He’s a AAA software engineer but the prerequisites to build out cutting edge AI require deep formal math that is beyond his education and years at this point.
Nothing to stop him playing around with AI models though.
I'm pretty excited to see him in this domain. I think he'll focus on some DeepSeek style improvements.
Having JC focusing on, say, writing a performant OSS CUDA replacement could be bigger than any of the last 20 announcements from openai/goggle/deepmind/etc
So I asked Ilya, their chief scientist, for a reading list. This is my path, my way of doing things: give me a stack of all the stuff I need to know to actually be relevant in this space.
And he gave me a list of like 40 research papers and said, 'If you really learn all of these, you'll know 90% of what matters today! And I did. I plowed through all those things and it all started sorting out in my head.
To put it another way, the idea that John Carmack is going to do groundbreaking research in AI is roughly as plausible as the idea that Yann LeCun is going to make a successful AAA video game. Stranger things have happened, but I won’t be holding my breath.
In that context anyone can make progress in the field, as long as they understand what they're dealing with.
Better regard mr. Carmack as an X factor. Maybe the experts will leave him in the dust. Or maybe he'll come up with something that none of the experts cared to look into.
I believe all his in-depth experience in other areas will heavily unlock him to bring about another breakthrough. He's that good.
He's probably one of the most qualified people around.
All deep formal math is a boundary to a thing.