Carmack is an accomplished and inventive engineer. He is not and would never claim to be the most important graphics researcher of his generation.

How can you rank him against AI researchers, a field where he has not attempted to contribute?

Not to mention all the mathematicians who contributed to the theoretical foundations of machine learning.

This announcement is meaningless IMO. Those who will make meaningful, core contributions to AI tech are doing it with pen and paper, not computers.

Carmack has had a lot of commercial success, which is great and I value his creativity in the space but working on a research question that is about ten paradigm shifts away is a different task than putting in hard labour to build games.

And maybe the output is he helps bring about one of those ten paradigm shifts, which would be a wonderful success. He didn’t say “solve” it, he said work on it.

That first line is pure nonsense.