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He must be tempted to join. I think there are few places in the world where one could make a bigger impact as an engineer. He already has experience in rocketry

He must be tempted to join. I think there are few places in the world where one could make a bigger impact as an engineer. He already has experience in rocketry. He's located in Texas. And I bet he'd be interested in the stuff Tesla's doing with AI too.

wolrah 5y ago
In a previous twitter thread linked from the post here Elon mentions having tried many times to get John to join.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
Tempted, perhaps, but not enough to join. Carmack's working on AGI, and he's committed to a decade-long time horizon. The impact of AGI is far greater than rockets, too.
- modeless 5y ago
  Elon is working on AI too, and Dojo is one of the most exciting things in the field if you ask me. Carmack has always been good at leveraging hardware to do amazing things on the graphics side, and AI hardware is not so dissimilar to graphics hardware.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Elon is working on ML, not AGI. Carmack is working on artificial general intelligence. As far as I know, that's well outside of anything Elon is doing.
    - modeless 5y ago
      I mean, Elon just announced that they're building a literal android that is supposed to take verbal directions and perform everyday tasks for you. If that's not AGI, I don't know what is. It may not be very likely to happen anytime soon, but the ambition is there at least. If you haven't watched the Tesla AI presentation, I highly recommend it. The dancer in a spandex robot suit is getting all the headlines but the technical presentations are the real deal. Karpathy in particular is an excellent technical presenter and he didn't hold back.
      - sillysaurusx 5y ago
        > Elon just announced that they're building a literal android that is supposed to take verbal directions and perform everyday tasks for you. If that's not AGI, I don't know what is. It's not AGI. An AGI is something that can think for itself, the way you can.
        modeless 5y ago
        Elon described this robot as taking directions like "go to the store and get me this list of groceries", implying that it would be able to, like, read the list, choose a store, drive a car there, use a cart, locate the groceries, go through checkout, etc. It's going to need to do a lot of thinking for itself to complete tasks like that. And more generally he described replacing human labor to the point that a universal basic income becomes necessary. AGI is definitely the ambition here.
        thechao 5y ago
        Nahhh... I'll paraphrase my old skool A(G)I advisor from my first year in grad school: you tell ML to get your groceries; AGI tells you to get the fucking groceries.
        eloff 5y ago
        Its not AGI. It's machine learning. It's unknown if it's possible to ever achieve AGI by using machine learning techniques.
        eloff 5y ago
        Seriously, downvotes for a 100% factual statement?
        paragraft 5y ago
        I think what's more likely is we'd discover how many common, useful tasks you could perform with a humanoid robot that don't require AGI, with a more Alexa-like approach of iteratively adding support for explicit discrete tasks over time. We've already moved back the goalposts for AGI in so many other areas as we realise how many tasks can be decomposed to something quite mechanical in the right vector space etc.
    - gpm 5y ago
      Elon's been giving some lip service to closer-to-GI capabilities anyways, e.g. when describing how it would be optimal to be able to control Tesla's humanoid robot by saying "please go to the store and get me the following groceries"... https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7775 https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7775 Whether Tesla wants to fund serious work towards that may be a different question (but they do seem to be serious about at least building the robot).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - qeternity 5y ago
    > and Dojo is one of the most exciting things in the field if you ask me Why do you think this?
    - gpm 5y ago
      Not the person you're asking, but - Long iteration time kills productivity, a lot of AI work has long iteration time because hardware is slow. - It's possible that bigger models on faster hardware are actually all we need to solve some problems. For example see GPT-3.
    - modeless 5y ago
