If by "techie" you mean, professional software engineer, that's fine, but there's no reason to assume that a professional software engineer is going to be magically better at AI research than... professional AI researchers? He's probably going to be substantially worse.
Also, your statement below:
> That's probably true. I look at this as Carmack running his own PhD program. I expect he will expand what we know about computation and the AGI problem before he's done.
Makes it clear to me that you don't really get it. Carmack, at best, might know enough right now to be in a PhD program. I doubt that he has anywhere near as much knowledge, insight, or ideas for research, as top graduate students. He's in no position to mentor graduate students.
No, I mean technologist. He has a pretty solid history with software, physics, aerospace, optics, etc...
> might know enough right now to be in a PhD program
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The frontier in AGI or even just AI is enormous and I think I would be more surprised if Carmack were not able to find some place he could expand the border of what we know.
If this research is as compute intensive as it seems to be, Carmack's contribution might be that he increases the rate other researchers can add their drops to the bucket.
Carmack isn't the first techie to take on a big hard problem. Jeff Hawkins, a name many of us also know, did as well.