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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, how

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"?
  - netcan 7y ago
    When pray tells come into the conversation... :)
  - Sebguer 7y ago
    Convince people to give him a lot of money to set on fire.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Well yes, but he's the cheapest provider of self-propelling pyres, and the only provider of pyres that can be used multiple times.
    - unionpivo 7y ago
      I mean even if both Tesla and SpaceX close tomorrow, he already achieved more in both companies than most of the current "unicorns". He successfully made popular mass market electric vehicle, and dragged whole auto moto industry behind. There were other electric cars before tesla. But tesla made it cool, and made the rest of the industry trying hard to catch up. SpaceX also is not the first private space firm, with their own rocket, But it's by far the most successful one, and lowered the cost of entry to space by significant amount. Also It's probably the first private space company that has rockets that can compete with most government ones. I am not rich enough to be buying individual stocks, so I have no personal stake in this.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    He made it cool to drive an electric car.
    - dna_polymerase 7y ago
      He shifted a whole industry towards a new paradigm. Look at Germany, they are desperate to catch up with Tesla, finally moving into electric cars. Without Elon they would keep selling their Diesel scam for the next decades.
      - 7y ago
- nkoren 7y ago
  Musk actually has credited Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace with providing the inspiration for vertically landing the Falcon 9. Of course Armadillo was likewise inspired by the Delta Clipper, which was in turn inspired by the LEM, etc. But it's one thing to vertically-land a rocket a few times when you have billions of dollars at your disposal; it's another thing to do it hundreds of times for a thousandth the price. That was Carmack's contribution: proving that vertical landing can be both incredibly robust, and cheap as chips. Really valuable work. I had the pleasure of meeting Carmack a few times over the years at small aerospace conferences. He's both as true a geek and as much of a gentleman as you might imagine. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he does with AGI.
- vsareto 7y ago
  >You can only do that effectively if you have the mental capacity to keep all that info in your head at once, I think. Yep, plus all the different perspectives from other endeavors. Extending human memory will be a really great accomplishment with brain-computer interfaces.
- ufmace 7y ago
  I don't see Elon as a genius at any kind of engineering. Everything he's done there was pretty easily foreseeable as being physically possible. What he is remarkably good at is selecting daring and potentially market-changing business goals, and executing against them consistently and aggressively despite naysayers. It's easy to say that it's probably possible to land a orbital rocket first stage. But who would bet a multi-billion dollar business on being able to not only do it, but save money by doing it, when nobody had ever done it before? Similarly, electric cars were far from new. Nobody seemed much inclined to build one that was actually a luxury car, instead of a toy for engineer-types who could put up with driving weird things. Any of the big manufacturers could have done it, and easily absorbed the losses if it failed, but none did. Elon made a wild bet on that, making a company that made nothing else, so the whole thing would go down the tubes if the idea flopped. Instead it seems to have worked. Although it seems to be harder than he anticipated, and maybe outside his skillset, to run an organization that does real mass-production.
  - aerovistae 7y ago
    If you think what he's done was easily foreseeable as possible, you haven't been paying much attention to headlines the past fifteen years.
    - marvin 7y ago
      It's only obvious in retrospect. Every step along the way, there has been thousands of people saying "this is impossible" or "this is theoretically possible, but it can't be engineered" or "this is possible in principle, but it will be so costly to develop that it doesn't make sense". When AGI is developed, it will seem obvious in retrospect. Participating engineers will receive middle-brow dismissals saying that this was obviously practically possible, since after all the human brain operates according to the laws of physics.
      - aerovistae 7y ago
        Exactly.
    - 7y ago
- quicknir 7y ago
  I normally don't bother but this comment is so profoundly ridiculous I had to say something. Tenured ML professors at the top 100 or so universities in the world aren't "most of us". A very large chunk of these people are geniuses. Those jobs are incredibly hard to get, and most of these people are reading everything that is getting published, on an ongoing basis, and are outputting something novel, on an ongoing basis. The fact that you think that John Carmack, because he's a name that you've actually heard of, is going to go into ML and suddenly make some giant advance that all the poor plebs in the field weren't able to do, is only a reflection of your misunderstanding of what's already happening in academia, not on Carmack's skills or abilities. You're acting as though everyone are just low level practitioners using sklearn, and it would be a great idea to have some smart people work on developing something novel. Guess what: that's already happening, with incredibly smart people, on an incredibly large scale. Carmack doing it would just be another drop in the bucket.
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    Granted. But the academic activity is focused around the kind of activities that Kuhn calls "Normal Science". That is, ML researchers mainly do competitions on the same data sets, trying to put up better numbers. In some sense that keeps people honest, it also lowers the cost of creating training data, but it only teaches people how to do the same data set over and over again, not how to do a fresh one. So a lot of this activity is meaningful in terms of the field, but not maybe not meaningful in terms of useful use. I saw this happen in text retrieval; when I was trying to get my head around with why Google was better than prior search engines, I learned very little from looking at TREC, in fact people in the open literature were having a hard time getting PageRank to improve the performance of a search engine. A big part of the problems was that the pre-Google (and a few years into the Google age) TREC tasks wouldn't recognize that Google was a better search engine because Google was not optimized around the TREC tasks, rather it was optimized around something different. If you are optimizing for something different, it may matter more what you are optimizing for rather than the specific technology you are using. Later on I realized that TREC biases were leading to "artificial stupidity" in search engines. IBM Watson was famous for returning a probability score for Jeopardy answers, but linking the score of a search result to a probability is iffy at best with conventional search engines. It turns out that the TREC tasks were specifically designed not to reward search engines that "know what they don't know" because they'd rather people build search engines that can dig deep into hard-to-find results, and not build ones that stick up their hand really high when they answer something that is dead easy.
kamaal 7y ago
>>I think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers. Sometimes, an outsider with his novel or even a different way of looking at things can contribute disproportionately to a field. Even experts have blind spots, often they show in the form of bias. If you know something is hard or near impossible to do, you are unlikely to try. If you don't know at times it's possible to stumble upon a solution by merely bringing a new way of thinking to the table.
lazyjones 7y ago
> I think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers. Researchers didn't build the first airplane. Nicolaus Otto, Carl Benz, Gottfried Daimler also weren't researchers. AGI will be a program and not a research paper and John Carmack is pretty good at getting those right.

