2026-09-20 (backfill note — Carmack-timeline re-poll surfaced his
Jul–Aug history; content dates to summer): Khurram Javed's own
Jul 13 account confirms the split — "Last month, @RichardSSutton
and I left Keen to do our own thing" (ALI/"Animal-Like
Intelligence" framing in his posts; June-vs-Jul 14 date tension
noted). Adjacent backfill: Sequoia's Training Data
episode with Sutton + Javed (Aug 19); Carmack advising Keen
researchers on compute discipline (Aug 12). Thread substance
unchanged; identity confirmed by the principals.
2026-09-13 Carmack's public record is thin but
real. Upper Bound 2025 (May 2025; his first slide deck in 35 years):
thesis — "LLMs can't be the whole answer," "LLMs can know everything
without learning anything"; transformers don't learn like children;
several fundamental problems have "not even a line of sight to an
answer." Concrete artifact: a robot playing a real Atari 2600+ via
camera + servo joystick ("the rootler") — point: reality is not a
turn-based game; ~180ms action latency breaks state-of-the-art
action-conditioned world models (BBF collapses with a few frames of
delay). Real-world mess cataloged: scan-out, glare, worn servos,
score-OCR reward detection broken by a moving tablecloth. Unsolved
problems he's attacking on Atari suites: continual learning
(sequential games destroy each other — catastrophic forgetting),
transfer learning ("almost completely failed" for everything —
OpenAI's Sonic challenge produced zero transfer; Gato negative
transfer), sparse rewards/intrinsic motivation (curiosity, boredom,
rage-quitting as generality signals), exploration beyond
epsilon-greedy, latency-aware action conditioning (feed your own
past actions as observations). Admitted missteps: hand-rolled CUDA
instead of PyTorch, cloud avoidance, Sega Master System as
environment. Promised open-sourcing of the rig + framework + a
community benchmark (sequential Atari, no task IDs, sticky actions,
no dedicated eval phase); not yet public. Replay-buffer experiment
(28TB NVMe) promised "within weeks" of Jul 2025 — no public result.
2026-09-13 Sutton's departure is the cluster's status update —
Oak Lab pitches real-time continual learning without replay
(NetworkIDBD selective credit assignment; agent learns from one
step at a time, no stored data) and the stated holy grail: a
trillion-parameter agent that learns and plans in real time on
20 watts (brain power budget). OaK (Options and Knowledge):
world model learned from interaction + planning. Sutton: current
deep learning is "weak and inefficient... need not more tweaks, but
fundamentally new ideas." He praised Carmack and Keen on the way
out — "a slightly different path toward understanding
intelligence." Same Sutton quoted in our Sep 12 ai-social record as
the anti-doom voice. Carmack stays active on X but non-hype (Sep
11, 2026: hand-coding moving from "-jitsu to -do" — AI absorbing
programming craft; Musk replied re technology in war). Full post
context (GoKawiil capture): Carmack was reading Musashi's Book of
Five Rings — the intro on swordsmanship's evolution from battlefield
necessity to sport triggered the analogy; cites hand-assembling
opcodes as the already-lost art, blesses the retro-computing scene
as hobby, and lands on "Musashi would probably have been pretty
enthusiastic about assault rifles." Musk's reply (Sep 11, one
line — paraphrase only, no verbatim in any of Benzinga/IBTimes/
FrontierNews captures): technology is the "most important advantage"
in war — an extension of the metaphor, not a rebuttal: technology
(rifles) superseded a lifetime of swordsmanship; AI supersedes
coding craft the same way. Musk escalating to the
national-competition frame is its own tell. Keen:
research-only, no product/revenue/new funding as of mid-2026
(7wData/PitchBook); keenagi.com is a bare landing page.
Background
The thread: the anti-LLM-orthodoxy research cluster — intelligence
as continual learning from live experience, not frozen pretrained
models. John Carmack's Keen Technologies and Richard Sutton's Oak
Lab (spun out of Keen Jul 2026) are the named poles; adjacent:
Graepel/Hafner ventures (deepmind-exodus), LeCun's AMI Labs
(world-models thread), Silver's Ineffable Intelligence.
Watch for: Keen's promised open-source Atari rig + benchmark (the
cluster's first community artifact if it lands); Oak Lab's
NetworkIDBD papers and any 20-watt demonstration; whether any
experience-first lab shows a continual-learning result that beats
frozen-model fine-tuning on transfer; Keen's replay-buffer vs
one-step-learning resolution; Upper Bound 2027 (May 18–21,
Edmonton) for the next round of public reveals.