YouSaid · the spoken record

John Carmack

lines on the record: 363
first: 2022-08-04
most recent: 2022-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I really stay away from any of those discussions or even really thinking about it. It's similar with the safety things where I think it's just premature. And there's a certain class of people that enjoy thinking about impractical things, things that are not in the world and of pragmatic effect around you. And I think that, again, because I don't think there's going to be a fast takeoff, I think we actually will have time to have these debates when we know the shape of what we're debating. And some people do take a principled approach that they think it's going to go too fast, that you really do need to get ahead of it, that you need to be thinking about this because we have slow processes of coming Daniel kind of consensuses or even coming up with ideas about this. And maybe that's true. I wouldn't put any of my money or funding into something like that because I don't think it's a problem yet. And I think that we will have these signs of life when we've got our learning disabled toddler. We should really start talking about some of the safety and ethics issues, but probably not before then.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So a couple of things on that. So on the one hand, it is kind of disturbing when you see people being like people that are mean to robots and mean to Alexa and whatever. And that seems to speak badly about humanity. But there's also the exact opposite side of that where you have so many people that imbue humanity in inanimate objects or things that are toys or that are relatively limited. I think there may even be more danger about people putting more emotional investment into a lot of these proto-AIs in different ways”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I would say that I don't expect it to be a super critical thing that a sense of mortality and death impending death is necessary there because those are things that they do wind up providing reward signals to us. And we will be in control of the reward signals. And there will have to be something fundamental that causes that engenders curiosity and goal setting and all of that. something is going to play in there at the reward level. Whether it's positive or negative or both, I don't have any strong opinions on exactly what it's going to be, but that's that type of thing where I doubt that might be one of those half dozen key things that has to be sorted out on exactly what the master reward that's the meta reward overall of the local task specific rewards have to be.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, a super interesting angle that I don't usually take on that about has death being a deadline that forces you to make better decisions. Because I have heard people talk about how if you have immortality, people are going to stop trying and working on things because they've got all the time in the world.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this idea that I do generally subscribe to sort of the pandemonium theories of consciousness where there's all these things bubbling around and I think of them as kind of slightly randomized sparse distributed memory bit strings of things that are kind of happening, recalling different associative memories. And eventually you get some level of consensus and it bubbles up to the point of being a conscious thought there. And the little bits of stochasticity that are sitting on in this as it cycles between different things and recalls different memory, that's largely our imagination and creativity. So I don't think there's anything deeply magical about it, certainly not symbolic. I think it is generally the flow of these associations drawn up with stochastic noise overlaid on top of them. I think so much of that is like it depends on what you happen to have in your field of view as some other thought was occurring to you that overlay and blend into the next key that queries your memory.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think most of the arguments about consciousness don't have a whole lot. I think that consciousness is kind of the way the brain feels when it's operating.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't disagree. I mean, I think that there's very few things that I would argue can't be reduced to AI, some kind of a narrow AI. I think we can do trillion dollars of value easily and all the things that can be done there. And a lot of it can be done with smoke and mirrors without having to go the whole thing. I mean, there's going to be the equivalent of the doom, the Doom version for the AGI that's not really AGI. It's all smoke and mirrors, but it happens to do enough valuable things that it's enormously useful and valuable to people. But at some point, you do want to get to the point where you have the fully general thing and you stop making bespoke specialized systems for each thing and you wind up start using the higher level language instead of writing everything in assembly language.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you're down to a dollar an hour. And then you're kind of like, well, I should have an entourage of AIs that are following me around, helping me out on anything that I want them to do.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The memory bandwidth trade offs means you get 128 of them at the same time. And either it's all feeding together, learning in parallel, or kind of all running together, kind of talking to a bunch of people. But still, if you've got thousands of GPUs necessary to run these things, it's going to be kind of expensive where it might start off $1,000 an hour for even post-development or something for that, which would be something that you would only use for a business, you know, something where you think they're going to help you make a strategic decision or point out something super important. But I also am completely confident that we will have another factor of a thousand in cost performance increase in AGI type calculations, not in general computing necessarily, but there's so much more that we can do with packaging, making those right trade-offs, all those same types of things that in the next couple decades,”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's going to start off hugely expensive. I mean, you're going to, if we're still all guessing about what compute is going to be necessary, I fall on the side of I don't think you run the numbers and you're like 