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"?
- netcan 7y ago
  When pray tells come into the conversation... :)
- Sebguer 7y ago
  Convince people to give him a lot of money to set on fire.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Well yes, but he's the cheapest provider of self-propelling pyres, and the only provider of pyres that can be used multiple times.
  - unionpivo 7y ago
    I mean even if both Tesla and SpaceX close tomorrow, he already achieved more in both companies than most of the current "unicorns". He successfully made popular mass market electric vehicle, and dragged whole auto moto industry behind. There were other electric cars before tesla. But tesla made it cool, and made the rest of the industry trying hard to catch up. SpaceX also is not the first private space firm, with their own rocket, But it's by far the most successful one, and lowered the cost of entry to space by significant amount. Also It's probably the first private space company that has rockets that can compete with most government ones. I am not rich enough to be buying individual stocks, so I have no personal stake in this.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  He made it cool to drive an electric car.
  - dna_polymerase 7y ago
    He shifted a whole industry towards a new paradigm. Look at Germany, they are desperate to catch up with Tesla, finally moving into electric cars. Without Elon they would keep selling their Diesel scam for the next decades.
    - 7y ago
nkoren 7y ago
Musk actually has credited Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace with providing the inspiration for vertically landing the Falcon 9. Of course Armadillo was likewise inspired by the Delta Clipper, which was in turn inspired by the LEM, etc. But it's one thing to vertically-land a rocket a few times when you have billions of dollars at your disposal; it's another thing to do it hundreds of times for a thousandth the price. That was Carmack's contribution: proving that vertical landing can be both incredibly robust, and cheap as chips. Really valuable work. I had the pleasure of meeting Carmack a few times over the years at small aerospace conferences. He's both as true a geek and as much of a gentleman as you might imagine. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he does with AGI.
vsareto 7y ago
>You can only do that effectively if you have the mental capacity to keep all that info in your head at once, I think. Yep, plus all the different perspectives from other endeavors. Extending human memory will be a really great accomplishment with brain-computer interfaces.
ufmace 7y ago
I don't see Elon as a genius at any kind of engineering. Everything he's done there was pretty easily foreseeable as being physically possible. What he is remarkably good at is selecting daring and potentially market-changing business goals, and executing against them consistently and aggressively despite naysayers. It's easy to say that it's probably possible to land a orbital rocket first stage. But who would bet a multi-billion dollar business on being able to not only do it, but save money by doing it, when nobody had ever done it before? Similarly, electric cars were far from new. Nobody seemed much inclined to build one that was actually a luxury car, instead of a toy for engineer-types who could put up with driving weird things. Any of the big manufacturers could have done it, and easily absorbed the losses if it failed, but none did. Elon made a wild bet on that, making a company that made nothing else, so the whole thing would go down the tubes if the idea flopped. Instead it seems to have worked. Although it seems to be harder than he anticipated, and maybe outside his skillset, to run an organization that does real mass-production.
- aerovistae 7y ago
  If you think what he's done was easily foreseeable as possible, you haven't been paying much attention to headlines the past fifteen years.
  - marvin 7y ago
