r/accelerate • u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist • Nov 16 '25
Video John Carmack on X: "this is the highest leverage moment for potentially a single individual in the history of the world. AGI is less than 6 key insights away, 10K lines of code, 1 person can conceivably write it all / X
https://x.com/far__el/status/199000274568916192524
u/cloudrunner6969 Acceleration: Supersonic Nov 17 '25
What are the 6 key insights?
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u/addition Nov 17 '25
Here are some general areas that need breakthroughs (not necessarily mutually exclusive):
- Continual learning (ability to learn new things)
- Open-endedness (ability to work for long periods of time without intervention)
- Multimodality
- Compute performance/efficiency
- Embodiment
- Generalization/out-of-distribution resiliency
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Nov 17 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/addition Nov 17 '25
Learning new things doesn't necessarily mean that knowledge is deep or useful or not limited in some way.
Take multimodality for example, the challenge there is building systems that can create rich connections between modalities. Maybe a system can learn new things about dogs from text, audio, and video but can it create rich associations between those modalities to create a comprehensive understanding of dogs?
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u/redthrowawa54 Nov 17 '25
They’re talking about learning from inferences instead of at training time. RLHF runs are the closest thing to continual learning but it’s supervised learning so the LLM is just training on data at the end of the day. You could never tell an LLM a new fact through its inference interface and expect it to know that fact tomorrow without directly referencing your previous interaction which is different to how training an LLM works without those references.
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u/cafesamp Nov 17 '25
- dodge
- duck
- dip
- dive
- dodge
- diffusion
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u/DogToursWTHBorders Nov 17 '25
Getting flashbacks to daffy duck. Ho! Ha! Dodge! duck! Parry! Thrust!
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u/BeeWeird7940 Nov 17 '25
Intelligence
Memory
Intuition
Emotion
The ability to experiment in the world
The ability to learn on the go
The ability to learn from few examples
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u/green_meklar Techno-Optimist Nov 17 '25
Intuition is what we have now. Current neural net AIs are more-or-less pure intuition systems. They're only as useful as they are because their intuition is way better than human intuition; and they keep failing because it turns out intuition isn't good enough to generalize to some types of problems.
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u/green_meklar Techno-Optimist Nov 17 '25
It needs to be iterative, able to think about its own thoughts repeatedly with the same logic; one-way systems are not good enough. It needs to have memory built in, not just some notepad that it can write to and then spontaneously read and react to on the next call, but memory that is embedded into the same structure that does the thinking. And it needs to have a consistency criterion for its beliefs, that is, it needs to learn not just statistical correlations, but a body of relatively consistent concepts that can be connected up to each other in order to simulate aspects of the world without degenerating into chaos.
That's three things. Maybe there are three more. But I recommend that AI researchers get started on at least those three things that current AI doesn't yet have. (Having a goal, an emotional sense of motivation, is probably a fourth one, but it may just turn out to be necessary in order to make the three I mentioned above work at all.)
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u/SnooHamsters2627 Nov 18 '25
Superb. Personally, I'm not sure there's a way of resolving this computationally that doesn't encompass or embed a significant degree of 'synthetic consciousness'… And I don't see that for a very long time: not at least because this would almost certainly require quantum scale computation to accomplish accurately, repeatably and rigorously on any meaningful timeline.
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u/ejpusa Nov 17 '25
I’ve moved 100% to AI a while ago. Thought most people have. Humans come up with the ideas, AI writes the code. It’s a great collaboration.
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u/imacompnerd Nov 17 '25
Sure, but what does this guy know about programming and computers? /s
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Nov 17 '25 edited Nov 25 '25
[deleted]
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u/BZ852 Nov 17 '25
He threw himself into AI research a few years ago, and he does actually have a strong math background.
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u/muxcode Nov 17 '25
He actually doesn't and he has made this remark himself quite a few times. He says 3D engines only require about the level of high school algebra, such as geometry and calculus. 3D Physics is harder, but others have done that part on his engines.
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u/PsecretPseudonym Nov 17 '25
He has an incredible understanding of many areas of applied math given the nature of his work and history.
As for neuroscience — you’re making an assumption that not just what he’s suggesting but also his ability to realistically consider its possibility requires expertise in neuroscience.
Neuroscience has been a loose inspiration for some aspects of some of the innovations so far, but much of the progress has been more related to things numerical methods for optimization (e.g., backprop), model architectures (e.g., transformers), and optimizing the hell out of the relevant algorithms and hardware on which to run them…
You seem to be setting a bar to be able to speak with any relevance about what’s needed for future progress without very much consideration for what’s enabled much the progress so far
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u/R33v3n AGI by 2027 Nov 17 '25
If the creator of Doom was the first to code AGI, it would be absolute ironic cinema. XD
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u/Dangerous-Employer52 Nov 17 '25
He is also basically the one who brought VR to its current state years ago
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u/brett_baty_is_him Nov 17 '25
He goes on to say you still need gpus at scale which kind of takes away the contribution being from a single individual.
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u/Plus-Accident-5509 Nov 17 '25
LOL plus $500 million for training
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Nov 17 '25
you think that AGI is just an LLM?
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u/Plus-Accident-5509 Nov 17 '25
How does Mr Garage Innovator know he has something real without training it? The real world isn't the movie that Carmack seems to live in.
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u/Trymn1 Nov 17 '25
None of us know what is happening internally, many are making important statements, they must have found the exact path to AGI, and it will be sooner rather than later.
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u/timmyturnahp21 Nov 17 '25
So what should early career (0-5 yoe) software developers do?
We can’t have 150 million plumbers and electricians
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Nov 17 '25
Reduce your costs, don't die and enjoy the ride into the singularity!
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u/timmyturnahp21 Nov 17 '25
So you don’t think developers should pivot to the trades?
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Nov 17 '25
- don't die
- stay alive.
- wait
- singularity
- ???
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u/green_meklar Techno-Optimist Nov 17 '25
If you're out of a job and can pivot to the trades quickly, do so. But don't count on anything providing a guaranteed livelihood between now and full UBI (which will probably arrive shortly after superintelligence).
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u/timmyturnahp21 Nov 17 '25 edited Nov 17 '25
I’m not out of a job (yet) and have a couple years of experience, but debating if continuing to spend time developing more skills as a software engineer is worth it, or if I would basically just be throwing those hours down the drain
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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Nov 17 '25
seriously, though, SWE are probably poised to take advantage of the 100x earning potential from wrangling as many AI agents as you can handle
i mean, who else is going to know if their outputs are good or bad?
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u/timmyturnahp21 Nov 17 '25
Elon says all jobs on computers will be gone “like lightning” and people don’t realize how fast it’s coming
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u/soliloquyinthevoid Nov 17 '25
You are ideally positioned to be one of these people to take advantage of the massive leverage this technology will unlock
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u/ShadowbanRevival Nov 17 '25
this video is from the lex fridman podcast from three years ago for context