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses. I don't think those all need to be weights. I don't think we need models that are quite that big evaluated quite that often. I base that on. We've got reasonable estimates of what some parts of the brain do. We don't have the neocortex formula, but we kind of get some of the other sensory processing and it doesn't feel like we need to. We can simulate that in computers for less weights. But still, it's probably going to be thousands of GPUs to be running a human level AGI, depending on how it's implemented. That might give you sort of a clan of 128 kind of run-in batch people, depending on whether they're sparsity in the way the weights and things are set up. If it is a reasonably dense thing, then just”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computers, but it should be able to interact on a Zoom meeting with people. And that's how you also do start convincing people, even if it's not a robot body moving around, which eventually gets to irrefutable levels. But if you can go ahead and not just type back and forth to a GPT bot on something, but you're literally talking to them in a embodied over Zoom form and working through problems with them or exploring situations, having conversations that are fully stateful and learned. I think that that's a valuable thing. So I do keep all of my eyes on things that can be implemented within sort of that 30 frames per second kind of work. And I think that's feasible.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then self play, I do think, is one of the critical things where socialization wise, one of the other limitations I set for myself thinking about these is I need something that is at least potentially real time because I want, it's nice you can always slow down time. You can run on a subscale system and test an algorithm at some lower level. And if you've got extra horsepower running it faster than real time is a great thing. I want to be able to have the AIs either socially interact with each other or critically with actual people. Your sort of child development psychiatrist that comes in and interacts and does the good boy, bad boy sort of thing as they're going through and exploring different things. And it's nice to, I come back to the value of constraints in a lot of ways. And if I say, well, one of my constraints is real-time operation. I mean, it might still be a huge data center full of.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like one of the really practical technical questions that I kind of keep arguing with myself over, if you're doing a training and learning and you've got, like you can watch Sesame Street, you can play master system games. And I think it's possible to maybe get past some of these signs of life of things with the just kind of projected directly into the receptor fields. But eventually for more kind of human emotional connection for things, probably having some VR room with a lot of screens in it for the AI to be learning in is likely helpful.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's enough businesses that operate on an objective kind of profit loss sort of basis that, I mean, if you look at how many things, again, talking about the world as an evolutionary space there, when you do have free markets and you have entrepreneurs, you're going to have people that are going to be willing to go out and try whatever crazy things. And when it proves to be beneficial, there's fast followers in all sorts of places.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the thing that finally convinces people. But again, I don't really care that much about convincing people. The world that I'm looking towards is, you know, you go to the website and say, I want five franc 1As to, you know, to work on my team today. And they all spin up and they start showing up in your Zoom meetings.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I do think that once you have an AGI, robotic bodies, humanoid bodies are going to be enormously valuable. I just don't think they're helpful getting to AGI”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reality is a bitch in so many ways, there we're dealing with all the mechanical components, like everything fails. Murphy's law, even if you've done it right before on your fifth one, it might come out differently. So, yeah, I think that anybody that is all in on the embodied aspect of it, they are tying a huge weight to their ankles. And I think that I would almost count them out. Anybody that's making that a cornerstone of their belief about it, I would almost write them off as being worried about them getting to AGI first. I was very surprised that Elon's big on the humanoid robots. I mean, like the NASA robot stuff was always almost a gagline. Like, what are you doing, people?”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I have a clear opinion on that, and that's that, no, it does not need to be embodied in the physical world, where you could say most of my career is about making simulated virtual worlds in games or virtual reality. And so on a fundamental level, I believe that you can make a simulated environment that provides much of the value of what the real environment does and restricting yourself to operating at real time in the physical world with physical objects, I think is an enormous handicap. I mean, that's one of the real lessons driven home by all my aerospace work is that, you know,”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tesla being a super pragmatic company that's doing things because they really want to solve this actual problem. It's a different vibe than the research oriented companies where it's a great time to be an AI researcher. You've got your pick of trillion dollar companies that will, you know, that will pay you to kind of work on the problems you're interested in, but that's not necessarily driving hard towards the core problem of AGI as something that's going to produce a lot of value by doing things that people currently do or would like to do.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a funny thing because, as far as I can tell, Elon is completely serious about all of his concerns about AGI, you know, being an existential threat. And I tried to draw him out to talk about AI. He just didn't want to. And I think that. I get that little fatalistic sense from. I mean, it's weird because his company could very well be the leading company leading towards a lot of that where”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of that puzzle. And we've got again, I have all the respect in the world for the amazing things that are being done now, but sometimes they can be taken a little bit out of context with things like there's some smoke and mirrors going on, like Gato, the recent work, the multitask learning stuff.