What this misses is that research is a competitive endeavor. To succeed as a researcher you don’t just need to know the bare minimum required to do research in your field. You need to be able to do it better than most of the people you’re competing against. I know that HN as a collective has near-unlimited faith in Carmack’s abilities (and he is no doubt Very Smart). But he’s competing with other Very Smart people who have decades more experience of AI research.
To put it another way, the idea that John Carmack is going to do groundbreaking research in AI is roughly as plausible as the idea that Yann LeCun is going to make a successful AAA video game. Stranger things have happened, but I won’t be holding my breath.
You're forgetting that a whole string of breakthroughs are all fairly recent (like in the last decade). Everyone, including the pro's, is treading new ground.
In that context anyone can make progress in the field, as long as they understand what they're dealing with.
Better regard mr. Carmack as an X factor. Maybe the experts will leave him in the dust. Or maybe he'll come up with something that none of the experts cared to look into.
Lots of scientific fields have seen breakthroughs in the past decade. Doesn’t mean that any random smart person can jump in and start doing groundbreaking research.
There are lots of less famous researchers toiling away who are also very smart and who have much more detailed specialist knowledge. I don’t doubt John Carmack’s intellectual ability, but he’s famous because he made some cool video games, not because he won the America’s Smartest Person competition. This idea that he’s the AI messiah seems almost cultish.
Why does it need to be competitive? Maybe the guy has enough money to let him do whatever he wants regardless of the outcome and he chose AI because it's interesting to him.
To put it another way, the idea that John Carmack is going to do groundbreaking research in AI is roughly as plausible as the idea that Yann LeCun is going to make a successful AAA video game. Stranger things have happened, but I won’t be holding my breath.