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John Carmack: So I asked Ilya, their chief scientist, for a reading list. This is my path, my way of doing things: give me a stack of all the stuff I need to k
by threeseed 1y ago
John Carmack:
So I asked Ilya, their chief scientist, for a reading list. This is my path, my way of doing things: give me a stack of all the stuff I need to know to actually be relevant in this space.
And he gave me a list of like 40 research papers and said, 'If you really learn all of these, you'll know 90% of what matters today! And I did. I plowed through all those things and it all started sorting out in my head.
- foldr 1y agoWhat this misses is that research is a competitive endeavor. To succeed as a researcher you don’t just need to know the bare minimum required to do research in your field. You need to be able to do it better than most of the people you’re competing against. I know that HN as a collective has near-unlimited faith in Carmack’s abilities (and he is no doubt Very Smart). But he’s competing with other Very Smart people who have decades more experience of AI research. To put it another way, the idea that John Carmack is going to do groundbreaking research in AI is roughly as plausible as the idea that Yann LeCun is going to make a successful AAA video game. Stranger things have happened, but I won’t be holding my breath.
- secondcoming 1y agoWhy does it need to be competitive? Maybe the guy has enough money to let him do whatever he wants regardless of the outcome and he chose AI because it's interesting to him.
- foldr 1y agoIn research you have to succeed before your competitors. It’s not research if it’s already been done.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- RetroTechie 1y agoYou're forgetting that a whole string of breakthroughs are all fairly recent (like in the last decade). Everyone, including the pro's, is treading new ground. In that context anyone can make progress in the field, as long as they understand what they're dealing with. Better regard mr. Carmack as an X factor. Maybe the experts will leave him in the dust. Or maybe he'll come up with something that none of the experts cared to look into.
- sergiotapia 1y agoThe difference is Carmack is literally a T-shaped dude -- hell, he's a T-shaped dude with lots of vertical lines :P I believe all his in-depth experience in other areas will heavily unlock him to bring about another breakthrough. He's that good.
- foldr 1y agoThere are lots of less famous researchers toiling away who are also very smart and who have much more detailed specialist knowledge. I don’t doubt John Carmack’s intellectual ability, but he’s famous because he made some cool video games, not because he won the America’s Smartest Person competition. This idea that he’s the AI messiah seems almost cultish.
- abraxas 1y agoI'd love to have a copy of that list. Just to see how much I've yet to absorb.
- CrimsonCape 1y agohttps://aman.ai/primers/ai/top-30-papers/ https://aman.ai/primers/ai/top-30-papers/