6 ms·

I was surprised by how bullish he is about this. At least a few years ago the experts in the field didn't see AGI anywhere near us for at least a few decades, a

I was surprised by how bullish he is about this. At least a few years ago the experts in the field didn't see AGI anywhere near us for at least a few decades, and all of the bulls were physicists, philosophers or Deepak-Chopra-for-the-TED-crowd bullshit artists who have never written a line of code in their lives, mostly milking that conference and podcast dollar, preaching Skynet-flavored apocalypse or rapture. To see Carmack go all in on this actually makes me feel like the promise has serious legs. The guy is an engineer's engineer, hardly a speculator, or in it for the quick provocative hot take. He clearly thinks this is possible with the existing tools and the near future projected iterations of the technology. Hard to believe this is actually happening, but with his brand name on it, this might just be the case. What an amazing time to be alive.

intelVISA 4y ago
if Carmack's in I'm in. Has he ever been drastically wrong?
- momentoftop 4y ago
  Throughout the Wolfenstein codebase, he spelled "column" with two "l"s.
- grimgrin 4y ago
  No one can argue he doesn't know how to summon demons
- tmpz22 4y ago
  When he went to go work on VR at Facebook?
  - GaylordTuring 4y ago
    What was wrong about that?
  - grimgrin 4y ago
    Wrong in the moral sense? He's still there though, right? edit: he is not still edit: he is still a consulting CTO
    - tmpz22 4y ago
      * To his credit Carmack is a one-person brand and attaching your (good) brand to a tainted brand (Facebook) isn't great * Many believe Occulus isn't succeeding fast enough, and so the years Carmack spent on Occulus/Metaverse could have been spent on any number of interesting projects. Although I'm sure the money was amazing and I can't object to him taking it. * If Occulus/Metaverse succeeds it will be a ultra-monetized environment (re: Farmville) and encourage a huge amount of consumer-hostile policies like unlimited tracking (since Facebook owns the hardware now). No gamer wants that. The whales who will be justifying its existence won't benefit from that.
      - kastagg 4y ago
        Carmack joined Oculus before the Facebook acquisition, so it's misleading to say he attached his brand to Facebook's.
      - beeboop 4y ago
        I doubt Carmack is motivated that much by money. He has way more than he'll ever spend.
        barrysteve 4y ago
        His reply to this tweet is that he didn't want to spend $20million of his own money on this venture. When you have the option to throw 20m on projects, you can spend it reasonably quickly.
        atq2119 4y ago
        His actual claim is that spending other people's money helps his focus because it makes him feel responsible. That's a plausible argument.
  - kastagg 4y ago
    That's misleading. Oculus wasn't originally Facebook, and it wasn't Facebook when Carmack joined. Carmack was working on the Oculus hardware around the time Oculus was founded in 2012. He joined Oculus in 2013. Facebook didn't acquire Oculus until 2014. You could criticize him for not leaving, but he didn't "go to work on VR at Facebook."
- enneff 4y ago
  The jury is still out on VR and Meta but it hardly seems promising.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Fair point, though I think VR is going to be solid for games once hardware properly catches up in a decade or so.
  - nscalf 4y ago
    You think Meta's VR systems aren't promising? My read on the situation is that they are making incredible progress, and doing so at scale. They're already delivering good revenue growth on a product that no one would say is "done". VR isn't a "build a good product" problem, it's a deep tech/hardware R&D problem before you can even open the door to building a good product.
- ytdytvhxgydvhh 4y ago
  Sure (According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack ): > During his time at id Software, a medium pepperoni pizza would arrive for Carmack from Domino's Pizza almost every day, carried by the same delivery person for more than 15 years. C’mon man, Domino’s?!
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Not sure he was right about the "putting down his own cat because it was annoying" thing.
  - 4ad 4y ago
    Good lord. I dislike cats, but this is vile. Totally lost any respect I had for Carmack.
    - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
      Don't meet your heroes.
      - 4ad 4y ago
        To be fair, Carmack wasn't ever a hero to me.
- trention 4y ago
  >Has he ever been drastically wrong Has he ever made a prediction with as drastic a consequence and transformative potential as the one he is currently making about AGI? Actually, is there any track record of predictions he has made and how they have panned out?
- zppln 4y ago
  What about his bet on MegaTextures?
- archagon 4y ago
  Newton worked on alchemy for much of his life.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Does this qualify? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
- staticman2 4y ago
  Has Carmack made a time bound prediction on AGI? He can't ever be "wrong" on AGI if he hasn't even made a disprovable claim about AGI.
godelski 4y ago
As an ML researcher who thinks AGI/HLI is still pretty far away, I don't think there's actually a issue with starting a company that's trying to solve this problem. The thing is that you're going to invent a lot of useful tools along the way. It's going to take you 20-50 years to get HLI, but you're still going to produce a ton of research with a lot of practical uses. The AGI does help build hype and investments too, but the milestones are the important part for the business.
abecedarius 4y ago
> all of the bulls were physicists, philosophers or Deepak-Chopra-for-the-TED-crowd bullshit artists who have never written a line of code in their lives One of the cofounders of DeepMind (founded in 2010) wrote a blog post that year saying his estimate of time till AGI was a lognormal distribution peaking at 2025. While I haven't personally seen any of his work, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Legg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Legg sounds pretty technical. If you'd written "nobody I was paying attention to said this", that would've been reasonable.
- versteegen 4y ago
  I might point out Shane Legg invented the term Artificial General Intelligence, and the title of his PhD thesis is "Machine Super Intelligence". Of course there always, since the beginning, were/are many, many AI researchers who were bullish on AGI... if you think it's possible then you should try to build it. But often people avoid broadcasting such opinions. However, very very few AI researchers are AGI researchers, historically because it's hard to make a small contribution, and to get taken seriously and get funding: I was told at the AGI conference just ~6 years ago there were maybe less than 10 funded -- they weren't counting DeepMind. ALMOST NOBODY at the AGI conference had funding to work on AGI!

