5/23/2025 at 8:08:05 AM
It's always a treat to watch a Carmack lecture or read anything he writes, and his notes here are no exception. He writes as an engineer, for engineers and documents all his thought processes and misteps in the exact detailed yet concise way you'd want a colleague to who was handing off some work.One question I would have about the research direction is the emphasis on realtime. If I understand correctly he's doing online learning in realtime. Obviously makes for a cool demo and pulls on his optimisation background, and no doubt some great innovations will be required to make this work. But I guess the bitter lesson and recent history also tell us that some solutions may only emerge at compute levels beyond what is currently possible for realtime inference let alone learning. And the only example we have of entities solving Atari games is the human brain, of which we don't have a clear understanding of the compute capacity. In which case, why wouldn't it be better to focus purely on learning efficiency and relax the realtime requirement for now?
That's a genuine question by the way, definitely not an expert here and I'm sure there's a bunch of value to working within these constraints. I mean, jumping spiders solve reasonably complex problems with 100k neurons, so who knows.
by MrScruff
5/23/2025 at 2:20:57 PM
I'm sure there were offline rendering and 3D graphics workstation people saying the same about the comparatively crude work he was doing in the early 90s...Obviously both Carmack and the rest of the world has changed since then, but it seems to me his main strength has always been in doing more with less (early id/Oculus, AA). When he's working in bigger orgs and/or with more established tech his output seems to suffer, at least in my view (possibly in his as well since he quit both Bethesda-id and Meta).
I don't know Carmack and can't claim to be anywhere close to his level, but as someone also mainly interested in realtime stuff I can imagine he also feels a slight disdain for the throw-more-compute-at-it approach of the current AI boom. I'm certainly glad he's not running around asking for investor money to train an LLM.
Best case scenario he teams up with some people who complement his skillset (akin to the game designers and artists at id back in the day) and comes up with a way to help bring some of the cutting edge to the masses, like with 3D graphics.
by kilpikaarna
5/23/2025 at 4:35:28 PM
The thing about Carmack in the 90s... There was a lot of research going on around 3d graphics. Companies like SGI and Pixar were building specialized workstations for doing vector operations for 3d rendering. 3d was a thing. Game consoles with specialized 3d hardware would launch in 1994 with the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation (in Japan only for one year)What Carmack did was basically get a 3d game running on existing COMMODITY hardware. The 386 chip that most people used for their excel spreadsheets did not do floating point operations well, so Carmack figured out how to do everything using integers.
May 1992 -> Wolfenstein 3d releases December 1993 -> Doom releases December 1994 -> Sony Playstation launches in Japan June 1996 -> Quake releases
So Wolfenstein and Doom were actually not really 3d games, but rather 2.5 games (you can't have rooms below other rooms). The first 3d game here is actually Quake which also eventually also got hardware acceleration support.
Carmack was the master of doing the seeminly impossible on super constrained hardware on virtually impossible timelines. If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?
by LarsDu88
5/23/2025 at 9:37:51 PM
The world seems to have rewritten history, and forgotten Ultima Underworld, which shipped prior to Doom..by muziq
5/23/2025 at 5:46:23 PM
> If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?Maybe. One aspect of Wolfenstein and Doom's popularity is that it was years ahead of everyone else technically on PC hardware. The other aspect is that they were genre defining titles that set the standards for gameplay design. I think Doom Deathmatch would have caught on in 1995, as there really were very few (just Command and Conquer?) standout PC network multiplayer games released between 1993 and 1995.
by hx8
5/23/2025 at 5:52:43 PM
I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995.The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM.
It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more than the actual technical innovation. Things like BSP for level partitioning have slowly been phased out of game engines, we have ample floating point compute power and hardware acceleration ow, but even developers of the more recent DOOM games have started to realize that they should return to the original formula of "blast zombies in the face at high speed, and keep plot as window dressing"
by LarsDu88
5/23/2025 at 8:21:44 PM
Sort of in the middle, id games always felt tight. The engines were immersive not only because of graphics, but basic i/o was excellent.by xh-dude
5/23/2025 at 7:00:11 PM
Hardware changes a lot in the time it takes to develop a game. When I read his plan files and interviews, I realized he seemed to spend a lot of time before developing the game thinking about what the next gen hardware was going to bring. Then design the best game they could think of whike targeting this not-yet-available hardware.by gjadi
5/23/2025 at 9:00:23 PM
But also, he didn't do the technically hardest and most impressive part, Quake, on his own. IIUC he basically relied on Michael Abrash's help to get Quake done (in any reasonable amount of time).by leoc
5/23/2025 at 8:41:20 PM
> So Wolfenstein and Doom were actually not really 3d games, but rather 2.5 games (you can't have rooms below other rooms). The first 3d game here is actually QuakeUltima Underworld is a true 3D game from 1992. An incredibly impressive game, in more ways than one.
by andrepd
5/23/2025 at 6:10:57 PM
If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?I think so, because the thing about DOOM is, it was an insanely good game. Yes, it pioneered fullscreen real-time perspective rendering on commodity hardware, instantly realigning the direction of much of the game industry, yadda yadda yadda, but at the end of the day it was a good-enough game for people to remember and respect even without considering the tech.
