My personal impression is that John Carmack has the ability to organize concepts in a way that few people can. So even if he's pretty clueless about the topic now, I would expect him to reduce some maths papers to their essence in a way that nobody else did.
I mean also for Oculus, reprojection in a pixel shader seems like an obvious and easy solution in hindsight. But nobody had tried that before he did. Plenty of people (myself included) knew the math. But we all missed its application to the issue at hand.
I’m sure Carmack’s mathematical ability exceeds that of the average game developer (and certainly my own), but the AI field isn’t short of math whizzes.
As a professor once told me: IF you're lucky, after 10 years in academia, you get to be creative and come up with 4-5 ideas once every 5 years or so (when coming up with the suggested list of research for new phd students to do). Then you get to be devastated when no-one picks up any of your more creative ideas, and everyone picks the 10 non-creative ideas on the list because they don't want to risk their phd.
Is that just your gut feeling, as in typical "bright people doing amazing things, surely they would succeed doing x" (which ultimately means nothing, that's just PR speak), or are you saying that based on your own understanding of advanced mathematics and mathematical research from which you are assessing the mathematical work those people you talk about do?
A whole couple of years, eh? Wow, this AGI thing is taking forever!
He exposed the concept in this post: https://web.archive.org/web/20140719085135/http://www.altdev...
But it was not named asynchronous projection back then.
I don't believe he had anything to do with hiring at openAI nor that he is anything more there than an investor/donor as others are.
Yes, I'm aware that Ilya had much more day-to-day impact, but if you're part of the ML research community and have worked with Ilya, or heard rumors of working with Ilya, that may have had more of a negative effect...
What makes you think that? He literally says he tries to understand things bottom up by knowing about every little detail that happens under the hood
Carmack has proven his extraordinary technical skills. I recommend following his Twitter. Sometimes he posts non-obvious technical stuff. I read some interviews and to me, he doesn't seem to be a person who is driven by gaining popularity.
I think this news is very optimistic, as yet another intelligent, talented and hard-working person is joining the field. Moreover, he is a household name, which may lead to benefits like popularization of the topic, gaining investors attention and so on.
I will keep my fingers crossed for him :).
Let's say I strongly disagree on many levels in the comparison with the other person you mention. Just to mention two, the humbleness that Carmack shows, and how well he explains himself are key differentiators for me. Regarding the appeal to authority in AI knowledge, Carmack has shown again and again he can deliver software (AI is software after all), and we are in a forum with hacker in the name.
I a summary, not my hero, but when he says something I will listen. Maybe I learn something.
People who work in the field for a long time tend to have a certain bias towards a solution. Often these people are stuck in a local maxima. Outsiders can offer a new perspective that results in a breakthrough, usually by starting from first principles or looking at different side-tracks that used to lead to a dead end.
A great example is Musk's SpaceX: when he noticed how much he had to pay for a rocket engine, he went back to first principles and said: "I'll just build it myself". Combine that with the insight that a rocket should be able to land properly to make re-use a valid option, and it disrupts a whole field.
And once someone did it, others know it's possible and start achieving it as well.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Just think about George "Good Will Hunting" Dantzig [1] with the (in)famous "I assumed these were homework assignments, not unsolved math problems" [1] or Eliud Kipchoge running a marathon in under 2 hours.
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
- John Cage
High hopes!
[1] https://bigthink.com/high-culture/george-dantzig-real-will-h...
A pretty infamous example is Citizen Kane. Welles knew very little of traditional cinematography techniques by the time he got to the production of the movie, so his planned shots more or less fit his artistic vision rather than industry standards. Gregg Toland, his director of cinematography, was at that point a 12 year veteran of the industry and hated the bland factory-line output of movie composition of the period.
Welles more or less told Toland what he wanted to shoot and how, and Toland did his best to fit that artistic image. Welles was completely clueless that Toland was using innovate and never before seen techniques to film his shots, and Toland kept quiet because he was allowed to go wild with his vision :)
This means that people should glorify random unknown senior engineers they don't know about instead being fascinated by the person whose work is available and who created amazing things for past 3 decades?
> From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML
That's how everyone start, they understand a little. We have a person here who dealt with complex algorithms in difficult to master language for 30+ years. It hints at "this person has the intellectual power to grasp AI fast".
> I put him into the same category as Elon Musk
This is like comparing an Olympic winner with random person from the streets, saying their athletic ability is about the same.
Fascination and heroification with Carmack comes with a reason, people who do that are closely familiar with his work - not surface level like "He made Doom and Quake". You sound very jealous.
Big organizations ruled by money and career-driven people often run into very expensive dead ends without noticing for years (see the last AI winter, there was just too much hype, which then involved too much money being thrown around, which then lead to the usual organizational cruft).
I would also be very concerned about any field in technology, if an intelligent person cannot make meaningful contributions after a few months or years, that would probably mean the whole field is already deep into diminishing returns and needs to be 'unstuck'.
Carmack has already entered two spaces of computer technology that he revolutionized: 3D gaming and VR. I trust that he's able to have a similar impact in AI, even if it's through failing at the problem in different ways than relying on ML.
The original technologies that were introduced have now been abandoned by Oculus, on Carmack's advice, except for implementation details that haven't been hugely impactful, unlike with 3D gaming.
His audience is not technical in an interview. He adjusts to that situation quite well.
It even makes it clear in the title he's seeking a "different path".
In his favour he's a proven success in different fields; personally I think he's too old to come up with the new ideas needed - that's a young person's game.
But perhaps he can do it as a team lead - and it won't be by following the failed-over-decades path of our current academic gatekeepers.
He isn't a cook and he's doing a moonshot towards AGI: I say 'good luck!'
That doesn't mean that I believe that his '60% change of AGI by 2030' isn't wildly overoptimistic, but then again those who take a shot at AGI are overoptimists..
But he can bring a lot of value, we'll see.
i dont know either personally, but where elon demonstrates being full of shit, carmack would stfu and learn about it before talking. at least thats my impression of them
BUT - I strongly believe, that he has earned quite some respect during his career.
And - importantly in this case - he is well known for NOT blowing things out of proportion, indulge in wishful thinking, hyping up unrealistic expectations or jumping to premature conclusions. He usually knows what he's talking about.
This is not people blindly believing everything he says - but more a case of his statements holding up really well under critical inspection most of the time.
Facebook's highest engineering level and achieved the top possible rating of "redefines expectations" for his level three years in a row. They had to create a new tier for him. Nobody else has ever reached that level. He replaced a "hundred person team" and maybe was better than that team.
I have no inside insight to the matter, but this seems like something beyond a "random senior engineer".
According to Sriram Krishnan, John Carmack was at Facebook's highest engineering level and achieved the top possible rating of "redefines expectations" for his level three years in a row. They had to create a new tier for him. Nobody else has ever reached that level. He replaced a "hundred person team" and maybe was better than that team.
I have no inside insight to the matter, but this seems like something beyond a "random senior engineer".
I'd happily bet my entire net worth that he knows more about the technical details of ML than you do.
From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months, and is just banking on PR based on his games and name.