I wouldn't bet against him. "The Bitter Lesson" may imply an advantage to someone who historically has been at the tip of the spear for squeezing the most juice out of GPU hosted parallel computation.
Graphics rendering and AI live on the same pyramid of technology. A pyramid with a lot of bricks with the initials "JC" carved into them, as it turns out.
I would be long carmack in the sense that I think he will have good judgement and taste running a business but I really don't see anything in common between AI and graphics.
Maybe someone better at aphorisms than me can say it better but I really don't see it. There are definitely mid-level low hanging fruits that would look like the kinds of things he did in graphics but the game just seems completely different.
What has "Graphics Carmack" actually done since about 2001?
So, his initial tech was "Adaptive tile refresh" in Commander Keen, used to give it console style pixel-level scrolling. Turns out, they actually hampered themselves in Commander Keen 1 by not understanding the actual tech, and implemented "The Jolt", a feature that was not necessary. The actual hardware implemented scrolling the same way that consoles like the NES did, and did not need "the jolt", nor the limitations it imposed.
Then, Doom and Quake was mostly him writing really good optimizations of existing, known and documented algorithms and 3D techniques, usually by recognizing what assumptions they could make, what portions of the algorithm didn't need to be recalculated when, etc. Very talented at the time, but in the software development industry, making a good implementation of existing algorithms that utilize your specific requirements is called doing your job. This is still the height of his relative technical output IMO.
Fast Inverse Square Root was not invented by him, but was floating around in industry for a while. He still gets kudos for knowing about it and using it.
"Carmack's reverse" is a technique for doing stencil shadows that was a minor (but extremely clever) modification to the "standard" documented way of doing shadow buffers. There is evidence of the actual technique from a decade before Carmack put it in Doom 3 and it was outright patented by two different people the year before. There is no evidence that Carmack "stole" or anything this technique, it was independent discovery, but was clearly also just a topic in the industry at the time.
"Megatextures" from Rage didn't really go anywhere.
Did Carmack actually contribute anything to VR rendering while at Oculus?
People treat him like this programming god and I just don't understand. He was well read, had a good (maybe too good) work ethic, and was very talented at writing 386 era assembly code. These are all laudable, but doesn't in my mind imply that he's some sort of 10X programmer who could revolutionize random industries that he isn't familiar with. 3D graphics math isn't exactly difficult.
Exactly. I know him and like him. He is a genius programmer for sure BUT people forget that the last successful product that he released was Doom 3 over 20 years ago. Armadillo was a failure and Oculus went nowhere.
He's also admitted he doesn't have much of math chops, which you need if you want to make a dent in AI. (Although the same could have been said of 3D graphics when he did Wolfenstein and Doom, so perhaps he'll surprise us)
Rage was released in 2011. His work at Meta produced highly optimized standalone VR. Whether you think it's successful or not, the tracking accuracy and latency is extremely competitive.
What has he shipped in the last 20 years? Oculus is one thing, but that was firmly within his wheelhouse of graphics optimization. Abrash and co. handled the hardware side of things.
Carmack is a genius no doubt. But genius is the result of intense focused practice above and beyond anyone else in a particular area. Trying
to extend that to other domains has been the downfall of so many others like him.
None of them came close to the success of Quake, Doom or Commander Keen.
If you examine the list it includes games like "Gunman Taco Truck" by his 12yo sun, SIGIL I/II (Doom mods) and a remake of Dangerous Dave. Most of the money he made post-id came from Facebook farming games.
I'm not saying he's doing nothing. He's extremely talented and achieved more than most of us could ever dream of. I'm just pointing out that after he departed from id neither id nor him managed to replicate the earlier success. Who knows, maybe times had changed and it would be the same even if he stayed.
Their success with Doom and Quake was a confluence of things that cannot be replicated today. Carmack's programming talent gave them at least a year head start versus the competition. They introduced a new genre with no competition. Romero wrote game development tools that made them productive and able to deliver quickly. The artists and game designers created something innovative and fun to play, that stood the test of time.
Duke Nukem was released in 1996, then Unreal was released in 1998 and that's when they lost their technical advantage. The market became saturated with FPS.
Romero and Tom Hall founded Ion Storm which produced one successful game - Deus Ex. He gave up on AAA and went back to creating small games.
Carmack's licensed code was the basis of many successful games beyond the 90s, including Half Life 1 and 2 and the latest Doom games. We wouldn't have Half Life without id Software. Maybe Valve Software wouldn't exist.
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. People often fall into the trap of thinking that because they are highly intelligent and an expert in one domain that this makes them an expert in one or more other domains. You see this all the time.
> People often fall into the trap of thinking that because they are highly intelligent and an expert in one domain that this makes them an expert in one or more other domains.
While this is certainly true, I'm not aware of any evidence that Carmack thinks this way about himself. I think he's been successful enough that's he's personally 'post-economic' and is choosing to spend his time working on unsolved hard problems he thinks are extremely interesting and potentially tractable. In fact, he's actively sought out domain experts to work with him and accelerate his learning.
Bayesian reasoning isn't a fallacy. A known expert in one domain is often correct about things in a related one. The post didn't claim that Carmack is right, just that that he's who they would bet on to be right, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