Minecraft would be a similar example. Minecraft looked like total ass, and games with similar rendering technology could have been (and were) made years earlier, but Minecraft was also good. And that was enough.
by CamperBob2
5/23/2025 at 6:46:50 PM
> his main strength has always been in doing more with lessCarmack builds his kingdom and then runs it well.
I makes me wonder how he would fare as an unknown Jr. developer with managers telling him "that's a neat idea, but for now we just need you to implement these Figma designs".
by Buttons840
5/23/2025 at 8:00:46 PM
A key aspect of the Carmack approach (or similar 'smart hacker' unconventional career approach) is avoiding that situation in the first place. However, this also carries substantial career, financial and lifestyle risks & trade-offs - especially if you're not both talented enough and lucky enough to hit a sufficiently fertile oppty in the right time window on the first few tries.Assuming one is willing to accept the risks and has the requisite high-talent plus strong work drive, the Carmack-like career pattern is to devote great care to evaluating and selecting opptys near the edges of newly emerging 'interesting things' which also: coincide with your interests/talents, are still at a point where a small team can plausibly generate meaningful traction, and have plausible potential to grow quickly and get big.
Carmack was fortunate that his strong interest in graphics and games overlapped a time period when Moore's Law was enabling quite capable CPU, RAM and GFX hardware to hit consumer prices. But we shouldn't dismiss Carmack's success as "luck". That kind of luck is an ever-present uncontrolled variable which must be factored into your approach - not ignored. Since Carmack has since shown he can get very interested in a variety of things, I assume he filtered his strong interests to pick the one with the most near-term growth potential which also matched his skills. I suspect the most fortunate "luck" Carmack had wasn't picking game graphics in the early 90s, it was that (for whatever reasons) he wasn't already employed in a more typical "well-paying job with a big, stable company, great benefits and career growth potential" so he was free to find the oppty in the first place.
I had a similarly unconventional career path which, fortunately, turned out very well for me (although not quite at Carmack's scale :-)). The best luck I had actually looked like 'bad luck' to me and everyone else. Due to my inability to succeed in a traditional educational context (and other personal shortcomings), I didn't have a college degree or resume sufficient to get a "good job", so I had little choice but to take the high-risk road and figure out the unconventional approach as best I could - which involved teaching myself, then hiring myself (because no one else would) and then repeatedly failing my way through learning startup entrepreneurship until I got good at it. I think the reality is that few who succeed on the 'unconventional approach' consciously chose that path at the beginning over lower risk, more comfortable alternatives - we simply never had those alternatives to 'bravely' reject in pursuit of our dreams :-).
by mrandish
5/23/2025 at 8:41:20 AM
From the notes:"A reality check for people that think full embodied AGI is right around the corner is to ask your dancing humanoid robot to pick up a joystick and learn how to play an obscure video game."
by johnb231
5/23/2025 at 2:00:37 PM
This debate is exhausting because there's no coherent definition of AGI that people agree on.I made a google form question for collecting AGI definitions cause I don't see anyone else doing it and I find it infinitely frustrating the range of definitions for this concept:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScDF5_CMSjHZDDexHkc...
My concern is that people never get focused enough to care to define it - seems like the most likely case.
by AndrewKemendo
5/23/2025 at 6:23:36 PM
The Wikipedia article on AGI explains it well enough.Researchers at Google have proposed a classification scheme with multiple levels of AGI. There are different opinions in the research community.
by johnb231
5/23/2025 at 2:16:45 PM
It is a marketing term. That's it. Trying to exhaustively define what AGI is or could be is like trying to explain what a Happy Meal is. At it's core, the Happy Meal was not invented to revolutionize food eating. It puts an attractive label on some mediocre food, a title that exists for the purpose of advertisement.There is no point collecting definitions for AGI, it was not conceived as a description for something novel or provably existent. It is "Happy Meal marketing" but aimed for adults.
by bigyabai
5/23/2025 at 5:25:14 PM
That’s historically inaccurateMy masters thesis advisor Ben Goertzel popularized the term and has been hosting the AGI conference since 2008:
https://goertzel.org/agiri06/%5B1%5D%20Introduction_Nov15_PW...