intelVISA 4y ago

if Carmack's in I'm in. Has he ever been drastically wrong?

momentoftop 4y ago
Throughout the Wolfenstein codebase, he spelled "column" with two "l"s.
grimgrin 4y ago
No one can argue he doesn't know how to summon demons
tmpz22 4y ago
When he went to go work on VR at Facebook?
- GaylordTuring 4y ago
  What was wrong about that?
- grimgrin 4y ago
  Wrong in the moral sense? He's still there though, right? edit: he is not still edit: he is still a consulting CTO
  - tmpz22 4y ago
    * To his credit Carmack is a one-person brand and attaching your (good) brand to a tainted brand (Facebook) isn't great * Many believe Occulus isn't succeeding fast enough, and so the years Carmack spent on Occulus/Metaverse could have been spent on any number of interesting projects. Although I'm sure the money was amazing and I can't object to him taking it. * If Occulus/Metaverse succeeds it will be a ultra-monetized environment (re: Farmville) and encourage a huge amount of consumer-hostile policies like unlimited tracking (since Facebook owns the hardware now). No gamer wants that. The whales who will be justifying its existence won't benefit from that.
    - kastagg 4y ago
      Carmack joined Oculus before the Facebook acquisition, so it's misleading to say he attached his brand to Facebook's.
    - beeboop 4y ago
      I doubt Carmack is motivated that much by money. He has way more than he'll ever spend.
      - barrysteve 4y ago
        His reply to this tweet is that he didn't want to spend $20million of his own money on this venture. When you have the option to throw 20m on projects, you can spend it reasonably quickly.
        atq2119 4y ago
        His actual claim is that spending other people's money helps his focus because it makes him feel responsible. That's a plausible argument.
- kastagg 4y ago
  That's misleading. Oculus wasn't originally Facebook, and it wasn't Facebook when Carmack joined. Carmack was working on the Oculus hardware around the time Oculus was founded in 2012. He joined Oculus in 2013. Facebook didn't acquire Oculus until 2014. You could criticize him for not leaving, but he didn't "go to work on VR at Facebook."
enneff 4y ago
The jury is still out on VR and Meta but it hardly seems promising.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  Fair point, though I think VR is going to be solid for games once hardware properly catches up in a decade or so.
- nscalf 4y ago
  You think Meta's VR systems aren't promising? My read on the situation is that they are making incredible progress, and doing so at scale. They're already delivering good revenue growth on a product that no one would say is "done". VR isn't a "build a good product" problem, it's a deep tech/hardware R&D problem before you can even open the door to building a good product.
ytdytvhxgydvhh 4y ago
Sure (According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack ): > During his time at id Software, a medium pepperoni pizza would arrive for Carmack from Domino's Pizza almost every day, carried by the same delivery person for more than 15 years. C’mon man, Domino’s?!
mardifoufs 4y ago
Not sure he was right about the "putting down his own cat because it was annoying" thing.
- 4ad 4y ago
  Good lord. I dislike cats, but this is vile. Totally lost any respect I had for Carmack.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
    Don't meet your heroes.
    - 4ad 4y ago
      To be fair, Carmack wasn't ever a hero to me.
trention 4y ago
>Has he ever been drastically wrong Has he ever made a prediction with as drastic a consequence and transformative potential as the one he is currently making about AGI? Actually, is there any track record of predictions he has made and how they have panned out?
zppln 4y ago
What about his bet on MegaTextures?
archagon 4y ago
Newton worked on alchemy for much of his life.
jacquesm 4y ago
Does this qualify? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
staticman2 4y ago
Has Carmack made a time bound prediction on AGI? He can't ever be "wrong" on AGI if he hasn't even made a disprovable claim about AGI.

godelski 4y ago

As an ML researcher who thinks AGI/HLI is still pretty far away, I don't think there's actually a issue with starting a company that's trying to solve this problem. The thing is that you're going to invent a lot of useful tools along the way. It's going to take you 20-50 years to get HLI, but you're still going to produce a ton of research with a lot of practical uses. The AGI does help build hype and investments too, but the milestones are the important part for the business.

abecedarius 4y ago

> all of the bulls were physicists, philosophers or Deepak-Chopra-for-the-TED-crowd bullshit artists who have never written a line of code in their lives One of the cofounders of DeepMind (founded in 2010) wrote a blog post that year saying his estimate of time till AGI was a lognormal distribution peaking at 2025. While I haven't personally seen any of his work, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Legg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Legg sounds pretty technical. If you'd written "nobody I was paying attention to said this", that would've been reasonable.

versteegen 4y ago
I might point out Shane Legg invented the term Artificial General Intelligence, and the title of his PhD thesis is "Machine Super Intelligence". Of course there always, since the beginning, were/are many, many AI researchers who were bullish on AGI... if you think it's possible then you should try to build it. But often people avoid broadcasting such opinions. However, very very few AI researchers are AGI researchers, historically because it's hard to make a small contribution, and to get taken seriously and get funding: I was told at the AGI conference just ~6 years ago there were maybe less than 10 funded -- they weren't counting DeepMind. ALMOST NOBODY at the AGI conference had funding to work on AGI!