John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence
I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different.<p>From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months, and is just banking on PR based on his games and name.<p>I put him into the same category as Elon Musk, who also understand nothing about technical details of AI, but was still able to hire a world class team at OpenAI. His name and fame counts for something in terms of recruiting and joining his venture may be a good bet because of that, but he's not a person whose opinion on the subject matter I would take seriously in the same way I'd take a researcher seriously.