Wow, there are a lot of people in this thread arguing whether or not John Carmack has the right skills to help AGI, or about the specifics of his knowledge.
Do you all realize you're arguing about nothing?
Good for him for doing something he seems excited about. Maybe we should all stop gossiping and go do something we're excited about too.
What is actually being argued is the cult worship of a particular engineer. I am against cult worship, so find the fact that Carmack is entering this space simply not news worthy. Yet here it is.
Do I wish him the best of luck and hope he cracks the problem? Of course, all the same I would wish that of an upstart PhD student. Yet, the announcements of a brilliant PhD student attending a university to work on AGI is somehow not on hacker news.
This is cult worship of the personality Carmack has amassed, perhaps completely accidentally. When Carmack actually achieves something interesting let us discuss it then, not the mere announcement that he will try, as if that means anything. Read: it doesn't.
The difference between John and the PhD student is their history of Getting Stuff Done. I imagine that the PhD student list of Stuff Done is not as accomplished as John's.
Also the reason why guys like John and Elon are much admired as engineers. They Get Stuff Done. The chance of something remarkable occurring with these folks are a lot higher than it is with the PhD student.
Having seen academics fail to convert their knowledge into production grade systems time and again, I can only say that there are light years of difference between theory and practice.
John Carmack is a genius in at least 3 different things and probably more: business, tech and expression (written or oral). He can explain very complicated things in such a graceful way. I personally consider anything he does to be newsworthy.
Carmack is amazing at computer graphics and related technologies, but I fail to see evidence of the other two areas. He's never been much of a businessman - he's always focused on the technical side and left the selling/operations to others. I'm not aware of much he's done in terms of educational explanations, and the talks of his I've seen have been rambling and convoluted (but fascinating!).
I would recommend that you listen his recent podcast with Joe Rogan. He's such a great person altogether. Regarding business, I would not say he's only a technical guy. In the podcast he explains how he came to give his first Ferrari as the prize of the first Quake competition. He also explained (somehow to your point) how his rocket company failed.
All I was suggesting was that to actively come into a discussion and say that what's being discussed is not worth discussing is, in my opinion, both unproductive & rude.
Would you do that at a party? Join a discussion and tell people that what they're discussing is not worthy of discussion? Or would you do what most people do and wander off to find a discussion that is more interesting to you.
"Wow, there are a lot of people in this thread arguing whether or not John Carmack has the right skills to help AGI, or about the specifics of his knowledge.
Do you all realize you're arguing about nothing?"
Absolutely. I should mention why. AGI is an open field. AGI is opennest of open fields. Advances in deep learning tell quite little about what AGI will look like. We don't know if AGI will be a hundred incremental innovations from deep learning, ten deep advances from deep learning or five incredible advances with only a slight relation to deep learning. We don't know if it will just appear when 100 super-computers are hooked together or if a genius at home on their laptop could cobble it together. Sure, you could extrapolate and say compute has mattered more than theory, so far. But you could also say impressive things have been done but they haven't approached robust generality and there's something we're missing. Pick the approach but then you'll have to see if it's possible.
Yeah, this comments section is a bunch of gossiping hens trying to get it on record that they don't think his retirement hobby will amount to anything. Pretty sad in what's presumably a community of fellow craftspeople and makers.
The human brain really can't handle the crippling adversity of a fellow human announcing an aspiration. Hopefully our AGI replacement can.
If he announced that he is retiring and sailing around the world, I’m sure you’d find people asserting that his skills as a programmer couldn’t possibly translate to being a world-class sailor. Consider for a moment that he might just be very interested in AGI and wants to work on it.
Do you all realize you're arguing about nothing?
Good for him for doing something he seems excited about. Maybe we should all stop gossiping and go do something we're excited about too.