That reports the New York Times (opens in new tab) (readers may encounter a paywall), John Carmack has left his position at Meta. Carmack was previously CTO of Oculus and stayed with the company after its acquisition by Facebook (now Meta) in 2014.
After Carmack’s internal announcement of his departure was leaked to the press, the developer published it in full on its public Facebook (opens in new tab) account, stating “This is the end of my decade in VR. I have mixed feelings.”
Carmack praises the Quest 2 as a piece of hardware, writing that the headset is “almost exactly what I wanted to see from the start: mobile hardware, inside-out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4K(ish) screen, cost-effective.” While Carmack has misgivings about the software, he is bolstered by the sales success and mass adoption of the Quest line.
“The problem,” writes Carmack, “is our efficiency.” The programmer refers to Meta as “an organization that has only known inefficiency”.
“We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources,” Carmack continues later in the post, “but we’re constantly sabotaging ourselves and wasting effort,” adding that he thinks Meta “operates with half the effectiveness it would [him] Merry.”
Carmack goes on to explain that while he was an influential voice at Meta, he’s never been “a prime mover.” He seems to indicate that corporate politics was never his specialty and that he preferred to focus on the technology.
The message ends on an optimistic note, however, with Carmack saying that Meta is still poised to lead the world in VR deployment as long as those at the company “make better decisions and fill [their] products with ‘Give a Damn!'”
Carmack is best known as one of the co-founders of id Software, where he led the development of the technology behind such classics as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, laying much of the foundation for modern 3D rendering. In addition to his development contributions at Oculus/Meta, Carmack’s involvement with the companies and advocacy for VR lent credibility to their projects as VR struggled with mass adoption for much of the past decade.
Carmack is now focusing on his startup Keen Technologies (opens in new tab), supposedly named after id’s early platform game series, Commander Keen. Keen’s focus is on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a branch of AI that focuses on mimicking a human’s holistic, adaptable intelligence, as opposed to pursuing more narrow applications such as generating AI art or graphics. and scientific simulations.
It’s hard for me to read this as anything other than a defeat for Meta, a defeat that comes at an inconvenient time for the company. Hardware loss leaders are common in gaming, but as of July, Meta’s Reality Lab division was reporting nearly $1 billion in losses each month (opens in new tab). Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees (opens in new tab) in November, as political and privacy concerns continue to haunt Facebook and Instagram and the company’s previews of the “metaverse” are widely mocked (opens in new tab).
