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Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see how he's progressed with this. When he first announced he was getting into AI it sounded almost like a semi retirement thing: something that interested him that he could do for fun and solo, without the expectation that it would go anywhere. But now he seems truly serious about it. Wonder if he's started hiring yet.

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He mentioned, in his Lex Friedman interview, that accepting investor money was a way to keep himself serious and motivated. He feels an obligation to those putting their money in.

Ah, I was thinking that $20MM doesn't seem like a lot of money for someone like Carmack. Surely he could have self-funded a business himself. This explains why he didn't.

yeah, his follow up tweet is pretty clear:

> This is explicitly a focusing effort for me. I could write a $20M check myself, but knowing that other people's money is on the line engenders a greater sense of discipline and determination. I had talked about that as a possibility for a while, and I am glad Nat pushed me on it.

It seems like bad logic. If he gets bored/throw in towel, he can just pay back with his money and move on. Also, if you need to create such artificial constraints in order to go to work, a main ingredient called “drive” is missing. I respect Carmack a lot but I don’t trust old centi-millionaires to work with same passion as their younger poorer selves. Finally, $20M is too low. AGI is not a solo endeavor and doesn’t fit in Carmack’s legendary work style. Just to train a large model once will eat up 20% of this money.

> " If he gets bored/throw in towel, he can just pay back with his money and move on."

> "Just to train a large model once will eat up 20% of this money."

Aren't these 2 statements conflicting?

No, because he has that amount of money on hand himself.

> Just to train a large model once will eat up 20% of this money.

Fascinating point. It has seemed like AI could produce a sort of arms race by players with the most resources because it is so compute intensive upfront.

"I want other people's skin in the game instead of mine" is not necessarily virtuous.

Carmack’s goal is not to become the most virtuous person in the world. His goal is to make the AGI

Has nothing to do with being virtuous, has everything to do with the fact that if I was an investor and he had less skin in the game than I did I would suspect I was getting conned.

> something that interested him that he could do for fun and solo

Really?

I don't think anybody who works on AGI (not AI) without being dead serious about it will be qualified to work on it. A bad AGI implementation is one of humanity's gravest risks, and this is well-known in the AGI field, has been for years. Elon was far from the first to say this.

Carmack isn't the type to get those kinds of details wrong.

I got the same impression, and maybe it still is. You can still raise money for a retirement project if the goal of the money is to hire a staff. VC money isn't solely for young 20-something founders who want to live their job.

Carmack sounds like someone who lives his job, so I don't think age/life stage is a factor here.

> Carmack sounds like someone who lives his job, so I don't think age/life stage is a factor here.

He said on lex Fridman that he's going all in on it. He said he was tired of his 1 day a week consultancy at oculus and wanted to work full time on this.

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1560729196166529025 > "I am continuing as a consultant with Meta on VR matters, devoting about 20% of my time there."

agreed, Carmack's work ethic, opinions on work and opinions of how those around him work are legendary!

I suppose if anyone could raise VC money for a retirement project it would be Carmack...

Does he have the expertise to pull it off as an individual?

I would say so. Most AGI work so far has been pursued by academics with a lack of software engineering best practices. Codebases get bloated and hard to understand. Ramp-up time measured in years. This hinders experimentation, which you have to optimize for with projects like this.

I would suspect Carmack understands this, and also understands what resources to consult, and how to spot the bullshit artists in the field.

I'd work for him in a heartbeat.

I'm just skeptical of his technical skills in this area. I need to watch the lex thing but I don't really rate lex in this area either.

It's a fairly big shift from games.

Management might be OK but setting the direction of the company needs more inspiration than just writing good C++ code

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