I had lunch with Yoshua Bengio at AGI 2014 and it was most of the conversation that day
by AndrewKemendo
5/23/2025 at 5:35:04 PM
The name AGI (i.e. generalist AI) was originally intended to contrast with narrow AI which is only capable of one, or a few, specific narrow skills. A narrow AI might be able to play chess, or distinguish 20 breeds of dog, but wouldn't be able to play tic tac toe because it wasn't built for that. AGI would be able to learn to do anything, within reason.The term AGI is obviously used very loosely with little agreement to it's precise definition, but I think a lot of people take it to mean not only generality, but specifically human-level generality, and human-level ability to learn from experience and solve problems.
A large part of the problem with AGI being poorly defined is that intelligence itself is poorly defined. Even if we choose to define AGI as meaning human-level intelligence, what does THAT mean? I think there is a simple reductionist definition of intelligence (as the word is used to refer to human/animal intelligence), but ultimately the meaning of words are derived from their usage, and the word "intelligence" is used in 100 different ways ...
by HarHarVeryFunny
5/23/2025 at 6:56:40 PM
Generalization is a formal concept in machine learning and is measurable.by johnb231
5/23/2025 at 2:10:28 PM
It doesn't really seem like there's much utility in defining it. It's like defining "heaven."It's an ideal that some people believe in, and we're perpetually marching towards it
by mvkel
5/23/2025 at 2:37:38 PM
No, it’s never going to be precise but it’s important to have a good rough definition.Can we just use Morris et al and move on with our lives?
Position: Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI: https://arxiv.org/html/2311.02462v4
There are generational policy and societal shifts that need to be addressed somewhere around true Competent AGI (50% of knowledge work tasks automatable). Just like climate change, we need a shared lexicon to refer to this continuum. You can argue for different values of X but the crucial point is if X% of knowledge work is automated within a decade, then there are obvious risks we need to think about.
So much of the discourse is stuck at “we will never get to X=99” when we could agree to disagree on that and move on to considering the x=25 case. Or predict our timelines for X and then actually be held accountable for our falsifiable predictions, instead of the current vide based discussions.
by theptip
5/23/2025 at 12:44:52 PM
We don't really need AGI. We need better specialized AIs. Throw in a few specialized AIs and they will leave some impact in the society. That might not be that far away.by ferguess_k
5/23/2025 at 3:00:27 PM
Saying we don't "need" AGI is like saying we don't need electricity. Sure life existed before we had that capability, but it would be very transformative. Of course we can make specialized tools in the mean time.by nightski
5/23/2025 at 5:21:47 PM
The error in this argument is that electricity is real.by hoosieree
5/23/2025 at 6:23:56 PM
Indeed, and I'd go even further. In addition to existing, electricity is also usefully defined - which helps greatly in establishing its existence. Neither unicorns nor AGI currently exist but at least unicorns are well enough defined to establish whether an equine animal is or isn't one.by mrandish
5/23/2025 at 3:19:10 PM
Can you give an example how it would be transformative compared to specialized AI?by charcircuit
5/23/2025 at 3:32:45 PM
AGI is transformative in that it lets us replace knowledge workers completely, specialized AI requires knowledge workers to train them for new tasks while AGI doesn't.by Jensson
5/23/2025 at 4:16:11 PM
Because it could very well exceed our capabilities beyond our wildest imaginations.Because we evolved to get where we are, humans have all sorts of messy behaviours that aren't really compatible with a utopian society. Theft, violence, crime, greed - it's all completely unnecessary and yet most of us can't bring ourselves to solve these problems. And plenty are happy to live apathetically while billionaires become trillionaires...for what exactly? There's a whole industry of hyper-luxury goods now, because they make so much money even regular luxury is too cheap.
If we can produce AGI that exceeds the capabilities of our species, then my hope is that rather than the typical outcome of "they kill us all", that they will simply keep us in line. They will babysit us. They will force us all to get along, to ensure that we treat each other fairly.
As a parent teaches children to share by forcing them to break the cookie in half, perhaps AI will do the same for us.
by fennecfoxy
5/23/2025 at 8:27:26 PM
Why on earth would you want an AI that takes away our autonomy? It's wild to see someone actually advocate for this outcome.by hackinthebochs
5/23/2025 at 9:11:05 PM
There are people who enjoy being dominated, kept on a leash like a dog. Bad idea to transfer that fetish to human civilization.ASI to humans would be like humans are to rats or ants.