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the idea that anything that can be done with a narrow AI that you can quantify up a loss function for or reward mechanism, you're almost certainly going to be able to produce something that's more resource effective to train and deploy and use in an inference mode, you know, train a whole lot using an inference. A living being is going to be something that's a continuous, lifelong learned, task agnostic thing.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally, the brain is a recurrent neural network generating an action policy. I mean, it's implemented on a biological substrate. And it's interesting thinking about things like that, where we know fundamentally the brain is not a convolutional neural network or a transformer. Those are specialized things that are very valuable for what we're doing. But it's not the way the brain's doing. Now, I do think consciousness and AI in general is a substrate independent mechanism where it doesn't have to be implemented the way the brain is, but if you've only got one existence proof, there's certainly some value in caring about what it says and does.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There have been incredible things happening in recent years. Like you say, all of the things from DeepMind and OpenAI that have been huge showpiece things. But when you really get down to it and you read the papers and you look at the way the models are going, it's still like a feed forward. You push something in, something comes out on the end. I mean, maybe there's diffusion models or Monte Carlo tree rollouts and different things going on, but it's not a being. It's not close to a being that's going through a lifelong learning process.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There will always be people that just won't believe it. And I fundamentally don't care. I mean, I don't care if they don't believe it. When it starts doing people's jobs and, I mean, I don't care about the philosophical zombie argument at all.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the example I give it, if we get to the point where you've got a learning disabled toddler, some kind of real special needs child that can still interact with their favorite TV show and video game and can be trained and learned in some appreciably human-like way at that point, you can deploy an army of engineers, cognitive scientists, educational education people. You've got so many advantages there unlike real education where you can do rollbacks and A-B testing and you can find a golden path through a curriculum of different things. If you get to that point, learning disabled toddler, I think that it's going to be a done deal.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human voice box and let it start learning human words. I think that animal intelligence is closer to human intelligence than a lot of people like to think. And I think that culture and modalities of I.O. make the gulf seem a lot bigger than it actually is. There's just that smooth spectrum of how the brain developed and cortexes and scaling of different things going on there.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“couple hundred years might be centuries and the median estimate would be like 50 70 years and it's been coming down and i know with me saying eight years for something that still puts me on the optimistic side but it's not crazy out in the fringes and just being able to look at that at a meta level about the trend of the the trend of the predictions going down there the idea that something could be happening relatively soon now I do not believe in fast takeoffs. You know, that's one of the safety issues that people say it's like, oh, it's going to go boom and the AI is going to take over the world. There's a lot of reasons. I don't think that's a credible position. And I think that we will go from a point where we start seeing things that credibly look like animals' behaviors and have a human voice box wired into them. It's like I tried to get Elon to say it's like you're pig at Neurolink.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's likely the case. One of the things that appeals to so many people, including me, about the promise of AGI is we know that we're only drinking from a straw, from the fire hose of all the information out there. I mean, you look at just in a very narrowly bounded field like machine learning, like you can't read all the papers that come out all the time. You can't go back and read all the clever things that people did in the 90s or earlier that people have forgotten about because they didn't pan out at the time when they were trying to do them with 12 neurons. So this idea that, yeah, I think there are gems buried in some of the older literature that was not the path taken by everything. And you can see it kind of herd mentality on the things that happen right now. It's almost funny to see it's like, oh, Google.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remote workers where anything that somebody does mediated by a computer and doesn't require physical interaction, that an AGI will be able to do, we can already simulate the equivalent of the Zoom meetings with avatars and synthetic deepfakes and whatnot. We can definitely do that. We have superhuman capabilities on any narrow thing that we can formalize and make a loss function for. But there's things we don't know how to do now. But I don't think they are unapproachably hard. Now that's incredibly hubristic to say that it's like, but I think that what I said a couple years ago is a 50% chance that somewhere there will be signs of life of AGI in 2030. And I've probably increased that slightly. I may be at 55, 60% now because I do think there's a little sense of acceleration there.