I like Carmack but is it really necessary to have a post about everytime he mentions AI (which is every week for the past year)? So far, his track record in AI research is non-existent.
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?).
> 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
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.
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.
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.
It’s John Carmack.
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 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.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artifici...
I think he just bet on the wrong horse (RL instead of LLMs), at least in the short term.
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.