It could stomp all over us to achieve whatever goals it chooses to accomplish.
Humans being cared for as pets would be a relatively benign outcome.
by johnb231
5/23/2025 at 4:47:13 PM
Oh great, can't wait for our AI overlords to control us more! That's definitely compatible with a "utopian society"*.Funnily enough, I still think some of the most interesting semi-recent writing on utopia was done ~15 years ago by... Eliezer Yudkowsky. You might be interested in the article on "Amputation of Destiny."
Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-th...
by davidivadavid
5/23/2025 at 8:26:49 PM
I still don’t see an issue of billionaires becoming trillionaires and being able to buy hyper luxury goods. Good for them and good for the people selling and manufacturing those goods. Meanwhile poverty is in all time lows and there’s a growing middle class at global level. Our middle class life conditions nowadays have a level of comfort that would get Kings from some centuries ago jealous.by tirant
5/23/2025 at 9:08:13 PM
Is this meant seriously? Do we really want something more intelligent than us to just force on us it's rules, logic and ways of living (or dying), which we may be too stupid to understand?by brulard
5/23/2025 at 7:35:10 PM
Who on earth has the resources to create true AGI and is interested in using it to create this sort of utopia for the masses?If AGI is created it is most likely to be guided by someone like Altman or Musk, people whose interests couldn't be farther from what you describe. They want to make themselves gods and couldn't care less about random plebs.
If AGI is setting its own principles then I fail to see why it would care about us at all. Maybe we'll be amusing as pets but I expect a superhuman intelligence will treat us like we treat ants.
by rurp
5/23/2025 at 7:59:02 PM
I think to many AI enthusiasts, we're already at the "specialized AIs" phase. The question is whether those will jump to AGI. I'm personally unconvinced but I'm not an ML researcher so my opinion is colored by what I use and what I read, not active research. I do think though that many specialized AIs is already enough to experience massive economic disruption.by Karrot_Kream
5/23/2025 at 3:32:33 PM
What if AGI is just a bunch of specialized AIs put together?It would seem our own generalized intelligence is an emergent property of many, _many_ specialized processes
I wonder if AI is the same
by alickz
5/23/2025 at 3:59:01 PM
> It would seem our own generalized intelligence is an emergent property of many, _many_ specialized processesYou can say that about other animals, but about humans it is not so sure. No animal can be taught as general set of skills as a human can, they might have some better specialized skills but clearly there is something special that makes humans so much more versatile.
So it seems there was this simple little thing humans got that makes them general, while for example our very close relatives the monkeys are not.
by Jensson
5/23/2025 at 4:09:13 PM
Humans are the ceiling at the moment yes, but that doesn't mean the ceiling isn't higher.Science is full of theories that are correct per our current knowledge and then subsequently disproven when research/methods/etc improves.
Humans aren't special, we are made from blood & bone, not magic. We will eventually build AGI if we keep at it. However unlike VCs with no real skills except having a lot of money™, I couldn't say whether this is gonna happen in 2 years or 2000.
by fennecfoxy
5/23/2025 at 4:27:38 PM
Question was if cobbling together enough special intelligence creates general intelligence. Monkeys has a lot of special intelligence that our current AI models can't come close to, but still aren't seen as general intelligence like humans, so there is some little bit humans has that isn't just another special intelligence.by Jensson
5/23/2025 at 4:14:50 PM
It may be a property of (not only of?) humans that we can generate specialized inner processes. The hardcoded ones stay, the emergent ones come and go. Intelligence itself might be the ability to breed new specialized mental processes on demand.by mike_ivanov
5/23/2025 at 12:49:00 PM
Specialized AIs have been making an impact on society since at least the 1960s. AI has long suffered from every time they come up with something new it gets renamed and becomes important (where it makes sense) without giving AI credit.From what I can tell most in AI are currently hoping LLMs reach that point quick just because the hype is not helping AI at all.
by bluGill
5/23/2025 at 1:55:22 PM
Yesterday my dad, in his late 70's, used Gemini with a video stream to program the thermostat. He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat.You can call this hype, maybe it is all hype until LLMs can work on 10M LOC codebases, but recognize that LLMs are a shift that is totally incomparable to any previous AI advancement.
