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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised by how bullish he is about this. At least a few years ago the experts in the field didn't see AGI anywhere near us for at least a few decades, and all of the bulls were physicists, philosophers or Deepak-Chopra-for-the-TED-crowd bullshit artists who have never written a line of code in their lives, mostly milking that conference and podcast dollar, preaching Skynet-flavored apocalypse or rapture.

To see Carmack go all in on this actually makes me feel like the promise has serious legs. The guy is an engineer's engineer, hardly a speculator, or in it for the quick provocative hot take. He clearly thinks this is possible with the existing tools and the near future projected iterations of the technology. Hard to believe this is actually happening, but with his brand name on it, this might just be the case.

What an amazing time to be alive.

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As an ML researcher who thinks AGI/HLI is still pretty far away, I don't think there's actually a issue with starting a company that's trying to solve this problem. The thing is that you're going to invent a lot of useful tools along the way. It's going to take you 20-50 years to get HLI, but you're still going to produce a ton of research with a lot of practical uses. The AGI does help build hype and investments too, but the milestones are the important part for the business.

> all of the bulls were physicists, philosophers or Deepak-Chopra-for-the-TED-crowd bullshit artists who have never written a line of code in their lives

One of the cofounders of DeepMind (founded in 2010) wrote a blog post that year saying his estimate of time till AGI was a lognormal distribution peaking at 2025. While I haven't personally seen any of his work, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Legg sounds pretty technical.

If you'd written "nobody I was paying attention to said this", that would've been reasonable.

I might point out Shane Legg invented the term Artificial General Intelligence, and the title of his PhD thesis is "Machine Super Intelligence".

Of course there always, since the beginning, were/are many, many AI researchers who were bullish on AGI... if you think it's possible then you should try to build it. But often people avoid broadcasting such opinions. However, very very few AI researchers are AGI researchers, historically because it's hard to make a small contribution, and to get taken seriously and get funding: I was told at the AGI conference just ~6 years ago there were maybe less than 10 funded -- they weren't counting DeepMind. ALMOST NOBODY at the AGI conference had funding to work on AGI!

if Carmack's in I'm in. Has he ever been drastically wrong?

No one can argue he doesn't know how to summon demons

When he went to go work on VR at Facebook?

Wrong in the moral sense?

He's still there though, right?

edit: he is not still

edit: he is still a consulting CTO

* To his credit Carmack is a one-person brand and attaching your (good) brand to a tainted brand (Facebook) isn't great

* Many believe Occulus isn't succeeding fast enough, and so the years Carmack spent on Occulus/Metaverse could have been spent on any number of interesting projects. Although I'm sure the money was amazing and I can't object to him taking it.

* If Occulus/Metaverse succeeds it will be a ultra-monetized environment (re: Farmville) and encourage a huge amount of consumer-hostile policies like unlimited tracking (since Facebook owns the hardware now). No gamer wants that. The whales who will be justifying its existence won't benefit from that.

Carmack joined Oculus before the Facebook acquisition, so it's misleading to say he attached his brand to Facebook's.

I doubt Carmack is motivated that much by money. He has way more than he'll ever spend.

His reply to this tweet is that he didn't want to spend $20million of his own money on this venture. When you have the option to throw 20m on projects, you can spend it reasonably quickly.

His actual claim is that spending other people's money helps his focus because it makes him feel responsible. That's a plausible argument.

The first thing you want to hear as an investor is that the person you're investing into has as much skin in the game as possible so opening up with "I'm putting other people's money in this instead of mine" is not great.

He's not stll there

Isn't he still there part-time?

Ah, thanks. Looks like he still consults for them, but probably not as an employee?

What was wrong about that?

That's misleading. Oculus wasn't originally Facebook, and it wasn't Facebook when Carmack joined. Carmack was working on the Oculus hardware around the time Oculus was founded in 2012. He joined Oculus in 2013. Facebook didn't acquire Oculus until 2014. You could criticize him for not leaving, but he didn't "go to work on VR at Facebook."

The jury is still out on VR and Meta but it hardly seems promising.

Fair point, though I think VR is going to be solid for games once hardware properly catches up in a decade or so.

You think Meta's VR systems aren't promising? My read on the situation is that they are making incredible progress, and doing so at scale. They're already delivering good revenue growth on a product that no one would say is "done". VR isn't a "build a good product" problem, it's a deep tech/hardware R&D problem before you can even open the door to building a good product.

Sure (According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack ):

> During his time at id Software, a medium pepperoni pizza would arrive for Carmack from Domino's Pizza almost every day, carried by the same delivery person for more than 15 years.

C’mon man, Domino’s?!

Not sure he was right about the "putting down his own cat because it was annoying" thing.

Good lord. I dislike cats, but this is vile. Totally lost any respect I had for Carmack.

Don't meet your heroes.

To be fair, Carmack wasn't ever a hero to me.

>Has he ever been drastically wrong

Has he ever made a prediction with as drastic a consequence and transformative potential as the one he is currently making about AGI? Actually, is there any track record of predictions he has made and how they have panned out?

What about his bet on MegaTextures?

Newton worked on alchemy for much of his life.

Does this qualify?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace

Has Carmack made a time bound prediction on AGI?

He can't ever be "wrong" on AGI if he hasn't even made a disprovable claim about AGI.

Throughout the Wolfenstein codebase, he spelled "column" with two "l"s.

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