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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

It's really interesting to see Carmack take such risky positions, such as betting FSD Level 5 by 2030 along with his all-in bet on VR. The VR thing didn't go nearly as well as he had hoped... and I suspect, like VR, the FSD thing will also not come to fruition due to it's grossly underestimated difficulty.

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Carmack is not a poor man, so a $10k bet or two (for charity, mind you) is more of a friendly wager than a make/break gamble.

And he's clearly been optimistic most his life, and it's paid off a number of times.

And self-driving has progressed further and faster than I have thought it would, though I don't think we'll get Level 5 by 2030.

> Carmack is not a poor man, so a $10k bet or two (for charity, mind you) is more of a friendly wager than a make/break gamble.

The point was he seems to consistently grossly underestimate the difficulty of problems outside of his domain expertise.

The two examples were self driving and VR.

> The point was he seems to consistently grossly underestimate the difficulty of problems outside of his domain expertise.

Carmack made 3d games and game engines. I don't think VR was outside his domain of expertise.

And for the self driving one, that bet is still on

He also tried (is trying?) rockets.

Tried, (more or less) failed, and gave up (because it was costing too much, basically). Search for "Armadillo Aerospace".

Personally I think VR is outside the domain of expertise of 3D games and game engines. To think that VR is within that domain is exactly the error -- VR as an overall product requires different consumer behavior than buying a game for a PC you already have. It requires buying a new kind of device or buying into a whole new form of interaction. It requires remembering to use that device and think about what games you have for it. It requires engineers to ship high FPS and low lag to prevent nausea to a degree unheard of for PC gaming.

Facebook's VR plan seems to hinge on being "even more ubiquitous than mobile" <https://officechai.com/learn/mark-zuckerbergs-email-explaini...>, which is a level of constant use that 3D games don't really have.

I am not a VR or 3D game expert, but even I can list other key differences. I bet you can too if you try. I think those are reasons to think VR is not really the same domain. I am curious what you think.

With the amount of time he's put into VR over the last decade I think it's fair to say he's as much an expert as anyone else at this point.

He became expert in the domain enough to decide to walk away...

He's now working on a startup in the AGI field, which will also probably go nowhere for him.

He gets to work on things that excite him - what a place to be in life. We can all envy that - but he's not very good at gauging problems and consistently underestimates their difficulty/time-to-market.

While I mostly agree that the hardware and UX challenges are mostly out of his domain,

> It requires engineers to ship high FPS and low lag to prevent nausea to a degree unheard of for PC gaming.

This is very much Carmack's speciality, and why his focus was on making mobile VR happen [0]. There are very few people who can outperform him at that, and most of them worked for Oculus :-)

[0]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/q-a-carmack-reveals-the... (this predates the Quest, but it should give you an idea of the problems he was tackling)

Fair enough. I think the UX challenges are tougher than FPS, and secondarily the hardware challenges are also tougher than FPS, so I probably should have omitted the FPS mention in my comment to keep things focused. :D

He actually wrote the Netflix VR app for Oculus, and wrote a really detailed post on it: https://netflixtechblog.com/john-carmack-on-developing-the-n...

VR is not _at all_ outside his domain expertise.

The issue with VR is that it almost entirely doesn't require his type of expertise for it to succeed. It's almost entirely a hardware problem, in terms of cost, wearability/usability, quality, along with the other issues like nausea etc. None of which Carmack's vast expertise lends itself towards. Writing an app for Netflix isn't exactly using his skills.

We see this often with engineering types, many of us included. Vastly underestimating difficulty of challenging problems and naively believe they're simple to solve.

I would argue its mostly a hardware problem because lots of engineers, including Carmack, have already explored and solved a ton of the hard software problems e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20140719085135/http://altdev.co/...

No one who correctly estimates the difficulty of writhing a game engine would ever start. Some things require optimism.

I am a self driving skeptic but seems like a good bet for Carmack. I would expect Waymo to open up to consumers before 2030 in SF, even if more expensive and take way longer than a normal car. It could be little more than a tech demo and he would still win the bet.

Waymo's already open in SF and Phoenix, with LA and San Antonio to come, and it's only 2024.

There's a wait-list you have to join, but anyone can download the app and get in line.

Why is Waymo so slow to roll out?

Pick an optimal path for each metro, only operate on good weather days, roll out nationally.

The major companies that have tried to go faster than Waymo have been destroyed by safety incidents (Uber, Cruise). Waymo's caution may be well-warrented.

Destroyed seems a bit harsh. Tesla is moving forward.

FSD12 appears to be a major advancement. https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1750448446790922634

>Why is Waymo so slow to roll out?

Ignoring the safety path, this other issue just scale. Manufacturing the cars would be a big problem. Getting a ton of them on the road is another. I wonder if all those sensors that the car uses could ramp up to a national level in a year.

I've been in the Waymo beta for a couple months now. At peak times, it's more expensive and slower than an Uber simply because there aren't enough cars on the road.

Because they're careful? Especially after the recent Cruise debacle - SF is relatively friendly to their efforts, and once they can point to a few years of problem-free operation in SF, other cities might allow them in, but trying to expand the service too early could prove a very costly mistake if a major issue is found and they get thrown out again...

I doubt that fees are quite covering expenses yet. I expect they'll roll out quite a bit quicker once expansion decreases their losses rather than increasing it.

you've just eliminated a lot of useful use cases. Who needs a car/service that only drives a limited set of "optimal routes" in good weather?

Also, "optimal routes" tend to quickly become suboptimal due to traffic, road closures etc.

I was like wtf are they talking about I’ve been using self driving cars for half a year

John carmack's won the bet, 6 years early.

It's rather more than a tech demo already.

https://youtu.be/P6sw4EKegp4?si=Yafm5a-ufCGizumy

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