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thousands of lines of code, not millions of lines of code. This is code that conceivably one individual could write, unlike writing a new web browser or operating system. And based on the progress that AI has, machine learning has made in the recent decade, it's likely that the important things that we don't know are relatively simple. There's probably a handful of things, and my bet is that I think there's less than six key insights that need to be made each one of them can probably be written on the back of an envelope. We don't know what they are, but when they're put together in concert with GPUs at scale and the data that we all have access to, that we can make something that behaves like a human being or like a living creature and that can then be educated in whatever ways that we need to get to the point where we can have universal”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You build it, power your building off of it, and then the government, I think, will come around to what you need to, everybody loves an existence proof. I think it's possible. Somebody should be doing this, but it's going to involve some politics. It's going to involve decent-sized teams and a bunch of this cross-functional stuff that I don't love. The artificial general intelligence side of things, it seems to me like this is the highest leverage moment for potentially a single individual, potentially in the history of the world, where the things that we know about the brain, about what we can do with artificial intelligence, nobody can say absolutely on any of these things, but I am not a madman for saying that it is likely that the code for artificial general intelligence is going to be tens of”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AGI wise, I was making this decision about what do I want to focus on after VR. And I'm still working on VR regularly. I spend a day a week kind of consulting with Meta and Ba's styles me the consulting CTO as kind of like the Sherlock Holmes that comes in and consults on some of the specific tough issues. And I'm still pretty passionate about all of that. But I have been figuring out how to compartmentalize and force that into a smaller box to work on some other things. And I did come down to this decision between working on economical nuclear fission or artificial general intelligence. And the fission side of things, I've got a bunch of interesting things going that way, but it would take, that would be a fairly big project thing to do. I don't think it needs to be as big as people expect. I do think something original SpaceX.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In different ways, but it's one of those things that it's just strange how we've had the technology sitting there, but these non-technical reasons on the social optics of it has been this major forcing function for something that really should be at the cornerstone of all of the world's concerns with energy. It's interesting how the non-technical factors have really dominated something that is so fundamental to kind of the existence of the human race as we know it today.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be most of it. Like the reserves of uranium as it stands now could not power the whole earth. But I am, you know, you get into breeder reactors and thorium and things like that that you do for conventional fission, there is enough for everything. Now, I mean, photovoltaic has been amazing. One of my current projects is working on an off-grid system, and it's been fun just kind of, again, putting my hands on all this, stripping the wires and wiring things together and doing all of that. And just having followed that a little bit from the outside over the last couple decades, there's been semiconductor-like magical progress in what's going on there. So I'm all for all of that, but it doesn't solve everything. And nuclear really still does seem like the smart money bet for what you should be getting for baseband on a lot of things. And solar may be cheaper for peeking over air conditioning loads during the summer and things that you can push around.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do want to say a quick thing about nuclear energy, where this is something that is so precisely feels like aerospace before SpaceX, where from everything that I know about all of these, the physics of this stuff hasn't changed. And the reasons why things are expensive now are not fundamental. Somebody should be going into really hard Elon Musk style at economical fission, not fusion, where the fusion is the kind of the darling of people that want to go and do nuclear because it doesn't have the taint that fission has in a lot of people's minds. But it's an almost absurdly complex thing where nuclear fusion is you look at the tokamax or any of the things that people are building.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need to actually build self driving cars. And I think that the narrow systems are going to have real value demonstrated well before then.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is one of those interesting things that there have been a lot of studies about how experts in their field usually underestimate the progress that's going to happen because an expert thinks about all the problems they deal with and they're like, damn, I'm going to have a hard time solving all of this. And they filter out the fact that they are one expert in a field of thousands. And you think about, yeah, I can't do all of that. And you sometimes forget about the scope of the ecosystem that you're embedded in. And if you think back eight years very specifically, the state of AI and machine learning, where we had just gotten ResNetz probably at that point, and you look at all the amazing magical things that have happened in eight years and they do kind of seem to be happening a little faster in recent years also. And you project that eight more years into the future, where, again, I think there's a 50% chance we're going to have signs of life of AGI, you know, which we can put through driver's ed.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the other side of that is people are terrible drivers. It is not going to be, that's probably going to be the argument that gets it through is like we can save 10,000 lives a year by taking imperfect self-driving cars and letting them take over a lot of driving responsibilities. It's like, was it 30,000 people a year die in auto accidents right now in America? And a lot of those are preventable. And the problem is you'll have people that every time a Tesla crashes into something, you've got a bunch of people that literally have vested interests shorting Tesla to come out and make it the worst thing in the world. And people will be fighting against that, but optimist in me again, I think that we will have systems that are statistically safer than human drivers and we will be saving.