by Workaccount2
5/23/2025 at 9:00:51 PM
That is amazing. But I had a similar experience when I first taught my mum how to Google for computer problems. She called me up with delight to tell me how she fixed the printer problem herself, thanks to a Google search. In a way, LLMs are a refinement on search technology we already had.by lexandstuff
5/23/2025 at 2:20:47 PM
That is what open ai’s non-profit economic research arm has claimed. LLMs will fundamentally change how we interact with the world like the Internet did. It will take time like the Internet and a couple of hype cycle pops but it will change the way we do things.It will help a single human do more in a white collar world.
by orochimaaru
5/23/2025 at 3:29:58 PM
> He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat.Sounds like AI robbed you of an opportunity to spend some time with your Dad, to me
by bluefirebrand
5/23/2025 at 9:11:15 PM
I'm there like twice a week don't worry. He knows about Gemini because I was showing him it two days before hahby Workaccount2
5/23/2025 at 7:03:33 PM
For some of us that's a plus!by TheGRS
5/23/2025 at 4:21:50 PM
Or maybe instead of spending time with your dad on a bs menial task, you could spent time fishing with him…by jabits
5/23/2025 at 4:28:55 PM
It's nice to think that but life and relationships are also composed of the little moments, which sometimes happen when someone asks you over to help with a "bs menial task"It takes five minutes to program the thermostat, then you can have a beer on the patio if that's your speed and catch up for a bit
Life is little moments, not always the big commitments like taking a day to go fishing
That's the point of automating all of ourselves out of work, right? So we have more time to enjoy spending time with the people we love?
So isn't it kind of sad if we wind up automating those moments out of our lives instead?
by bluefirebrand
5/23/2025 at 4:05:06 PM
Yeah. As a mediocre programmer I'm really scared about this. I don't think we are very far from AI replacing the mediocre programmers. Maybe a decade, at most.I'd definitely like to improve my skills, but to be realistic, most of the programmers are not top-notch.
by ferguess_k
5/23/2025 at 3:16:50 PM
There are clearly a lot of useful things about LLMs. However there is a lot of hype as well. It will take time to separate the two.by bluGill
5/23/2025 at 1:01:05 PM
Yeah “AI” tools (such a loose term but largely applicable) have been involved in audio production for a very long time. They have actually made huge strides with noise removal/voice isolation, auto transcription/captioning, and “enhancement” in the last five years in particular.I hate Adobe, I don’t like to give them credit for anything. But their audio enhance tool is actual sorcery. Every competitor isn’t even close. You can take garbage zoom audio and make it sound like it was borderline recorded in a treated room/studio. I’ve been in production for almost 15 years and it would take me half a day or more of tweaking a voice track with multiple tools that cost me hundreds of dollars to get it 50% as good as what they accomplish in a minute with the click of a button.
by BolexNOLA
5/23/2025 at 1:35:52 PM
Bitter lesson applies here as well though. Generalized models will beat specialized models given enough time and compute. How much bespoke NLP is there anymore? Generalized foundational models will subsume all of it eventually.by danielbln
5/23/2025 at 1:59:17 PM
You misunderstand the bitter lesson.It's not about specialized vs generalized models - it's about how models are trained. The chess engine that beat Kasparov is a specialized model (it only plays chess), yet it's the bitter lesson's example for the smarter way to do AI.
Chess engines are better at chess than LLMs. It's not close. Perhaps eventually a superintelligence will surpass the engines, but that's far from assured.
Specialized AI are hardly obsolete and may never be. This hypothetical superintelligence may even decide not to waste resources trying to surpass the chess AI and instead use it as a tool.
by johnecheck
5/23/2025 at 1:44:36 PM
Generalized models might be better but they are rarely more efficient.by ses1984
5/23/2025 at 12:52:05 PM
Yeah I agree with it. There is a lot of hype, but there is some potentials there.by ferguess_k
5/23/2025 at 4:12:51 PM
Why not just hire like 100 of the smartest people across domains and give them SOTA AI, to keep the AI as accurate as possible?Each of those 100 can hire teams or colleagues to make their domain better, so there’s always human expertise keeping the model updated.
by babyent
5/23/2025 at 4:17:42 PM
"just"by trial3
5/23/2025 at 4:23:03 PM
They’re spending 10s of billions. Yes, just.200 million to have dedicated top experts on hand is reasonable.
by babyent
5/23/2025 at 2:34:33 PM
Is this supposed to be a gotcha? We know these systems are typically trained using RL and they are exceedingly good at learning games...by vonneumannstan
5/23/2025 at 6:18:11 PM
No it is not a “gotcha” and I don’t understand how you got that impression.Carmack believes AGI systems should be able to learn new tasks in realtime alongside humans in the real world.
by johnb231
5/23/2025 at 10:36:51 AM
This sounds like a problem that could be solved around the corner with a caveat.Games generally are solvable for AI because they have feedback loops and a clear success or failure criteria. If the "picking up a Joystick" part is the limiting factor, sure. But why would we want robots to use an interface (especially a modern controller) heavily optimized for human hands; that seems like the definition of a horseless carriage.