      I believe that the major limiting factor in the speed of development of AI is hardware, not software. Now and for the foreseeable future. The most important projects in AI, therefore, are the ones pushing hardware performance as high as it can go, and the people who have the opportunity to write software for that hardware are going to make the fastest progress. Though Carmack probably doesn't agree with me on this given his statements that "I believe that current supercomputers are actually sufficient for human level AGI" https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1340369768138862592 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1340369768138862592 and "I am provisionally not very interested in custom AI accelerators, because I don't think the extra performance will outweigh the reduced flexibility and immature software compared to GPUs" https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1412897975370719235 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1412897975370719235
      - rowanG077 5y ago
        Then don't require an AI to run in realtime. Just let it interpret the world in 0.001x speed. This way you could easily simulate hardware which will only be available in decades.
      - b9a2cab5 5y ago
        I'm tempted to agree with Carmack here, having worked at a now-defunct self driving project previously that used multiple server-grade GPUs and many-core CPUs pulling 1000+W in their car that couldn't even figure out how to move around a car that was parallel parked too far out in the road. More teraflops are not what is needed.
  - freemint 5y ago
    Can you explain what you find exiting about the Dojo? Making custom AI chips (other than as practice) seems a giant waste of money at the scale of it. In addition I was kinda underwhelmed how little benefit they got compared to an off the shelf solution. Edit: Someone else asked the same thing before.
- Datsundere 5y ago
  AGI on classical computers? is this a joke?
gpm 5y ago
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1429930662652485632 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1429930662652485632 > I did kind of volunteer to help them fix what I consider very poor user interface performance on the older model S (that I drive). Their engineers have been sharing data with me. That sounds like kinda sorta starting to join... Working with Tesla on AI actually sounds more like what he's been working on recently... at least if he can convince them to give him a lot of flexibility on what exactly he works on.
adventured 5y ago
The big problem is that Carmack is an elite software engineer, and he's not at that same tier in rocketry/aerospace despite being good at it. Elite vs good. Which is to say, he'd have to take a back seat at SpaceX (which is running at full speed; Carmack would have to try to get back up to speed in aerospace just to contribute, difficult by itself). His ability to contribute beyond that of other industry specific talent is very questionable, and there are far better people - at rocketry/aerospace - working there than him. Carmack knows that without question. It simply doesn't make sense for him to spend his time doing that; it's not the best use of his time given that SpaceX already exists (vs trying to start what SpaceX has become, in his Armadillo effort). It's the equivalent of Michael Jordan spending the remainder of his athletic career trying to play baseball. Sure, he could have done that. If the White Sox had allowed him on the team (ignoring the strike for a moment), more than likely all he would have been doing is taking the job of someone better at playing professional baseball than him; while his greatest ability by far rests in his basketball prowess. Carmack already did a deep run at aerospace. He has N time left. Where can he combo make the greatest impact and enjoy the work. I'd guess that's something close to the equation, it seems to be for most people in that position/stage of life. Working at SpaceX is unlikely to be that place all things considered. What might have happened if Carmack had joined in the early days instead of doing Armadillo is an interesting thought (it's hard to see how the SpaceX outcome could be much better than it has been though, realistically).
- modeless 5y ago
  > It's the equivalent of Michael Jordan spending the remainder of his athletic career trying to play baseball Sure, but that could just as easily describe Carmack's current efforts in AGI (and I seem to recall that he even tweeted something to that effect himself, though I can't find it now). Him achieving AGI as a solo researcher seems less likely than him making some big technical contributions to SpaceX, or Tesla AI. Edit: I think I was recalling this tweet: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1411010796285480965 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1411010796285480965
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

