% of the company to become a billionaire from it's sale.
    - mkl 7y ago
      Not exactly. The acquisition was mostly in the form of Facebook shares, which I expect have increased in value since.
      - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
        It was a mix of cash and shares (not sure on the split), but I checked the stock price for fun - holy shit it has nearly tripled since the acquisition 5 years ago.

AccordingDay 7y ago

But there's 100s of world-class researchers working on this problem already.

carlosdp 7y ago
I bet those people don't read comments on HN, so I'm not too concerned.
noonespecial 7y ago
100s of world-class researchers are trying desperately to get papers into journals fast enough to keep their labs funded. Carmack may have other priorities. This can only be good.
chapium 7y ago
He will be surrounded by brilliant peers, sounds good.
lazyjones 7y ago
100s of world-class researchers may be good at coming up with new ideas and hypotheses towards AGI, but are they good enough programmers to test all of them in reasonable time, with relevant data sets?

braindeath 7y ago

> especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics I don't put learning state of the art ML past Carmack, at all. However, does ML tech of today lead to general AI? It's a strong assumption.

laichzeit0 7y ago
Whatever the solution is to AGI, fundamentally it will still have to be describable in the language of mathematics (and stochastics is still mathematics).
- Ultimatt 7y ago
  I dunno. You're limiting your thought to computer science. I think it's more likely at this point in time biotech will produce an AGI, likely by accident. Worse one that competes directly with us for resource. We dont have a great mathematical description of our own intelligence, doing it for a tricked out slimemould would be just as hard.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > I think it's more likely at this point in time biotech will produce an AGI, likely by accident. Does a living thing count as AGI? In that case, I'd say that most parents are quite good at creating AGIs ;)
    - rat9988 7y ago
      I think you missed the artificial part of AGI.

drongoking 7y ago

> (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) This may be his biggest impediment. ML has gotten very far with looking at problems as linear algebraic systems, where optimizing a loss function mathematically yields a good solution to a precisely defined (and well circumscribed) classification or regression problem. These techniques are very seductive and very powerful, but the problems they solve have almost nothing in common with AGI. Put another way, Machine Learning as a field diverged from human learning (and cognitive science) decades ago, and the two are virtually unrecognizable to each other now. Human learning is the best example of AGI we have, and using ML tech as a way to get there may be a seductive dead end.

visarga 7y ago
Humans are not AGI's. We're specialised in human survival, not general intelligence. We're pretty limited in intelligence in many ways, actually, and the environment doesn't support generality. Without a proper challenge an agent would not become super intelligent. The cost of developing such an intelligence would conflict with the need to minimise energy for survival.
- TeamSlytherin 7y ago
  It's best to think about AGI as... at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life (or do you even need high school). It's true that it's not a survival issue, but sadly, it's not a test of "pure knowledge" either. There is a great deal of social structure, even "fluff" that is only relevant for interaction (like getting an 80's reference).
  - visarga 7y ago
    > at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life That means you're specialised in survival. If you do well in life, you have a higher chance of procreation. Your genes survival depends on it. General Intelligence is like Free Will - a fascinating concept with no base in reality. A mental experiment.

throwaway34241 7y ago

> he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical Yes, he seemed to put a lot of effort to try to get things through FB internal politics, and not always successfully. I really wish his experiments with a scheme-based rapid prototyping environment / VR web browser had been allowed to continue [1]. VR suffers from a lack of content, and VR itself is well-suited to creating VR content, and his VR script would surely facilitate closing that loop among other things. Although now four years later I guess FB has a large team working on a locked-down, limited world building tool (closed platform, no programming ability). Oh well. I don't think this is the end of this wave of VR, but at this point I wouldn't be at all surprised if say Apple or someone else ends up bringing it to the mainstream instead of Facebook. [2] [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/RFlh0o6l3Ls/8InN7uz-Mv4J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/RFlh0o6l3... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/11/20959066/apple-augmented-reality-ar-headset-glasses-rumors-reported-release-date https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/11/20959066/apple-augmented...

