John Carmack leaves Meta with a memo criticizing the company’s efficiency

John Carmack, a virtual reality pioneer who later joined Meta from Oculus A $2 billion acquisitionleft the social network. Business Insider first reported his departure, citing people familiar with the company, and published portions of an internal memo containing sentiments critical of Meta and its augmented and virtual reality efforts. after Insider’s and New York Times news broke, Carmack confirmed on Twitter and Facebook he actually leaves the company and even publishes his note to employees in full.

“This is the end of my decade in VR,” Carmack said in his memoir. I started praising the Quest 2 headset for being “what I wanted to see in the first place,” with built-in tracking, optional PC streaming, efficiency, and a screen with nearly 4K resolution. However, he said, “if different decisions had been made, it could have happened a little faster and gone better.”

Carmack’s main issue with Meta is the company’s efficiency, or lack thereof, based on his memo. “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we’re constantly sabotaging ourselves and wasting effort,” he said. “There’s no way to sugarcoat it; I think our organization is operating at half the efficiency that would make me happy.”

The executive said that as “a voice at the highest level” he felt he should be able to push things forward, but “obviously wasn’t convincing enough”. Although he didn’t give specific examples, Carmack noted that a good number of the things he complained about came back a year or two after evidence of the problem had been gathered. “I’ve never been able to kill stupid things without taking damage, or set a direction and get the team to follow it,” he said. Carmack admitted near the end of the memo that he was “struggle-weary” but still “believes VR can bring value to the majority of people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do that than Meta.”

As chief executive He said on Twitterhe doesn’t hide from anyone that he’s “always very disappointed with the way things are going. [Meta.]”One interview podcast With Lex Friedman in August, he He said there was a loss of 10 billion dollars made him “sick” by the company’s AR and VR division [his] Mada thinks it’s a waste of money.” He posted on Meta’s internal message board criticizing the headset’s features and the need to install software updates before using them. He also seemed to push Meta to immediately put user experience first. about metaverse when it comes to how you want to build your vision.

Carmack became Oculus’ first chief technology officer after leaving id Software in 2013. Torment and Earthquake franchise He joined Meta in 2014 when Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion. in 2019 A step back from Oculus and served as CTO in a consulting capacity to focus exclusively on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or artificial intelligence capable of performing human tasks. His startup Keen Technologies is working on the development of such artificial intelligence systems.