Here's a heuristic that somebody gave me a while ago: using the word "just" in the way you did is a signal that you don't understand the topic.
John's document covers why he's doing what he's doing:
> Fundamentally, I believe in the importance of learning from a stream of interactive experience, as humans and animals do, which is quite different from the throw-everything-in-a-blender approach of pretraining an LLM. The blender approach can still be world-changingly valuable, but there are plenty of people advancing the state of the art there.
He thinks interacting with the real world and learning as you go isn't getting enough attention and might take us farther than the LLM approach. So he's applying these ideas to a subject that he's an expert in. You don't seem to find this approach interesting but John does (and I do too, for the record).
Everybody dismissing him might be right. Those keeping score know that Carmack's batting average isn't one thousand. But those people also know Carmack has the resources to work on pretty much whatever he wants to work on. I'm happy he's still working hard at something and sharing his work.
