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He just founded a new company called Keen Technologies to work on AGI. Not surprising that he wants to focus on that now. He's been part-time at Meta for years.

He just founded a new company called Keen Technologies to work on AGI. Not surprising that he wants to focus on that now. He's been part-time at Meta for years. I'm interested to find out what kind of business model he's planning for an AGI company. Edit: he posted his leaving message publicly here: https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl/ https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvP... Additional public comments on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931901491908610 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931901491908610 > As anyone who listens to my unscripted Connect talks knows, I have always been pretty frustrated with how things get done at FB/Meta. Everything necessary for spectacular success is right there, but it doesn't get put together effectively. > I thought that the "derivative of delivered value" was positive in 2021, but that it turned negative in 2022. There are good reasons to believe that it just edged back into positive territory again, but there is a notable gap between Mark Zuckerberg and I on various strategic issues, so I knew it would be extra frustrating to keep pushing my viewpoint internally. I am all in on building AGI at Keen Technologies now. @dang can you change the link to one of these?

ladyattis 4y ago
>he's planning for an AGI company. This is something I think will break the mystique around Carmack. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s he was considered the whiz kid when it came to rendering engines but in reality something that's as nuanced and still not fully understood (intelligence, especially AGI) is likely too far out of his expertise to develop. Why? Because the last 60 or so years of development in the field hasn't yield much in the way of results in pure research or practical application. Machine learning and other hat tricks aren't even in the realm of AI properly but rather probability models that work well enough on a narrow set of problems to possibly commercialize them (ex. chat bots for help desk replacements). The thought that anyone, and I mean anyone, is going to develop artificial general intelligence before the 2050s or even later is to me laughable. We barely can understand how to talk to parts of our own brains, we're still learning more from other so-called lower lifeforms with respect to how they solve problems (fun fact: it seems bumble bees like to play or at least do things that are roughly analogous to being play-like, all without any kind of human or hominid-like brain so fancy that). So, it just seems like hubris to imagine any corporation, research department, or a singular scientist cracking this nut. I think we're more in the technological Bronze Age with respect to computing than anything else. It would be nice we finally got started on our computing Iron Age.
rvz 4y ago
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Is AI really grifting? It's not like mom and pop can sink their savings into AI tech and lose it all to scams, etc. like they can with crypto. At worst some big investors sink a big seed round in and never get it back from a 'grifting' AI company--IMHO no real harm done, if you're an angel investor you're mature enough to deal with getting burned it's just part of the risk (and no one is going to cry for someone rich enough to gamble millions and lose it all). I suspect his AI company will be like his previous rocket company, Armadillo Aerospace, that tried to go after the x prize for space. A purely passion project that bootstraps itself from the start and either sinks or swims. I can't see Carmack 'grifting' by courting huge seed rounds from tons of investors, expanding quickly into an enormous company to steamroll into series rounds with no solid business plan, etc.
  - dinobones 4y ago
    AI in its current form is grifting. Trying to actually productionize anything with GPT3 for example is a nightmare, it can actively lie to you, the embeddings are pretty sub-par, and inference is pretty expensive. But you hear nothing but praise from it here on HN, and people act like the 30 minute web app they built and charge $15/month for is going to change the industry. But it's getting better. GPT3.5/InstructGPT and now ChatGPT are showing incredible leaps in performance. Less hallucination, more coherence, it's getting better over time. So guess who wins and profits once the tech catches up? Is it the people like me sitting on the sidelines and poo-pooing the tech? Or is it the people who have been in the space for a while? Just the act of being "in proximity" to a technology can be so valuable. I know first-hand, I was an Objective-C developer for pure passion, because I loved clean MacOS apps and wanted to build myself tools. Well guess what? That proximity to Objective-C, familiarity with Xcode, and knowledge of Apple API patterns paid handsomely when the iPhone came out and I became an iOS developer. The same happened for WatchOS. You see this pattern in technology over and over again. And I have no reason to think that AI/large language models will be an exception. TLDR: It's kind of a grift. Carmack likely won't advance the field of AI or make a major breakthrough. But I have no doubt the infrastructure and talent he surrounds himself with will be able to manifest something profitable when the time comes.