I'm sure if you compared a monkey and a dolphins performance using a joystick you'd get results that aren't really correlated with their intelligence. I would guess that if you gave robots an R2D2 like port to jack into and play a game, that problem could be solved relatively quickly.
by throw_nbvc1234
5/23/2025 at 10:52:28 AM
Just like OpenAI early on promised us an AGI and showed us how it "solved" Dota 2.They also claimed it "learned" to play by playing itself only however it was clear that most of the advanced techniques were borrowed from existing AI and by observing humans.
No surprise they gave up on that project completely and I doubt they'll ever engage in anything like that again.
Money better spent on different marketing platforms.
by xnickb
5/23/2025 at 11:34:31 AM
It also wasn't even remotely close to learning Dota 2 proper. They ran a massively simplified version of the game where the AI and humans alternated between playing one of two pre-defined team compositions, meaning >90% of the games characters and >99.999999% of the possible compositions and matchups weren't even on the table, plus other standard mechanics were also changed or disabled altogether for the sake of the AI team.Saying you've solved Dota after stripping out nearly all of its complexity is like saying you've solved Chess, but on a version where the back row is all Bishops.
by jsheard
5/23/2025 at 12:00:06 PM
Exactly. What I find surprising in this story though is not the OpenAI. It's investors not seeing through these blatant.. lets call them exaggerations of the reality and still trusting the company with their money. I know I wouldn't have. But then again, maybe that's why I'm poor.by xnickb
5/23/2025 at 12:36:39 PM
In their hearts, startup investors are like Agent Mulder: they Want To Believe. Especially after they’ve already invested a little. They are willing to overlook obvious exaggerations up to and including fraud, because the alternative is admitting their judgment is not sound.Look at how long Theranos went on! Miraculous product. Attractive young founder with all the right pedigree, credentials, and contacts, dressed in black trurtlenecks. Hell, she even talked like Steve Jobs! Investors never had a chance.
by ryandrake
5/23/2025 at 12:48:22 PM
They already have 400 million daily users and a billion people using the product, with billions of consumer subscription revenue, faster than any company ever. They are also aggregating R&D talent at a density never before seen in Silicon ValleyThat is what investors see. You seem to treat this as a purity contest where you define purity
by jdross
5/23/2025 at 1:19:29 PM
Also apparently still not making a profit.by zaphar
5/23/2025 at 12:55:51 PM
I'm speaking about past events. Perhaps I didn't make it clear enoughby xnickb
5/23/2025 at 2:04:44 PM
I agree that restricting the hero pool is a huge simplification. But they did play full 5v5 standard dota with just a restricted hero pool of 17 heroes and no illusions/control units according to theverge (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/13/18309459/openai-five-dota...). It destroyed the professionals.As an ex dota player, I don't think this is that far off from having full on, all heroes dota. Certainly not as far of as you are making it sound.
And dota is one of the most complex games, I expect for example that an AI would instantly solve CS since aim is such a large part of the game.
by rowanG077
5/23/2025 at 3:12:44 PM
> It destroyed the professionals.Only the first time, later when it played better players it always lost. Players learned the faults of the AI after some time in game and the AI had very bad late game so they always won later.
by Jensson
5/23/2025 at 3:14:51 PM
Not on the last iteration.by rowanG077
5/23/2025 at 2:23:06 PM
Another issue with the approach is that the model had direct access to game data, that is simply an unfair competitive advantage in dota, and it is obvious why that advantage would be unfair in CS.It is certainly possible, but i won't be impressed by anything "playing CS" that isn't running a vision model on a display and moving a mouse, because that is the game. The game is not abstractly reacting to enemy positions and relocating the cursor, it's looking at a screen, seeing where the baddy is and then using this interface (the mouse) to get the cursor there as quickly as possible.
