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I don't get why people are so invested in framing it this way. I'm sure there are ways to do the stated objective. John Carmack isn't even an AI guy why is he suddenly the standard.

Who is an "AI guy"? The field as we know it is fairly new. Sure, neural nets are old hat, but a lot has happened in the last few years.

John Carmack founded Keen technology in 2022 and has been working seriously on AI since 2019. From his experience in the video game industry, he knows a thing or two about linear algebra and GPUs, that is the underlying maths and the underlying hardware.

So, for all intent and purposes, he is an "AI guy" now.

But the logic seems flawed.

He has built an AI system that fails to do X.

That does not mean there isn't an AI system that can do X. Especially considering that a lot is happening in AI, as you say.

Anyway, Carmack knows a lot about optimizing computations on modern hardware. In practice, that happens to be also necessary for AI. However, it is not __sufficient__ for AI.

"He has built an AI system that fails to do X."

Perhaps you have put your finger on the fatal flaw ...

> That does not mean there isn't an AI system that can do X.

You are holding the burden of proof here...

No, Carmack holds the burden of proof because he started the argument. His incapable program does not prove anything.

Maybe this is formulated a bit harshly, but let us respect the logic here.

One of my supervisors used to say: "Don't tell me it's impossible, tell me _you_ could not do it." A true c_nt move that ends every discussion.
Huh, by saying that something is impossible, __you__ are ending the discussion, not your professor.
No. Pointing out a flaw in an argument doesn't require proving the opposite.
This is exactly how Science works. He’s right until proven wrong. And so are you.
Keen includes researchers like Richard Sutton, Joseph Modayil etc. Also John has being doing it full time for almost 5 years now so given his background and aptitude for learning I would imaging by this time he is more of an AI guy then a fairly large percentage of AI PhDs.
Yeah and in another 5 years he'd probably be at nobel laureate level in AI. I don't think that's how it works. What do you mean? Even a phd program can take 5 years sometimes. Also the man started saying he'd bring about AGI right at the gate. He wasn't being exactly humble.

God I hate sounding like this. I swear I'm not too good for John Carmack, as he's infinitely smarter than me. But I just find it a bit weird.

I'm not against his discovery, just against the vibe and framing of the op.

He stated AGI is an interesting problem to work on could you provide a reference on him claiming "he'd bring about AGI right at the gate"?
Isn't that basically saying the same thing? I meant at the gate as he's speaking of AGI before the 5 years you mentioned
What in your opinion constitutes an AI guy?
Names >> all, and increasingly so.

One phenomena that bared this to me, in a substantive way, was noticing an increasing # of reverent comments re: Geohot in odd places here, that are just as quickly replied to by people with a sense of how he works, as opposed to the keywords he associates himself with. But that only happens here AFAIK.

Yapping, or, inducing people to yap about me, unfortunately, is much more salient to my expected mindshare than the work I do.

It's getting claustrophobic intellectually, as a result.

Example from the last week is the phrase "context engineering" - Shopify CEO says he likes it better than prompt engineering, Karpathy QTs to affirm, SimonW writes it up as fait accompli. Now I have to rework my site to not use "prompt engineering" and have a Take™ on "context engineering". Because of a couple tweets + a blog reverberating over 2-3 days.

Nothing against Carmack, or anyone else named, at all. i.e. in the context engineering case, they're just sharing their thoughts in realtime. (i.e. I don't wanna get rolled up into a downvote brigade because it seems like I'm affirming the loose assertion Carmack is "not an AI guy", or, that it seems I'm criticizing anyone's conduct at all)

EDIT: The context engineering example was not in reference to another post at the time of writing, now one is the top of front page.

> Now I have to rework my site to not use "prompt engineering" and have a Take™ on "context engineering". Because of a couple tweets + a blog reverberating over 2-3 days.

The difference here is that your example shows a trivial statement and a change period of 3 days, whereas what Carmack is doing is taking years.

Right. Nothing against Carmack. Grew up on the guy. I haven't looked into, at all, into any of the disputed stuff, and should actively proclaim I'm a yuge Carmack fanboy.
Credentialism is bad, especially when used as a stick
Maybe cause he's like top 5 most influential computer programmers of all time and knew to be a super human workaholic?
Because it "confirms" what they already believe in.
Ah some No True Scotsman

Not sure why justanotherjoe is a credible resource on who is and isn’t expert in some new dialectic and euphemism for machine state management. You’re that nobody to me :shrug:

Yann LeCun is an AI guy and has simplified it as “not much more than physical statistics.”

WWhole lot of AI is decades old info theory books applied to modern computer.

Either a mem value is or isn’t what’s expected. Either an entire matrix of values is or isn’t what’s expected. Store the results of some such rules. There’s your model.

The words are made up and arbitrary because human existence is arbitrary. You’re being sold on a bridge to nowhere.

I'm not being gatekeeper here. John Carmack came into AI around 2021 iirc and came in Lex Friedman and said he's going to bring about AGI. It's okay for him to try so but he had no particular expertise in the field. He's a brilliant guy and I'm not gonna say he's not going to succeed, or that his opinion is worthless. But people seeemed to think that the whole field is a farce just waiting for an adult to come in and fix it. I find that biased. By the way this is how people end up worshipping figures like Musk. There's a limit to transfer function of human expertise, ironically to the discussion at hand.

That's just what I think anyway.

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