Yes, he may well improve some algorithm, or rewrite some commonly used tool to improve efficiency. And researchers are often not incentivized to do that, so it would be great. But a far cry from the picture people are painting about him soaking up the field and using his genius to solve some major problem quickly.

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.