It would be like letting an AI plot its position on the field and what action its taking during a football match and then saying "Look, The AI would have scored dozens of times in this simulation, it is the greatest soccer player in the world!" No, sorry, the game actually requires you to locomote, abstractly describing your position may be fun but it's not the game
by mistercheph
5/23/2025 at 3:16:10 PM
Did you read the paper? It had access to the dota 2 bot API, which is some gamestate but very far from all gamestate. It also had artifially limited reaction to something like 220ms, worse then professional gamers.But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that. It's perfectly valid to judge the best an AI can do vs the best a human can do. It's not really fair to take away exactly what a computer is good at from an AI and then say: "Look but the AI is now worse". Else you would also have to do it the other way around. How well could a human play dota if it only had access to the bot API. I don't think they would do well at all.
by rowanG077
5/23/2025 at 8:02:55 PM
> But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that.There are ~86 billion neurons in the human brain. If we assume each neuron stores a single bit a human also has access to gigabytes of working memory. If we assume each synapse is a bit that's terabytes. Petabytes is not unreasonable assuming 1kb of storage per synapse. (And more than 1kb is also not unreasonable.)
The whole point of the exercise is figuring out how much memory compares to a human brain.
by lukeschlather
5/23/2025 at 12:01:38 PM
It was 6 years ago. I'm sure now there'd be no contest now if OpenAI dedicated resources to it, which it won't because it's busy with solving entirety of human language before others eat their lunch.by scotty79
5/23/2025 at 12:40:16 PM
Funnily enough, even dota2 has grown much more complex than it was 6 years ago, so it's a harder problem to solve today than it was back thenby spektral23
5/23/2025 at 12:05:51 PM
What do you base your certainty on? Were there any significant enough breakthroughs in the AGI?by xnickb
5/23/2025 at 12:18:45 PM
ARC-AGI, while imagined as super hard for AI, was beaten enough that they had to come up with ARC-AGI-2.by scotty79
5/23/2025 at 12:45:56 PM
"AI tend to be brittle and optimized for specific tasks, so we made a new specific task and then someone optimized for it" isn't some kind of gotcha. Once ARC puzzles became a benchmark they ceased to be meaningful WRT "AGI".by hbsbsbsndk
5/23/2025 at 5:42:31 PM
So if DOTA became a benchmark same way Chess or Go became earlier it would be promptly beaten. It just didn't stick before people moved to more useful "games".by scotty79
5/23/2025 at 4:23:42 PM
To be fair humans have had quite a few million years across a growing population to gather all of the knowledge that we have.As we're learning with LLMs, the dataset is what matters - and what's awesome is that you can see that in us, as well! I've read that our evolution is comparatively slow to the rate of knowledge accumulation in the information age - and that what this means is that you can essentially take a caveman, raise them in our modern environment and they'll be just as intelligent as the average human today.
But the core of our intelligence is logic/problem solving. We just have to solve higher order problems today, like figuring out how to make that chart in excel do the thing you want, but in days past it was figuring out how to keep the fire lit when it's raining. When you look at it, we've possessed the very core of that problem solving ability for quite a while now. I think that is the key to why we are human, and our close ancestors monkeys are...still just monkeys.
It's that problem solving ability that we need to figure out how to produce within ML models, then we'll be cooking with gas!
by fennecfoxy
5/23/2025 at 10:43:32 AM
The point isn't about learning video games its about learning tasks unrelated to its specific competency generally.by mellosouls
5/23/2025 at 3:22:20 PM
> But why would we want robots to use an interface (especially a modern controller) heavily optimized for human hands; that seems like the definition of a horseless carriage.Elon's response to this is that if we want these androids to replace human jobs then the lowest friction alternative is for the android to be able to do anything a human can do in a human amount of space. A specialized machine is faster and more efficient, but comes with engineering and integration costs that create a barrier to entry. Elon learned this lesson the hard way when he was building out the gigafactories and ended up having to hire a lot of people to do the work while they sorted out the issues with the robots. To someone like Elon a payroll is an ever growing parasite on a companies bottom line, far better if the entire thing is automated.
by jandrese
5/23/2025 at 11:37:08 AM
A human would learn it faster, and could immediately teach other humans.AI clearly isn't at human level and it's OK to admit it.
by jappgar
5/23/2025 at 10:50:01 AM
No, the joystick part is really not the limiting factor. They’ve already done this with a direct software interface. Physical interface is a new challenge. But overall you are missing the point.by johnb231
5/23/2025 at 8:26:50 AM
It's because humans (and other animals) have enormous innate capacities and knowledge which makes learning new things much much simpler than if you start from scratch. It's not really because of human's computational capacity.by suddenlybananas
5/23/2025 at 1:22:14 PM
> enormous innate capacities and knowledgeHundreds of millions of years of trial-and-error biological pre-training where survival/propagation is the reward function
by xnx
5/23/2025 at 2:22:50 PM
There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it?It just isn't needed. Just like you can find let's say kangaroos in the latent space of an image generator, so we learn abstract concepts and principles of how things work as a bonus of learning to process the senses.
