John Carmack Steps Out of Meta's VR Mess
upstart writes:
John Carmack steps out of Meta's VR mess:
John Carmack is a legendary name in the tech industry, a prodigy programmer who worked on gaming milestones like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. His late interests, virtual reality and AI, are now forcing his decision to leave Meta and its very messy business outlook.
John Carmack is leaving Meta's VR business. After a decade spent trying to "move things" within Mark Zuckerberg's company, the co-creator of the FPS genre has decided to give up and pursue other interests with his own startup. Carmack's final message, however, depicts a rather troublesome situation for his former employer's business.
Meta, the ginormous corporation previously known as Facebook, is inefficient, constantly self-sabotaging and "ill prepared for the inevitable competition" to come, Carmack said in his final message to employees. The programmer left id Software in 2013 to work full-time at Oculus, a company later acquired by Facebook/Meta to become part of Facebook Reality Labs' VR efforts.
Carmack said that Quest 2, Meta's latest attempt at building and marketing a VR headset for the masses, is pretty close to what he considers the "right thing" to do if you want to make a good product. "It all could have happened a bit faster," Carmack also said, but Meta seems to be inherently inefficient, just like production code which is unable to go beyond a 5% GPU utilization rate.
Meta is not progressing at the pace it should, Carmack remarked, because the company has "only known inefficiency" and "is ill-prepared for the inevitable competition" in the VR space. Meta has a ridiculous amount of people and resources, and yet it is constantly self-sabotaging and squandering effort. It's not even "operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy," Carmack said.
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