I have studied Rich's RL book (both editions), and enjoy his work and occasional talks on YouTube. Carmack is obviously talented. In the referenced YouTube announcement Carmack basically said that the average person should not really care about what they are doing right now, and the way they are funded they can take their time, not rush out any public systems or projects, etc. - at least that is the way I interpreted what he said.<p>Off topic, but: I used to think AGI was likely, but probably not until maybe 2040. After doing a deep dive into LLMs in the last 2 years, and generally deep learning for the eight years before that, I now think there is some real chance of having something that I consider AGI by 2030. Lately LLMs have become a little useful for graph datastore, KGs, etc. I think the missing piece is the ability of LLMs to handle reasoning, and seeing GPT-4's ability to write Prolog code given a problem description, it doesn't strain my imagination too much to think a breakthrough for reasoning could be here in a year or less.