[Solvency]

Do you think Carmack, deep down, wonders why he let himself miss the boat on the LLM revolution? He spent golden years toiling away in Facebook, only to finally announce he was quitting to focus on AGI... only for the world to be taken by storm by transformers, GPT, Midjourney, etc.

If anyone could have been at the forefront of this wave, it could've been him.

And now the landscape has utterly changed and no one is even convinced they need "AGI". Just a continually refined LLM hooked up to tools and other endpoints.

[jjtheblunt]

> If anyone could have been at the forefront of this wave, it could've been him.

Why does DOOM and clever programming on a NeXT imply what you assert?

[arketyp]

Indeed. Carmack wasn't simply betting on VR; more specifically, he was working on VR for mobile devices, where his expertise was a good fit.

[lyu07282]

I sometimes wonder what could've happened if he stuck to the 3d graphics space. He once was a great innovator, wolfenstein, doom then quake, he did some innovation in Rage / id Tech 5 with infinite texture streaming but it was full of technical issues. Ultimately around doom 3 / rage, it felt like id software wasn't anything special anymore, they were brought out and then he left Id.

Now the last major innovation in the space came from epic games / unreal engine.

[WithinReason]

He did his best work when he wrote the entire engine alone. That's no longer possible. You can however plausibly invent AGI alone. He said that an AGI implementation is likely simple (meaning not complex), and I agree. The difficulty is in the method not lines of code, so it's work that fits him.

[Swizec]

The biggest problem with AGI is definitional. How will we know when we see it?

Once that little detail gets solved, who’s to say that “refined LLM hooked up to tools and other specialized LLMs” won’t be it? Sure could be.

But it also could not be! AGI has been right around the corner my whole life and even longer. 50 years at least. Every new AI discovery is on the verge of AGI until a few years later it hits a wall. Research is hard like that.

[jojobas]

With everything Carmack achieved two things dumbfounded me: his sycophantic relationship with Jobs (who apparently almost succeeded in getting him to postpone his wedding so that he could appear on some Apple event) and that he would go near Facebook at all.

Talk about having "fuck you" money but just not willing to say "fuck you".

[moomoo11]

maybe he gets to go to Mars and set up a research facility there.