randomsearch 7y ago
The VR vs AI comparison is interesting to me, because I think both technologies have come in “waves”. However, I think this is the last VR wave - it’s going to be on a steady gradient to ubiquity now - whilst I believe AI will winter again and there are many more waves to come, and decades (centuries?) to pass before AGI. Reasoning being: VR is just making what we have better. Better screens, better refresh, better batteries, better lenses etc etc. I don’t see any roadblocks. AGI, by contrast, is not going to be a better DNN. Harder to convince people but thinking is: brain neurons are vastly most sophisticated than digital; we don’t even fully understand what neurons do; we don’t have anything other than a vague understanding of what the brain does; it is apparent that we engage in plenty of symbolic reasoning, which DNN do not do; DNNs are fooled by trivial input changes that indicate they are massively overfitting data; from what I’ve heard from researchers at top AI companies/institutions DNN design is just a matter of hacking and trying stuff until you get that specific results on your given problem, so I don’t see where DL research is actually headed; improvements are correlated with compute power increases, indicating no qualitative gains in the study of learning. I’m incredibly impressed by DL’s achievements but I believe at best current methods could serve as data preprocessing for a future AGI. I’m actually quite glad that AGI is so far off, because I don’t think that it’s likely big tech companies will use it responsibly. VR OTOH is very close and is going to change everything (and IMO is likely a necessary step towards AGI).

Zod666 7y ago

"With the Quest, he (in my opinion) solidified VR's path to mobile standalones" Yes and I really wished he hadn't. Before he joined oculus they were working on the rift2, he steered them away from that to focus on mobile efforts. I do see the appeal of mobile vr but at the end of the day it is basically an android phone in a vr headset. PCvr is already 2 big steps back in graphical quality from desktop games. Mobile vr is like 10 steps back. 8 more steps than I'm willing to take even if it affords me mobility.

CivBase 7y ago
Wireless teathering is the future of VR. True mobility is pointless when you're realistically restricted to a dedicated space anyways.
- Ultimatt 7y ago
  You should take more long haul flights if you think mobile is pointless.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    What class are you flying that you have enough free space around you for hands to make any use of a VR headset on the plane? (Also, even with the space, I'm not sure I'd be brave enough to try and use one in air - adding turbulence and random vibrations on top of the usual VR issues sounds pretty nauseating even as I type it.)
  - CivBase 7y ago
    I said mobility is pointless, not mobile. That's an important distinction. By mobility, I mean the ability to throw the headset around and walk anywhere without worrying about leaving the range of your tether. That sort of thing is important for AR, but I just don't see it mattering for VR in the long run. There is definitely a market for VR headsets for content delivered by a phone or builtin hardware. Those devices will realistically be limited to seated or standing-room-only experiences, though.
7y ago

cyberjunkie 7y ago

I can trust John Carmack's words when he says in an interview, or on stage. There's a passion in his talks, a nervousness in blurting what he really feels, and those are really good traits, in my mind. I genuinely felt a sense of disappointment when he moved to Facebook (via the Occulus acquisition). So yea, fuck you, Facebook and your manipulative, life values corrupting and PR machinery. I place John Carmack miles above Zuckerberg.

nmfisher 7y ago
I have to admit, I felt a bit disappointed too. Carmack and Facebook always struck me as an antithetical pairing - the creativity/independence of the former didn't seem to sit right with the maniacal/emotional exploitation of the latter.
- me_me_me 7y ago
  I think Carmack just doesn't give a flying f* about Facebook or etc. he is interested in tech and he clearly works on stuff he is passionate about. He worked on VR and not work for Facebook. Facebook just happened to be paying for it.

throw231 7y ago

> about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) To be honest anyone who has a very good working knowledge of Linear Algebra can learn much of ML-math in a day. There really isn't anything mathematically super-sophisticated that is in popular use today.

eanzenberg 7y ago
ML is not AGI
visarga 7y ago
If you know about math you're just as good at ML as a person who read everything about swimming is in swimming. You got to run experiments to see what happens, build an intuition, understand the problem from the inside. Math leaves you with a few pretty formulas and nothing else.
- fooker 7y ago
  Ah, you've almost described the contemporary profession of being a Machine Learning Priest.
  - visarga 7y ago
    There are lots of ideas floating around. Everyone who has studied the field has ideas. Ideas are cheap, results matter. The problem is we don't know if any of these ideas would work, and proving an idea requires lots of data, simulations and compute. Being good at grasping the theory is just the first step in a thousand mile journey. The problem of AI is not going to be solved with a neat math trick on paper, but with lots of experiments. Nature has taken a similar path towards intelligence.
    - Scarblac 7y ago
      The field of statistical inference is about mathematically proving how good various statistical ideas are. It's possible to do better than just throw trial and error on a new idea.

anonytrary 7y ago

AI today is comparable to physics in the 1700s. Back then, it was a bunch of people tinkering with prisms and apples. Today, it's a bunch of people tinkering with hyperparameters. I suspect that we know as little about AGI today as someone in the 1700s knew about QFT. Not only did they not know about QFT, but they didn't even know that they didn't know it.

