John Carmack Is Leaving Meta
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective.
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We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.
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It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it.
Via Dan Luu:
I find this letter from Carmack interesting in that it summarizes a sentiment I’ve heard from literally all of the highest impact/most effective people I’ve talked to at large companies.
I am all in on building AGI at Keen Technologies now.
During Meta’s developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company’s Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be "grumpy" about, like the company’s rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to use them for work or demo them for people outside the company.
See also: his 2020 keynote (Hacker News).
Update (2023-02-21): John Carmack (via Hacker News):
Startups are so great like that — see a problem and just FIX IT THAT WEEK. The time to deliver a fix to VR users at Meta was often over six months, disregarding all the problems that were just ignored.