    It's only obvious in retrospect. Every step along the way, there has been thousands of people saying "this is impossible" or "this is theoretically possible, but it can't be engineered" or "this is possible in principle, but it will be so costly to develop that it doesn't make sense". When AGI is developed, it will seem obvious in retrospect. Participating engineers will receive middle-brow dismissals saying that this was obviously practically possible, since after all the human brain operates according to the laws of physics.
    - aerovistae 7y ago
      Exactly.
  - 7y ago
quicknir 7y ago
I normally don't bother but this comment is so profoundly ridiculous I had to say something. Tenured ML professors at the top 100 or so universities in the world aren't "most of us". A very large chunk of these people are geniuses. Those jobs are incredibly hard to get, and most of these people are reading everything that is getting published, on an ongoing basis, and are outputting something novel, on an ongoing basis. The fact that you think that John Carmack, because he's a name that you've actually heard of, is going to go into ML and suddenly make some giant advance that all the poor plebs in the field weren't able to do, is only a reflection of your misunderstanding of what's already happening in academia, not on Carmack's skills or abilities. You're acting as though everyone are just low level practitioners using sklearn, and it would be a great idea to have some smart people work on developing something novel. Guess what: that's already happening, with incredibly smart people, on an incredibly large scale. Carmack doing it would just be another drop in the bucket.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  Granted. But the academic activity is focused around the kind of activities that Kuhn calls "Normal Science". That is, ML researchers mainly do competitions on the same data sets, trying to put up better numbers. In some sense that keeps people honest, it also lowers the cost of creating training data, but it only teaches people how to do the same data set over and over again, not how to do a fresh one. So a lot of this activity is meaningful in terms of the field, but not maybe not meaningful in terms of useful use. I saw this happen in text retrieval; when I was trying to get my head around with why Google was better than prior search engines, I learned very little from looking at TREC, in fact people in the open literature were having a hard time getting PageRank to improve the performance of a search engine. A big part of the problems was that the pre-Google (and a few years into the Google age) TREC tasks wouldn't recognize that Google was a better search engine because Google was not optimized around the TREC tasks, rather it was optimized around something different. If you are optimizing for something different, it may matter more what you are optimizing for rather than the specific technology you are using. Later on I realized that TREC biases were leading to "artificial stupidity" in search engines. IBM Watson was famous for returning a probability score for Jeopardy answers, but linking the score of a search result to a probability is iffy at best with conventional search engines. It turns out that the TREC tasks were specifically designed not to reward search engines that "know what they don't know" because they'd rather people build search engines that can dig deep into hard-to-find results, and not build ones that stick up their hand really high when they answer something that is dead easy.

kamaal 7y ago

>>I think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers. Sometimes, an outsider with his novel or even a different way of looking at things can contribute disproportionately to a field. Even experts have blind spots, often they show in the form of bias. If you know something is hard or near impossible to do, you are unlikely to try. If you don't know at times it's possible to stumble upon a solution by merely bringing a new way of thinking to the table.

lazyjones 7y ago

> I think it's quite unlikely his solo work in a new domain will leapfrog an entire field of researchers. Researchers didn't build the first airplane. Nicolaus Otto, Carl Benz, Gottfried Daimler also weren't researchers. AGI will be a program and not a research paper and John Carmack is pretty good at getting those right.