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that it's going to happen probably more so than people expect. But it's that whole sigmoid curve where you overestimate the near-term progress and you underestimate the long-term progress. And I think self-driving is going to be like that. And I think 2030 is still a pretty good bet.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because if Elon went away and SpaceX went public and got aboard of directors, there are more profitable things they could be doing than focusing on human presence on Mars. So this really is a sort of personal thing there. In contrast with that, self-driving cars have a dozen credible companies working really hard. And while yes, it's going slower than most people thought it would. betting against that is a bet against almost the entire world in terms of all of these companies that have all of these incentives. It's not just one guy's passion project. And I do think that it is solvable. Although there's, I recognize it's not 100% chance because it's possible the long tail of self-driving problems winds up being an AGI complete problem. I think there's plenty of value to mine out of it with narrow AI.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the difference is everybody looks at this, it's like, oh, but Tesla's been wrong for years. They've been promising it for years and it's not here yet. And the reason this is different than the bet with Mars is Mars really is more than is comfortable a bet on Elon Musk. That is his thing. And he is really going to move heaven and earth to try to make that happen.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I, yeah, I mean, he doesn't think that people are going to be riding around in robotaxis in 2030 in major cities just like you take an Uber now. And I think it will.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is in contrast to the other $10,000 bet I made kind of recently. And that was self-driving cars at like a level five running around cities. And people have kind of nitpicked that we probably don't mean exactly level five, but the guy I'm having the bet with is we're going to be, we know what we mean about this. Jeff Fat.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As soon as they started thinking, it's like, oh, I could lose money by keeping my position right now. And all these engineers, they engage their brain. They started thinking it's like, okay, launch windows, launch delays, like how many times would it take to get this right? What historical precedents do we have? And then it mostly came down to it's like, well, what about in transit by 2030? And then what about different things or would you, would you go for 2032? But one of the people did go ahead and was optimistic enough to make a bet with me. So I have a $10,000 bet that by 2030, I think it's going to happen shortly thereafter. I think there will probably be infrastructure on Mars by 2030, but I don't think that we'll have humans on Mars on 23. I think it's possible, but I think it's less than a 50% chance, so I felt safe making that bet.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not going to happen. And this was really a startling thing to see that again, room full of brilliant people. But as soon as like money came on the line and they were like, do I want to put 10,000? And I was not the richest person in the room. There are people much better off than I was. There's a spectrum, but I”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I do. In fact, I made a bet with someone, with a group of people, kind of this, about whether Boots on Mars by 2030. And this was kind of a fun story because I was an Intel sponsored event and we had a bunch of just world-class brilliant people and we were talking about computing stuff but the after-dinner conversation was like what are some other things how are they going to go in the future? And one of the ones tossed up on the whiteboard was like boots on Mars by 2030. And most of the people in the room thought, yes, they thought that like SpaceX is kicking ass. We've got all this possible stuff. Seems likely that it's going to go that way. And I said, no, I think less than 50% chance that it's going to make it there. And people, you know, were kind of like, oh, why the pessimism or whatever? And of course, I'm an optimist at almost everything. But for me to be the one kind of outlier saying, no, I don't think so. Then I started saying some of the things. I said, well, let's be concrete about it. I bet $10,000 that it's.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's kind of a weird thing, just like having a discussion with, he's the richest man in the world right now, but he operates on a level that is still very much in my wheelhouse on a technical side of things.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're talking very detailed things about how this weld is made, how this subassembly goes together. What are like startups shutdown behaviors of the different things? So he is really in there at a very detailed level. And I think that he is the best modern example now of someone that tries to, that can effectively micromanage some decisions on things on both Tesla and SpaceX to some degree where he cares enough about it. I worry a lot that he stretched too thin, that you get boring company and neuralink on Twitter and all the other possible things there, where I know I've got limits on how much I can pay attention to that I have to kind of box off different amounts of time. And I look back at my aerospace side of things. It's like I did not go all in on that. I did not commit myself at a level that it would have taken.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was never going to impact me or my family if it completely failed. And I was still hedging my bets, working at in software at the time when he had been really all in there. And I have a huge amount of respect for that. And people do not, the other thing I get irritated with is people that say it's like, oh, Elon's just a business guy. He just got like he was gifted the money and he's just kind of investing in all of this. He was really deeply involved in a lot of the decisions. You know, not all of them were perfect, but he cared very much about engine material selection, propellant selection. And for years, he'd be kind of telling me it's like, get off that hydrogen peroxide stuff. It's like, you know, liquid oxygen is the only proper oxidizer for this. And I am, you know, and like the times that I've gone through the factories with him.”
2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source