It’s AGI. So far everyone’s track record is nonexistent.

No. The parent comment said "AI Research".

If you want "AGI" so badly, you certainly need to have an "AI research" background and a track record. Can't achieve your "AGI" without that.

Given that Carmack has a close to zero track record in this research, it makes total sense for him to partner with someone that does.

> Can't achieve your "AGI" without that.

Can I ask, what makes you so confident on that? For all I know (which is admittably not much), current AI may be going to a direction completely orthogonal to achieving AGI.

The current trend in AI isn't all of AI, and any kind of work with the goal of producing AGI would definitionally be classified as AI.

We don't know how to achieve AGI. So screwing around with LLM might not be anything close to the process to achieve AGI.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artifici...

Temporal difference learning was a huge contribution.

I agree. The guruism on HN about this guy is crazy. Yeah, he made some really cool games 20-30 years ago, but do we really need a front page post every time he tweets? I'd prefer to hear about the company once they actually get something done.

It’s amusing that from one side of your mouth you’re complaining about the frequency which John appears on hackernews, but from the other side of your mouth you’re relegating his body of work to “some cool games 20-30 years ago”. Yes, as a younger man he focused his expertise into pioneering developments in the video game space. But what of his engineering contributions to the fields of performance auto-motives, rocket science, or virtual reality? Maybe it is his technical aptitude and contributions to various fields of engineering is why he is such a popular figure to the audience of hackernews?

He funds some ventures. His tech opinions of late have shifted largely to shudder clean and pushing terrible FP idioms with no evidence like “immutable first”.

His relevance in tech is dried up as evidenced by the parroting of bullshit without taking a modicum of a second to actually think it through. I don’t particularly care what a dude that got rich making video games invests in.

Edit:

Listen guys, funding ventures != personally contributing to tech as the user I responded to is implying. This worship of carmack is weird. Like bezos also funded a rocket company, but isn’t worshiped for “contributions to rocket science”. Hypocrites.

> funding ventures != personally contributing to tech

Yes it is. So is being an adviser or a board member with technical background and a name that attracts further investment. This is why people like this receive generous equity and are considered part of the company when they’re advising a startup.

No. They’re implying that carmack is personally contributing code and knowledge in their post, when what he’s actually contributing to all his failed startups is capital.

Carmack can contribute nothing to rocket science just like his opinions of programming are largely irrelevant today which is why he simply parrots whatever is currently hyped.

And again, nobody says that Elon musk is personally driving rocket science (except a few people that he pays to publicly strike his ego) despite spacex clearly breaking various grounds.

At least apply your “standards” of contribution equally.

On the other side you should be very wary of blind idolism, news title bait and fanboy clubs. Maybe give a thought as to why you jumped to his defense when he probably hasn't ever met you? Was all the things surrounding Doom all it took to convince you he's worth defending in all other areas he's not had expertise in?

Everything you said, plus that the sheer mention of his name and his new partnership will cause waves and investment to follow. He rests on a mountain of contributions and just his name and interest are enough to get something moving. The wise eye pays attention to this news and takes it into account, especially if it has even a passing interest in the space.

There aren’t enough John Carmack submissions. He has great insight and has lived quite a full life in the industry.

he has failed to address the most important technological domain of the hacker news crowd - making incremental improvements to frontend web technologies

He would have invented QuakeJS like he did with QuakeC :). React - get the fug out of here :)

Yeah he's an actual superstar. Very skilled engineer. This trend of dismissing successful people is a bit lame.

I agree with the sentiment and I've been watching his tweets on AI to see if Carmack has any relevant input on the field.

But what I think is very interesting is that, from my totally lay-person perspective, the current challenge is scaling out the AI systems we have. We know what systems like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 require to run and it is now an engineering challenge to scale up those systems (or drastically reduce their costs). And those systems are surprisingly GPU like. Carmack is the kind of low-level bit crunching, memory obsessed kind of guy that might be able to squeeze out the performance from the hardware.

So him teaming up with a high-level first principles math and science research type is a pretty interesting combo. There is no telling if such a partnership will ultimately result in an advancement - but on paper at least it is an interesting approach. All they are missing is a strong hardware guy (maybe Keller will go beyond investing in Carmack's Keen Technologies?).

If Carmack started contributing to llama.cpp, we'd probably see something tangible in a few weeks lol.

What exactly are these first principles everyone keeps talking about? Kind of like how everyone keeps talking about updating Bayesian priors without ever actually using bayes rule.

According to Wikipedia[0]:

> In philosophy and science, a first principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.

In that sense the OP's comment might read as Carmack partnering up with someone who has a strong foundational understanding of hight level mathematics (if my understanding of the term and OP's post is correct).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_principle?wprov=sfla1

From what I have read, John had a genius for what you might call relentless optimization. Even if they just improve the performance or reduce the hardware requirements of executing an already trained LLM that would be a huge win. Current progress in that regard focuses on reducing the fidelity of the LLM to make it easier to execute, which isn’t ideal.

> So far, his track record in AI research is non-existent.

especially given that according to Wiki he started working on AI in 2019, since then tons of stuff happened in this area, but no results from him.

Somebody ought to start a Carmack tracker for the number of days since he was last mentioned.

If his name contributed to investment or plans for investment somewhere, then that is a track record. If John Carmack is partnering with someone and they share information about what they are partnering on, how, and where, that is extremely valuable information for anyone interested in the space. You don’t need to have shipped something yet in order to make waves that are worth paying attention to.

It’s John Carmack.

> So far, his track record in AI research is non-existent.

I think he just bet on the wrong horse (RL instead of LLMs), at least in the short term.