wolrah 5y ago

In a previous twitter thread linked from the post here Elon mentions having tried many times to get John to join.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

Tempted, perhaps, but not enough to join. Carmack's working on AGI, and he's committed to a decade-long time horizon. The impact of AGI is far greater than rockets, too.

modeless 5y ago
Elon is working on AI too, and Dojo is one of the most exciting things in the field if you ask me. Carmack has always been good at leveraging hardware to do amazing things on the graphics side, and AI hardware is not so dissimilar to graphics hardware.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Elon is working on ML, not AGI. Carmack is working on artificial general intelligence. As far as I know, that's well outside of anything Elon is doing.
  - modeless 5y ago
    I mean, Elon just announced that they're building a literal android that is supposed to take verbal directions and perform everyday tasks for you. If that's not AGI, I don't know what is. It may not be very likely to happen anytime soon, but the ambition is there at least. If you haven't watched the Tesla AI presentation, I highly recommend it. The dancer in a spandex robot suit is getting all the headlines but the technical presentations are the real deal. Karpathy in particular is an excellent technical presenter and he didn't hold back.
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      > Elon just announced that they're building a literal android that is supposed to take verbal directions and perform everyday tasks for you. If that's not AGI, I don't know what is. It's not AGI. An AGI is something that can think for itself, the way you can.
      - modeless 5y ago
        Elon described this robot as taking directions like "go to the store and get me this list of groceries", implying that it would be able to, like, read the list, choose a store, drive a car there, use a cart, locate the groceries, go through checkout, etc. It's going to need to do a lot of thinking for itself to complete tasks like that. And more generally he described replacing human labor to the point that a universal basic income becomes necessary. AGI is definitely the ambition here.
        thechao 5y ago
        Nahhh... I'll paraphrase my old skool A(G)I advisor from my first year in grad school: you tell ML to get your groceries; AGI tells you to get the fucking groceries.
        eloff 5y ago
        Its not AGI. It's machine learning. It's unknown if it's possible to ever achieve AGI by using machine learning techniques.
        eloff 5y ago
        Seriously, downvotes for a 100% factual statement?
        paragraft 5y ago
        I think what's more likely is we'd discover how many common, useful tasks you could perform with a humanoid robot that don't require AGI, with a more Alexa-like approach of iteratively adding support for explicit discrete tasks over time. We've already moved back the goalposts for AGI in so many other areas as we realise how many tasks can be decomposed to something quite mechanical in the right vector space etc.
  - gpm 5y ago
    Elon's been giving some lip service to closer-to-GI capabilities anyways, e.g. when describing how it would be optimal to be able to control Tesla's humanoid robot by saying "please go to the store and get me the following groceries"... https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7775 https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7775 Whether Tesla wants to fund serious work towards that may be a different question (but they do seem to be serious about at least building the robot).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- qeternity 5y ago
  > and Dojo is one of the most exciting things in the field if you ask me Why do you think this?
  - gpm 5y ago
    Not the person you're asking, but - Long iteration time kills productivity, a lot of AI work has long iteration time because hardware is slow. - It's possible that bigger models on faster hardware are actually all we need to solve some problems. For example see GPT-3.
  - modeless 5y ago
    I believe that the major limiting factor in the speed of development of AI is hardware, not software. Now and for the foreseeable future. The most important projects in AI, therefore, are the ones pushing hardware performance as high as it can go, and the people who have the opportunity to write software for that hardware are going to make the fastest progress. Though Carmack probably doesn't agree with me on this given his statements that "I believe that current supercomputers are actually sufficient for human level AGI" https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1340369768138862592 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1340369768138862592 and "I am provisionally not very interested in custom AI accelerators, because I don't think the extra performance will outweigh the reduced flexibility and immature software compared to GPUs" https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1412897975370719235 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1412897975370719235
    - rowanG077 5y ago
      Then don't require an AI to run in realtime. Just let it interpret the world in 0.001x speed. This way you could easily simulate hardware which will only be available in decades.
    - b9a2cab5 5y ago
      I'm tempted to agree with Carmack here, having worked at a now-defunct self driving project previously that used multiple server-grade GPUs and many-core CPUs pulling 1000+W in their car that couldn't even figure out how to move around a car that was parallel parked too far out in the road. More teraflops are not what is needed.
- freemint 5y ago
  Can you explain what you find exiting about the Dojo? Making custom AI chips (other than as practice) seems a giant waste of money at the scale of it. In addition I was kinda underwhelmed how little benefit they got compared to an off the shelf solution. Edit: Someone else asked the same thing before.
Datsundere 5y ago
AGI on classical computers? is this a joke?

gpm 5y ago

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1429930662652485632 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1429930662652485632 > I did kind of volunteer to help them fix what I consider very poor user interface performance on the older model S (that I drive). Their engineers have been sharing data with me. That sounds like kinda sorta starting to join... Working with Tesla on AI actually sounds more like what he's been working on recently... at least if he can convince them to give him a lot of flexibility on what exactly he works on.

adventured 5y ago

The big problem is that Carmack is an elite software engineer, and he's not at that same tier in rocketry/aerospace despite being good at it. Elite vs good. Which is to say, he'd have to take a back seat at SpaceX (which is running at full speed; Carmack would have to try to get back up to speed in aerospace just to contribute, difficult by itself). His ability to contribute beyond that of other industry specific talent is very questionable, and there are far better people - at rocketry/aerospace - working there than him. Carmack knows that without question. It simply doesn't make sense for him to spend his time doing that; it's not the best use of his time given that SpaceX already exists (vs trying to start what SpaceX has become, in his Armadillo effort). It's the equivalent of Michael Jordan spending the remainder of his athletic career trying to play baseball. Sure, he could have done that. If the White Sox had allowed him on the team (ignoring the strike for a moment), more than likely all he would have been doing is taking the job of someone better at playing professional baseball than him; while his greatest ability by far rests in his basketball prowess. Carmack already did a deep run at aerospace. He has N time left. Where can he combo make the greatest impact and enjoy the work. I'd guess that's something close to the equation, it seems to be for most people in that position/stage of life. Working at SpaceX is unlikely to be that place all things considered. What might have happened if Carmack had joined in the early days instead of doing Armadillo is an interesting thought (it's hard to see how the SpaceX outcome could be much better than it has been though, realistically).

modeless 5y ago
> It's the equivalent of Michael Jordan spending the remainder of his athletic career trying to play baseball Sure, but that could just as easily describe Carmack's current efforts in AGI (and I seem to recall that he even tweeted something to that effect himself, though I can't find it now). Him achieving AGI as a solo researcher seems less likely than him making some big technical contributions to SpaceX, or Tesla AI. Edit: I think I was recalling this tweet: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1411010796285480965 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1411010796285480965
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]