Meta VR executive advisor John Carmack resigns: Inefficiency, internal strife, and chaotic decision-making
Meta VR executive advisor and legendary engineer John Carmack posted on Facebook stating that internal conversations with the company have been leaked to the media, potentially leading to misinterpretations. As a result, he has chosen to release a complete statement on the social platform.
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John Carmack
John Carmack is the founder of the game development company id Software. He is known for creating games like Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake, and is considered the father of first-person shooter games. He advocates for open-source code, and the famous shooter game Half-Life's GoldSrc engine was inspired by his work on Quake.
He has mixed feelings about his decade-long involvement in the VR field. In a tweet, he expressed his frustration with continuing to work at Meta and will return to his founded company Keen Technologies to promote the development of General Artificial Intelligence (AGI).
Inefficiency, Internal Strife, and Decision-Making Chaos
He is very satisfied with the VR headset Quest 2, considering it a successful and correct product in its early stages. However, he points out that Meta has many internal decision-making and efficiency issues.
He mentioned that the GPU utilization of Quest 2 is only 5%, which personally offends him and causes him pain.
As a system optimizer, he cares deeply about efficiency, but constantly seeing such inefficiencies is soul-crushing for him. Especially with Meta having an excessive amount of manpower and resources, yet continuously wasting them on self-destruction, operating at less than half efficiency.
Although he has a senior voice, it seems he lacks influence and has never been a primary driver himself.
John Carmack believes he could have stayed at Meta after the acquisition of Oculus and fought with several generations of executives directly at headquarters, but he was too busy coding and tired of the conflict.
He concludes that VR can still bring value to most people in the world, and Meta is well-suited to be a driving force, but there is significant room for improvement in decision-making.