hajile 4y ago
I suspect he's going to get smacked hard by the AGI problem and ultimately concede defeat on his biggest goal while achieving some success in the current less-than-general ML stuff.
- Jeema101 4y ago
  It's as if nobody's learned anything from the 'self-driving car' boondoggle of the last 20 years or so. Any problem can seem easy when you don't know the things you don't know.
- motoxpro 4y ago
  Have a listen to some interviews. Doing it out of love for the problem more so than anything else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4
- LASR 4y ago
  I don’t think you’d need to be alone in solving the AGI problem. Carmack is an engineer at heart. I am sure there are some yet undiscovered technical blockers in that space that he will solve.
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  If you solve a few more problems with chatgpt it's going to become useful enough that people are going to stop caring so much about the AGI label. It's going to quack like a duck enough to change a lot of industries.
  - methodical 4y ago
    > "If you solve a few more problems" The amount of work done by these 7 words is incredible. ChatGPT is far from changing a "lot" of industries. Still pathetic at programming (which isn't its purpose, but is AlphaCode's purpose; which also sucks), use of it for copy writing is nullified since it seems Google will crack down on AI generated copy writing. DALL-E is also a nice party trick but far from being particularly useful. I'd certainly love to have a useful AI but I think we're experiencing a 80-20 rule situation right now, and that it'll be a few years before we see anything that makes significant improvements on current solutions.
fallingknife 4y ago
If you solve AGI, all business is your plan.
wpietri 4y ago
It's very interesting to me that he's giving up on VR entirely. If he thought it was just an issue with Facebook, presumably he'd jump in somewhere else and get the impact he was looking to have. That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere. Or rather, half of it isn't. Oculus-style VR is two best in one: 3D persistent virtual worlds and stereoscopic facehugger interfaces. The former has had great success, mostly in games, but the latter has spent decades as the thing that people are supposed to want but don't actually use much when they get the chance.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if he has a noncompete in play that prevents him from continuing his VR work for a few years.
  - slimginz 4y ago
    Oh Meta 100% has some sort of non-compete in writing, especially after his lawsuit with Bethesda when he left Id to work at Oculus[1]. [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/zenimax-accuses-john-carmack-of-theft-in-amended-oculus-rift-lawsuit-filing/ https://www.pcgamer.com/zenimax-accuses-john-carmack-of-thef...
    - astrange 4y ago
      There is absolutely no such thing as a non-compete in California.
      - zactato 4y ago
        He lives in Texas still
        schrodinger 4y ago
        I really doubt Carmack would decide his life based on NDAs or non-competes.
      - 4y ago
ww520 4y ago
He believes that AGI is an engineering problem because of the vast compute resource required for it. Being an engineering problem he believes he can make an impact.
- tgv 4y ago
  That would be utterly wrong.
  - Kuinox 4y ago
    GPT-3 happened and showed that by throwing more computation at the problem you have better results.
    - tgv 4y ago
      As one of my AI profs said: it's like trying to teach pigs to fly, and say you're progressing because you're building higher towers.
      - musha68k 4y ago
        Chomsky and Gary Marcus predict that the current approach will not be sufficient; is and will increasingly be detrimental to society because of that “almost right at best” reason. Chomsky only has hopes in a combined approach that integrates “old AI” with the engineering / data / GPU driven one. See also discussion here for anyone interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857543
faitswulff 4y ago
+1 to changing the post to Carmack's published post on Facebook or Twitter without the Business Insider fluff.
Kiro 4y ago
Why would he change the link? We're discussing this article.
surfsvammel 4y ago
Keen Technologies. That’s a great name.
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  I think it is based on id Software's Commander Keen[0] game. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen

ladyattis 4y ago

>he's planning for an AGI company. This is something I think will break the mystique around Carmack. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s he was considered the whiz kid when it came to rendering engines but in reality something that's as nuanced and still not fully understood (intelligence, especially AGI) is likely too far out of his expertise to develop. Why? Because the last 60 or so years of development in the field hasn't yield much in the way of results in pure research or practical application. Machine learning and other hat tricks aren't even in the realm of AI properly but rather probability models that work well enough on a narrow set of problems to possibly commercialize them (ex. chat bots for help desk replacements). The thought that anyone, and I mean anyone, is going to develop artificial general intelligence before the 2050s or even later is to me laughable. We barely can understand how to talk to parts of our own brains, we're still learning more from other so-called lower lifeforms with respect to how they solve problems (fun fact: it seems bumble bees like to play or at least do things that are roughly analogous to being play-like, all without any kind of human or hominid-like brain so fancy that). So, it just seems like hubris to imagine any corporation, research department, or a singular scientist cracking this nut. I think we're more in the technological Bronze Age with respect to computing than anything else. It would be nice we finally got started on our computing Iron Age.

rvz 4y ago

qbasic_forever 4y ago
Is AI really grifting? It's not like mom and pop can sink their savings into AI tech and lose it all to scams, etc. like they can with crypto. At worst some big investors sink a big seed round in and never get it back from a 'grifting' AI company--IMHO no real harm done, if you're an angel investor you're mature enough to deal with getting burned it's just part of the risk (and no one is going to cry for someone rich enough to gamble millions and lose it all). I suspect his AI company will be like his previous rocket company, Armadillo Aerospace, that tried to go after the x prize for space. A purely passion project that bootstraps itself from the start and either sinks or swims. I can't see Carmack 'grifting' by courting huge seed rounds from tons of investors, expanding quickly into an enormous company to steamroll into series rounds with no solid business plan, etc.
- dinobones 4y ago
  AI in its current form is grifting. Trying to actually productionize anything with GPT3 for example is a nightmare, it can actively lie to you, the embeddings are pretty sub-par, and inference is pretty expensive. But you hear nothing but praise from it here on HN, and people act like the 30 minute web app they built and charge $15/month for is going to change the industry. But it's getting better. GPT3.5/InstructGPT and now ChatGPT are showing incredible leaps in performance. Less hallucination, more coherence, it's getting better over time. So guess who wins and profits once the tech catches up? Is it the people like me sitting on the sidelines and poo-pooing the tech? Or is it the people who have been in the space for a while? Just the act of being "in proximity" to a technology can be so valuable. I know first-hand, I was an Objective-C developer for pure passion, because I loved clean MacOS apps and wanted to build myself tools. Well guess what? That proximity to Objective-C, familiarity with Xcode, and knowledge of Apple API patterns paid handsomely when the iPhone came out and I became an iOS developer. The same happened for WatchOS. You see this pattern in technology over and over again. And I have no reason to think that AI/large language models will be an exception. TLDR: It's kind of a grift. Carmack likely won't advance the field of AI or make a major breakthrough. But I have no doubt the infrastructure and talent he surrounds himself with will be able to manifest something profitable when the time comes.

hajile 4y ago

I suspect he's going to get smacked hard by the AGI problem and ultimately concede defeat on his biggest goal while achieving some success in the current less-than-general ML stuff.

Jeema101 4y ago
It's as if nobody's learned anything from the 'self-driving car' boondoggle of the last 20 years or so. Any problem can seem easy when you don't know the things you don't know.
motoxpro 4y ago
Have a listen to some interviews. Doing it out of love for the problem more so than anything else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4
LASR 4y ago
I don’t think you’d need to be alone in solving the AGI problem. Carmack is an engineer at heart. I am sure there are some yet undiscovered technical blockers in that space that he will solve.
worldsayshi 4y ago
If you solve a few more problems with chatgpt it's going to become useful enough that people are going to stop caring so much about the AGI label. It's going to quack like a duck enough to change a lot of industries.
- methodical 4y ago
  > "If you solve a few more problems" The amount of work done by these 7 words is incredible. ChatGPT is far from changing a "lot" of industries. Still pathetic at programming (which isn't its purpose, but is AlphaCode's purpose; which also sucks), use of it for copy writing is nullified since it seems Google will crack down on AI generated copy writing. DALL-E is also a nice party trick but far from being particularly useful. I'd certainly love to have a useful AI but I think we're experiencing a 80-20 rule situation right now, and that it'll be a few years before we see anything that makes significant improvements on current solutions.

fallingknife 4y ago

If you solve AGI, all business is your plan.

wpietri 4y ago

It's very interesting to me that he's giving up on VR entirely. If he thought it was just an issue with Facebook, presumably he'd jump in somewhere else and get the impact he was looking to have. That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere. Or rather, half of it isn't. Oculus-style VR is two best in one: 3D persistent virtual worlds and stereoscopic facehugger interfaces. The former has had great success, mostly in games, but the latter has spent decades as the thing that people are supposed to want but don't actually use much when they get the chance.

JohnFen 4y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if he has a noncompete in play that prevents him from continuing his VR work for a few years.
- slimginz 4y ago
  Oh Meta 100% has some sort of non-compete in writing, especially after his lawsuit with Bethesda when he left Id to work at Oculus[1]. [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/zenimax-accuses-john-carmack-of-theft-in-amended-oculus-rift-lawsuit-filing/ https://www.pcgamer.com/zenimax-accuses-john-carmack-of-thef...
  - astrange 4y ago
    There is absolutely no such thing as a non-compete in California.
    - zactato 4y ago
      He lives in Texas still
      - schrodinger 4y ago
        I really doubt Carmack would decide his life based on NDAs or non-competes.
    - 4y ago

ww520 4y ago

He believes that AGI is an engineering problem because of the vast compute resource required for it. Being an engineering problem he believes he can make an impact.

tgv 4y ago
That would be utterly wrong.
- Kuinox 4y ago
  GPT-3 happened and showed that by throwing more computation at the problem you have better results.
  - tgv 4y ago
    As one of my AI profs said: it's like trying to teach pigs to fly, and say you're progressing because you're building higher towers.
    - musha68k 4y ago
      Chomsky and Gary Marcus predict that the current approach will not be sufficient; is and will increasingly be detrimental to society because of that “almost right at best” reason. Chomsky only has hopes in a combined approach that integrates “old AI” with the engineering / data / GPU driven one. See also discussion here for anyone interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857543

faitswulff 4y ago

+1 to changing the post to Carmack's published post on Facebook or Twitter without the Business Insider fluff.

Kiro 4y ago

Why would he change the link? We're discussing this article.

surfsvammel 4y ago

Keen Technologies. That’s a great name.

noisy_boy 4y ago
I think it is based on id Software's Commander Keen[0] game. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen