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.

for systems that learn in real-time, is there a way for the humans to know/understand how/why the system came to the conclusion it has? there are examples of where humans ran experiments that came to a conclusion for the wrong reasons. if an AI system thinks it knows the answer for the wrong reason, wouldn't that then poison its reasoning later as well? can an AI system learn its reasoning is wrong and then update it when provided better evidence? that seems to be something a vast majority of humans cannot do.

And this is different from the argument that's being pooh-poed and downvoted how? You are effectively saying "Carmack is smart and is working on cool stuff that'll most likely be useless" in different words.

Oh darn I used the word just now everything I said is invalidated! That’s too bad!

FWIW, I’m aware of that heuristic too which is why I intentionally use the word “just” as a meta heuristic to filter a certain type of person.