emmanuel_1234 7y ago
Wouldn't it be fun if the next Newton turns out to be the guy who wrote Doom and other FPS, games that were blamed for any kind of surge of violence until the GTA games show up?
- codingslave 7y ago
  Yeah, weird to think that todays newton could be seen on Joe Rogans Podcast talking about the future of gaming
  - toxik 7y ago
    It would fit, Newton was apparently quite insufferable in social settings — Carjack has a stroke of that
- TremendousJudge 7y ago
  Wouldn't be out of place -- Newton worked on alchemy, teology and managed the Royal Mint
Iv 7y ago
Too many people make this mistake of conflating machine learning with AI. I hope someone as external to the field as Carmack will see the value of rule based inference as well. The Good Old Fashioned AI as it used to be called

tomaskafka 7y ago

> he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical. Sigh. I assumed the whole point of hiring John Carmack is that you trust him to identify critical problems - and to find the best way to solve them.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
... to the extent and up until it helps get the product off the ground. Beyond that, the primary benefit is PR - "oh, that's the gaming hardware made by Carmack himself, so it must be good".
marvin 7y ago
That's the classical plight of someone who's much smarter than those around them. It's not enough to see the right path, you'd also have to manage to convince everyone else that it's right. Technology moves by peak knowledge and insight, not the democratic average.

randomsearch 7y ago

What scientific work has Carmack done?

randomsearch 7y ago
This was downvoted, so I figured it must be obvious. I googled but as far as I can tell, Carmack is an engineer not a scientist. No formal scientific training, no scientific work.
- Strom 7y ago
  The word you're looking for is academic. Carmack hasn't done academic work, but he has done plenty of scientific work. Scientific work is no less scientific if it isn't published in an academic journal. Academia doesn't hold a monopoly on the scientific method.
  - randomsearch 7y ago
    No, I mean scientific. What scientific work has Carmack done? I'm genuinely interested, because someone called him a scientist but I thought he was an engineer.
    - Strom 7y ago
      Are you in doubt that Carmack has used the scientific method to do anything? [1] If not, does your definition of scientist require something other than doing work using the scientific method? Perhaps some specific quantity of work? -- [1] One of his companies, Armadillo Aerospace, was pretty much just a series of scientifc experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
      - randomsearch 7y ago
        Thanks for the explanation. We could debate whether that’s science or not, but I don’t think it’d be particularly productive and we’ve already gone a bit off topic. Final thought from me - I was thinking about your post and it is indeed difficult to discern science from engineering. One dichotomy that occurred to me (which may not hold under close scrutiny) is that scientists are interested in _the pursuit of truth_, whereas engineers are interested in _building things_.

buboard 7y ago

I dont know of his credentials as a scientist or mathematician to advance the field. But, he seems to be a ruthless optimizer, which can often leads to great leaps , even as a side effect. Neural networks are not difficult mathematically for any scientist to grasp really. And they are in actual need of compression and optimization. People are spoiled with general purpose tools that are not very efficient, even if computation is cheap.

deegles 7y ago

If he invents (births?) an AGI, will it be Facebooks property? Sounds like the beginning of a dystopian novel.

LegitShady 7y ago

It's funny people talk about Palmer and carmack in vr but Oculus was built on appropriated valve tech and neither Palmer or Carmack have succeeded in making VR a thing. As far as I can tell Carmack is an old engineer whose name gets thrown around for headlines. If there weren't articles about his stealing stuff to take to Oculus I don't think his presence there would be observable. Now people are talking like Carmack switching topics is going to change the world. It's just going to change his schedule. There are smarter engineers already working on this problem.

mattmar96 7y ago
Seems you aren't familiar with his seminal graphics work. He effectively kickstarted 3d gaming and created the FPS genre. I'd be cautious dismissing his potential influence in the field. He has a way of looking at problems differently.
- LegitShady 7y ago
  I am familiar with it. I just don't see this massive string of successes in every field. I see his huge expertise in graphics engines and games. But it didn't help him with VR - in fact he got in trouble with VR and ended up landing with a company I have no respect for and he didn't make VR a thing. Many people have a way of looking at things differently. I just don't see the reason this is news, unless you own facebook shares or something. Even then zero effect. I say all this as the owner of two VR headsets (A vive for roomscale and a Lenovo Explorer for simracing/flying).