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.
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.
Could you give some actual examples of projects or companies that you see as "grifting"?
Most companies are clearly communicating that they're in the R&D phase of the tech. R&D definitely isn't grifting.
The problem spaces where people find value and pay for AI isn't grifting either, like the bulk of content moderation happening now, recommendation systems, text to speech, speech to text, etc. The camera on my phone uses neural networks, with great success. I use ChatGPT daily, at this point.
What do you see as clearly being "grifting" (ok, lets try to keep Elon Musk related projects out of this)?
Carmack is an engineer at heart. I am sure there are some yet undiscovered technical blockers in that space that he will solve.
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.
Information complexity is the true test of intelligence, and the current crop of "AI" is actually making computing dumber, not smarter.
But yes, "dumber" is often more useful. But the industries "AI" will revolutionize are the kinds of industries where "dumber" is more profitable (e.g., copywriting spam, internet pornography, casual games, etc.) so the world will be poorer for it.
Show me the compelling tech demo that did that without being a big deal.
they can answer questions, yes, but it's tough to tell if it's telling the truth or making stuff up which is kind of a problem. code at least compiles or doesn't so its easy to verify.
https://cogconnected.com/2022/12/dwarf-fortress-sells-160000...
I too can pull up completely irrelevant statistics.
Buddy, it’s not a demo, it’s a warning of what’s to come.
Stay behind, it makes no difference to anyone but yourself. As for me, I have integrated ChatGPT into my daily work. I have used it to write emails that negotiated a 30k usd deal, write stories, prototype an app, send a legal threat, brainstorm name and branding ideas, scope a potential market and this is just some of the stuff I used for actual productive work.
I can’t begin to tell you how much I have played with it for fun and intellectual curiosity.
https://thegradient.pub/gpt2-and-the-nature-of-intelligence/
It remind me of the alice bot hype of my youth, which in retrospect was just an evolution fromthe ELIZA hype of 1966. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
We are actually far from sci-fi where is my flying delorean and clean fusion energy for humankind? An as far as AI is concerned where is HAL 9000?
I don't know what you consider "older" folk but I highly doubt you speak for every member of that group.
Also, I don't think the distinction here between "revolution" and "evolution" is so clear cut (or important.)
Well, we did just produce the world's first clean fusion energy this week.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nuclear-fusion-power-plan...
This happened in an experimental setting, not an actual production setting. It was a net positive energy output when ONLY accounting for the energy input of the actual lasers, not when accounting for the mechanisms which fired the lasers (which had an energy efficiency of about 1%, although this efficiency could be higher if they used more advanced laser generator/whatnots). It was generated in a way that in no way resembles what current attempts at a production ready, maintainable, fusion reactor look like (tokamaks), and was instead, as stated before, essentially a design meant for experiments where fusion occurred (basically by shooting a pellet of fusion material into the central focus of a bunch of powerful lasers).
The LLNL is, and always has been, a experimental laboratory meant for primarily nuclear weapons testing and maintenance, and as such, have the ability to test nuclear fusion (via this inertial confinement setup), as fusion occurs in thermonuclear bombs, of which the US certainly has many in its stockpile.
This test, while a big "milestone", is the equivalent of building a specialized fuel efficient vehicle which gets 500 miles to the gallon by sacrificing almost everything that makes a car a car, and then equating that as to say that every car on the road will be getting 500 miles to the gallon any day now. When in fact, the only thing achieved was the ability to say that we've made a car get 500 miles to the gallon.
The problem I have with GPT is that is wonderful at confidently writing things that are completely incorrect. It works wonderfully at generating fluff.
I’m not a pessimist I love this kind of thing. I just understand the delta between impressive demo and real useful product. It’s why self driving still isn’t pervasive in our lives after being right around the corner for the better part of a decade.
Any problem can seem easy when you don't know the things you don't know.
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.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/zenimax-accuses-john-carmack-of-thef...
> California employers can sidestep non-competes in the following instances:
> EXCEPTION 1: If the employee sells business goodwill
> EXCEPTION 2: If the owner sells his or her business interests
> EXCEPTION 3: If the owner sells all operating and goodwill assets
> Upon the business’ dissolution, a member of the company may agree to a non-compete if operating a similar business in the geographic area. Goodwill is the company’s name and brand reputation. Employees with stock options are not considered company owners for purposes of non-competition agreements.
Combine that with being burned out and I can see trying something else.
If I had another 30 IQ points I'd be climbing over walls and sneaking into buildings at night to work on this stuff.
I encourage anyone to try out some AI related stuff, genius IQ not required. It's still a young field so there aren't yet huge towers of knowledge to climb before you can do anything. The core ideas are actually super simple, requiring nothing more than high school math.
Maybe it's just a sign of how hot AI is right now.
VR headsets have improved immensely since I first tried it in 1991 (Dactyl Nightmare) and I suspect they will keep improving. Where we are at today is not necessarily a plateau but it might feel like one if you were expecting a growth curve that looks like a hockey stick.
VR in its current form is eye cocaine, nothing more. Why watch poppy avatars hop around in a virtual reality, while you are bound to do nothing?
In every way, VR should be restricted to very few use cases, not to - hello Zuck - rebuild reality completely and hereby track everything you do or see to deliver even more addictive material to your eye vision.
It sounds cool, some use cases look cool, but the very fact that hardly anyone at Meta uses their own device/creature, speaks volumes. I am glad, JC takes consequences and abandons this experiment.
In fact I think the other use cases are bogus, everything else is unimpressive to me except the ability to have a decent fitness experience with FitXR or Beatsaber.
That's not Carmack's opinion. To quote from his post:
"Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place."
"the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world"
The main problem with VR in my opinion is a lack of software. Most of the games produced have been either toys that are little more than a tech demo, or ports of other games not designed around VR. There haven't been many serious attempts to harness VR for non-game playing purposes.
I think the future is still bright for VR. We're currently in a bit of a local hype-cycle trough, but the tech is only going to improve.
The simple answer here is that people's brain hardware is already quite good at turning flat 2D representations into 3D mental experiences, so stereoscopy doesn't add much. Making it, as you say, a gimmick. The historically cyclical interest in the gimmick suggests that it's mainly appealing as a novelty.
Also suspicious to me is the way that Meta still isn't releasing actual use statistics. They're happy to release DAU numbers for Facebook. Where are the equivalent numbers for Oculus? What Carmack says is consistent with my suspicion that a lot of people bought the Quest to try it but don't use it regularly. Which would explain why they keep those numbers very quiet.
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.