I found it strange that John Carmack and Ilya Sutskever both left prestigious positions within their companies to pursue AGI as if they had some proprietary insight that the rest of industry hadn't caught on to. To make as bold of a career move that publicly would mean you'd have to have some ultra serious conviction that everyone else was wrong or naive and you were right. That move seemed pompous to me at the time; but I'm an industry outsider so what do I know.

And now, I still don't know; the months go by and as far as I'm aware they're still pursuing these goals but I wonder how much conviction they still have.

▲

jasonwatkinspdx 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

With Carmack it's consciously a dilliante project.

He's been effectively retired for quite some time. It's clear at some point he no longer found game and graphics engine internals motivation, possibly because the industry took the path he was advocating against back in the day.

For a while he was focused on Armadillo aerospace, and they got some cool stuff accomplished. That was also something of a knowing pet project, and when they couldn't pivot to anything that looked like commercial viability he just put it in hibernation.

Carmack may be confident (ne arrogant) enough to think he does have something unique to offer with AGI, but I don't think he's under any illusions it's anything but another pet project.

▲

defen 3 days ago | parent [-]

> possibly because the industry took the path he was advocating against back in the day

What path did he advocate? And what path did the industry take instead?

	▲	jasonwatkinspdx 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well way back in the day there was the old Direct3D vs OpenGL debate, where Carmack heavily favored an open standard and ecosystem. And what ended up happening is NVIDIA just has defacto control of things now. But more technically, when he was experimenting with what became the Doom 3 engine, he favored a model of extending the basic OpenGL state machine to be able to do lots of passes with a wider variety of blending modes. Basically, you get "dumb" triangles, but can render so many billions of them per frame you build up visual complexity, shadows, lighting, etc that way. The other model has its roots in Renderman and similar offline rendering frameworks. Here a small shader kernel is invoked per vertex and per fragment. Your shader can run whatever code it wants subject to some limitations. So you get "smart" triangles, and build up complexity, shadows, lighting, etc through having complex shaders. The shadow algorithm used in Doom 3 is a great example of the difference. Doom 3 figures out the shadow volume, and renders it as triangles with the OpenGL modes set such that how many shadow volumes a given pixel intersects is recorded in the stencil buffer. Then you can render the scene geometry with a blending mode where the stencil selects if you're inside shadow or not. This is in contrast to shadow map style algorithms, where you render from the PoV of the light into a depth buffer, then inside your fragment shader you sample that shadow map to figure out if the fragment is occluded from the light or not. Anyhow, Doom 3 is the only major game to use stencil volume shadows afaik. And not to hang Carmack's dissatisfaction on just that alone, I think it is clear he didn't want a graphics world where NVIDIA was running everything. I also think not being able to keep up with Unreal Engine's momentum was maybe part of it too.

▲

9dev 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not sure about that. Think of Avi Loeb, for example, a brilliant astrophysicist and Harvard professor who recently became convinced that the interstellar objects traversing the solar system are actually alien probes scouting the solar system. He’s started a program called "Galileo" now to find the aliens and prepare people for the truth.

So I don’t think brilliance protects from derailing…

▲

therobots927 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The simple explanation is that they got high on their own supply. They deluded themselves into thinking an LLM was on the verge of consciousness.

	▲	nprateem 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The simpler answer is they could convince VCs to give them boat loads of cash by sounding like they can.

▲

hnfong 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They’re rich enough in both money and reputation to take the risk. Even if AGI (whatever that means) turns out to be utterly impossible, they’re not really going to suffer for it.

On the other hand if you think there’s a say 10% chance you can get this AGI thing to work, the payoffs are huge. Those working in startups and emerging technologies often have worse odds and payoffs

▲

JRR_214 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]