Recent Posts
Social•Feb 12, 2026
Low IQ, High Agency: AI Trust Wins
The modern age has richly rewarded people with a combination of high intelligence and high agency. Now that many aspects of intelligence are successfully being automated, it seems likely that people with relatively lower intelligence but exceptional agency will come into their own if they are willing to egolessly accept AI advice. Imagine a ruthless criminal that completely trusts everything their always-on AI glasses are telling them, knowing that it is carefully looking out for their best interests and isn’t scheming to betray them.
By John Carmack
Social•Jan 6, 2026
Baseline Agent Outperforms Standard Algorithms in Physical Atari Replication
Another RL team replicated our Physical Atari work and compared my baseline agent against several standard algorithms. https://t.co/uyWjFXxnZO
By John Carmack
Social•Jan 2, 2026
PyTorch's 64‑bit Index Standard Simplifies Development
Pytorch made the right call standardizing on signed 64 bit indexes. I would probably still be rather pointlessly making case by case decisions to use int32 if it were an option. Some old habits linger.
By John Carmack
Social•Dec 23, 2025
Will Journals Reject Papers Using Real Code Variable Names?
Would papers get rejected if they used legal code with variable names instead of Greek laden pseudo code?
By John Carmack
Social•Dec 21, 2025
Online Learning Bridges Performance Gaps Between Identical Robots
Some interesting experiments with our “physical Atari” RL framework — one of our main points was that the flawless simulators didn’t transfer well at all to the messy reality of cameras and servos, but perhaps less obviously, even transferring from...
By John Carmack
Social•Dec 16, 2025
Weight Decay Softly Prunes Noisy Features, Not Just Simplicity
Weight decay is usually presented as “encouraging simpler solutions”, but I tend to think that the real benefit is the soft pruning of noisy / unhelpful features. Without decay, a weight can random-walk to a large value even if the...
By John Carmack