Maybe a way to AGI could be figuring out how to combine a video generator with a LLM or something similar in a way that allows it to understand things intuitively, instead of doing just lots and lots of some statistical bullsit.
by Nopoint2
5/23/2025 at 3:18:51 PM
> There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it?We do have that, ever felt fear of heights? That isn't learned, we are born with it. Same with fear of small moving objects like spiders or snakes.
Such things are learned/stored very different from memories, but its certainly there and we can see animals also have those. Like cats gets very scared of objects that are long and appear suddenly, like a cucumber, since their genetic instincts thinks its a snake.
by Jensson
5/23/2025 at 4:16:20 PM
> Like cats gets very scared of objects that are long and appear suddenly, like a cucumber, since their genetic instincts thinks its a snake.After having raised four dozen kittens that a couple of feral sisters gave birth to in my garage, I’m certain that is nonsense. It’s an internet meme that became urban legend.
I don’t think they have ever even reacted to a cucumber, and I have run many experiments because my childhood cat loved cucumbers (we’d have to guard the basket of cucumbers after harvest, otherwise she’d bite every single one of them… just once).
by throwup238
5/23/2025 at 3:35:02 PM
Of course it is learned, and fear is triggered by anything unfamiliar, that causes a high reconstruction error. Because it means you don't understand it, and it could be dangerous. We are just not used to encoding anything so deep below the eye level, and it freaks us out.by Nopoint2
5/23/2025 at 3:51:53 PM
Do you really think every single ant is learning all that on its own? And if ants can store that in their DNA, why don't you think other animals can? DNA works just fine as generic information storage, there are obviously a ton of behaviors and information encoded there from hundreds of millions of years of survival of the fittest.by Jensson
5/23/2025 at 9:45:25 AM
By innate do you mean evolved/instinctive? Surely even evolved behaviour must be expressed as brain function, and therefore would need a brain capable of handling that level of processing.I don't think it's clear how much of a human brains function exists at birth though, I know it's theorised than even much of the sensory processing has to be learned.
by MrScruff
5/23/2025 at 9:55:13 AM
I'm not arguing against computational theory of mind, I'm just saying that innate behaviours don't require the same level of scale as learnt ones.Existing at birth is not the same thing as innate. Puberty is innate but it is not present at birth.
by suddenlybananas
5/23/2025 at 10:10:53 AM
That's an interesting point. I can see that, as you say puberty and hormones impact brain function and hence behaviour, and those are inate and not learned. But at least superfically that would appear to be primarily broad behavioural effects, similar to what might be induced by medication. Rather than something that impacts pure abstract problem solving, which I guess is what the Atari games are supposed to represent?by MrScruff
5/23/2025 at 10:24:49 AM
This is obviously wrong from genetic defects that cause predictable development problems in specialized areas. They are innate but not present at birth.by rafaelmn
5/23/2025 at 9:09:14 AM
> the human brain, of which we don't have a clear understanding of the compute capacityNeurons have finite (very low) speed of signal transfer, so just by measuring cognitive reaction time we can deduce upper bounds on how many _consecutive_ neuron connections are involved in reception, cognitive processing, and resulting reaction via muscles, even for very complex cognitive processes. And the number is just around 100 consecutive neurons involved one after another. So “the algorithm” could not be _that_ complex in the end (100x matmul+tanh?)
Granted, a lot of parallelism and feedback loops are involved, but overall it gives me (and many others) an impression that when the AGI algorithm is ever found, it’s “mini” version should be able to run on modest 2025 hardware in real time.
by nlitened
5/23/2025 at 9:35:51 AM
> (100x matmul+tanh?)Biological neurons are way more complex than that. A single neuron has dentritic trees with subunits doing their own local computations. There are temporal dynamics in the firing sequences. There is so much more complexity in the biological networks. It's not comparable.
by johnb231
5/23/2025 at 11:07:58 AM
You could implement a Turing-machine with humans acting physically operating as logic gates. Then, every human is just a boolean function.by woolion
5/23/2025 at 3:19:54 PM
Neurons are stateful though, it is core to their function and how they learn.by Jensson
5/23/2025 at 11:16:10 AM
This is exactly it. Biology is making massive use of hacked real time local network communication in ways we haven´t begun to explore.by neffy
5/23/2025 at 9:55:41 AM
The granted is doing a lot of work there. In fact, if you imagine a computer being able to do similar tasks as human brain can in around 100 steps, it becomes clear that considering parallelism is absolutely critical.by scajanus