News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate develo... by zoogeny on Saturday October 07, 2023 @11:05AM (#37802303)
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?).

Re:John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate develo... by solarpunk on Saturday October 07, 2023 @11:39AM (#37802624)
If Carmack started contributing to llama.cpp, we'd probably see something tangible in a few weeks lol.
Re:John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate develo... by pretendscholar on Saturday October 07, 2023 @12:16PM (#37802966)
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.
Re:John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate develo... by MrDresden on Saturday October 07, 2023 @12:47PM (#37803282)
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