John Carmack, a pioneer of virtual reality technology, is leaving Meta after more than eight years with the company, according to an internal post reviewed by The New York Times.
In the post, which was written by Mr Carmack, 52, the technologist criticized his employer. He said Meta, which is transitioning from a social networking company to one focused on the immersive world of the metaverse, is operating with “half the effectiveness” and has “a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we its constant self-sabotage and wasteful effort.”
“It’s been a struggle for me,” Mr Carmack wrote in the post, published this week on an internal forum. “I have a top-level voice here, so it feels like I should be able to move things around, but I’m apparently not convincing enough.”
As the former chief technology officer of Oculus, the virtual reality company that Facebook bought for $2 billion in 2014, Mr. Carmack has been one of the most influential voices leading the development of VR headsets. He stayed with Facebook after Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, decided last year to move the company to focus on the metaverse and rebranded Facebook as Meta.
But even as Meta moved quickly into an area in which Mr. Carmack specialized, he was sometimes a dissenting voice about how the effort was going. He became known for internal posts criticizing the decision-making and direction of Mr. Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer. Mr. Carmack has worked part-time for the company for the past few years.
What is the metaverse and why is it important?
The origin. The word “metaverse” describes a fully realized digital world that exists outside of the world we live in. It was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel ‘Snow Crash’, and the concept was further explored by Ernest Cline in his novel ‘Ready Player One’.
Mr. Carmack and Meta did not respond to requests for comment. Insider previously reported on Mr. Carmack’s departure.
Meta’s revenues have been hit hard by spending on the metaverse and slowing growth in social networking and digital advertising. In July, the Silicon Valley company posted its first revenue decline as a publicly traded company. Last month, Meta said it laid off about 11,000 employees, or about 13 percent of its workforce, representing the company’s most significant job loss.
In an August podcast interview, Mr. Carmack said Meta’s $10 billion loss at the time in the division that housed the augmented reality and virtual reality initiatives made him “sick to the stomach.” He added that the company’s counterproductive efforts have been hampered by bureaucracy and dogged by concerns about diversity and privacy.
In other posts seen by The Times this year, Mr. Carmack criticized features on the company’s Quest virtual reality headsets. In his farewell post, he praised the Quest 2 headset as “almost exactly what I wanted to see from the start” in terms of cost and mobile hardware, though he was still critical of the software.
“We built something pretty close to The Right Thing,” he said.
Mr Carmack’s post, which said he was ending his decade in VR, ended by saying he was “tired of fighting” and would focus on his own start-up. (He announced in August that his artificial intelligence company, Keen Technologies, was a raised $20 million.)
“VR can add value to most people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do so than Meta,” he wrote.
Before Meta, Mr. Carmack developed several techniques in computer graphics that became critical to games he developed, including Quake. He joined Oculus in 2013 as chief technology officer and retired from that position in 2019 to transition to a part-time position.
Mr. Carmack testified this week during a hearing on the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block Meta’s purchase of Within, the virtual reality start-up behind a fitness game called Supernatural. The agency has argued that the tech giant will eliminate competition in the nascent metaverse if allowed to close the deal. The hearing is expected to continue next week.
