I wouldn't bet against him. "The Bitter Lesson" may imply an advantage to someone who historically has been at the tip of the spear for squeezing the most juice out of GPU hosted parallel computation.

Graphics rendering and AI live on the same pyramid of technology. A pyramid with a lot of bricks with the initials "JC" carved into them, as it turns out.

Carmack is always a genius, but like most people he requires luck, and like most people, the house always wins. Poor Armadillo Aerospace.

Exactly. I know him and like him. He is a genius programmer for sure BUT people forget that the last successful product that he released was Doom 3 over 20 years ago. Armadillo was a failure and Oculus went nowhere.

He's also admitted he doesn't have much of math chops, which you need if you want to make a dent in AI. (Although the same could have been said of 3D graphics when he did Wolfenstein and Doom, so perhaps he'll surprise us)

I wish him well TBH

What has "Graphics Carmack" actually done since about 2001?

So, his initial tech was "Adaptive tile refresh" in Commander Keen, used to give it console style pixel-level scrolling. Turns out, they actually hampered themselves in Commander Keen 1 by not understanding the actual tech, and implemented "The Jolt", a feature that was not necessary. The actual hardware implemented scrolling the same way that consoles like the NES did, and did not need "the jolt", nor the limitations it imposed.

Then, Doom and Quake was mostly him writing really good optimizations of existing, known and documented algorithms and 3D techniques, usually by recognizing what assumptions they could make, what portions of the algorithm didn't need to be recalculated when, etc. Very talented at the time, but in the software development industry, making a good implementation of existing algorithms that utilize your specific requirements is called doing your job. This is still the height of his relative technical output IMO.

Fast Inverse Square Root was not invented by him, but was floating around in industry for a while. He still gets kudos for knowing about it and using it.

"Carmack's reverse" is a technique for doing stencil shadows that was a minor (but extremely clever) modification to the "standard" documented way of doing shadow buffers. There is evidence of the actual technique from a decade before Carmack put it in Doom 3 and it was outright patented by two different people the year before. There is no evidence that Carmack "stole" or anything this technique, it was independent discovery, but was clearly also just a topic in the industry at the time.

"Megatextures" from Rage didn't really go anywhere.

Did Carmack actually contribute anything to VR rendering while at Oculus?

People treat him like this programming god and I just don't understand. He was well read, had a good (maybe too good) work ethic, and was very talented at writing 386 era assembly code. These are all laudable, but doesn't in my mind imply that he's some sort of 10X programmer who could revolutionize random industries that he isn't familiar with. 3D graphics math isn't exactly difficult.

> People often fall into the trap of thinking that because they are highly intelligent and an expert in one domain that this makes them an expert in one or more other domains.

While this is certainly true, I'm not aware of any evidence that Carmack thinks this way about himself. I think he's been successful enough that's he's personally 'post-economic' and is choosing to spend his time working on unsolved hard problems he thinks are extremely interesting and potentially tractable. In fact, he's actively sought out domain experts to work with him and accelerate his learning.

Expecting an expert in one thing to also be pretty good at other domains, especially when they're relatively related, isn't a fallacy.

Bayesian reasoning isn't a fallacy. A known expert in one domain is often correct about things in a related one. The post didn't claim that Carmack is right, just that that he's who they would bet on to be right, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Ever since Romero departed the id Software had shipped *checks notes* Quake II, Quake III, Doom 3 and Quake 4.

Funnily enough Romero himself didn't ship much either. IMO it's one of the most iconic "duo breakups". The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.