John Carmack

What they built

Co-founded id Software and wrote the engines for Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake — pioneering real-time 3D rendering on consumer hardware. CTO of Oculus VR from 2013, then Consulting CTO at Meta after the Facebook acquisition until 2022. Since 2022 runs Keen Technologies, his AGI research startup, working with Richard Sutton.

In their own words

• From his Meta resignation letter (December 2022, published in full): "We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort."
• Same letter: "I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy."
• Same letter, on why he's leaving: "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."
• Same letter, the most personal line: "The more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it."
• On his AGI approach (Dallas Innovates Q&A): "The programming for AGI is going to be something that one person could write" — tens of thousands of lines of code, not millions. He is deliberately positioning himself as "one of these random test points" off the industry mainline.
• On pace: "I raised $20 million, but I'm thinking that this is a decade-long task where I don't want to burn through $20 million in the next two years." (Dallas Innovates.)
• On the path: "It's not clear those are the necessary steps to get all the way to artificial general intelligence," referring to current LLM scaling.
• On timelines (D CEO, November 2025, Venture Dallas): roughly 60% chance of AGI by 2030, 95% by 2050.

Principles as they articulated them

• Measure reality, not activity. GPU utilization, frame time, draw calls — the number matters more than the narrative. 5% utilization is a moral failure, not an engineering detail.
• Small teams. The Doom engine was one programmer; AGI, he argues, should be the same shape — a single mind able to hold the whole design.
• Embodied grounding through games and television. Keen's current experimental setup has a physical robot joysticking a real console while a camera watches the TV — deliberately avoiding the shortcut of talking to the emulator over an API.
• Be a "random test point." Don't try to beat the mainline at its own game; occupy a position nobody else is occupying, and if the mainline is wrong, you're the only one who had the answer.

What surprised me in research

• Keen Technologies' flagship experiment is camera-plus-robot-plus-joystick-plus-TV. He deliberately refuses the simulator shortcut. That is a strikingly unfashionable choice in 2025 — it ties AGI to real latencies, real perception noise, and real action.
• He is openly LLM-skeptical while respecting the labs. His phrase is that current deep learning is not clearly on the necessary path — not that it's wrong, but that it's unverified.
• The resignation letter is unusually candid about powerlessness: "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." For someone so associated with omnicompetence, this is a surprising self-assessment.
• He paces the $20M over a decade. The dominant frontier-AI stance is "burn everything now." He is doing the opposite on purpose.

Recent or later work

Keen Technologies, founded August 2022, $20M seed (Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Sequoia, Patrick Collison, Tobi Lutke, Jim Keller). Team of ~6. Partnered with Richard Sutton (reinforcement learning pioneer) in September 2023. Current work: embodied game-playing agents learning from video. Several multi-hour Lex Fridman appearances (2022, 2023) where he discusses the full sweep — id Software, Armadillo, VR, AGI.

Sources

• https://daringfireball.net/misc/2022/12/carmack-facebook.text — Full resignation letter — daringfireball.net
• https://www.engadget.com/john-carmack-leaves-meta-043202664.html — "John Carmack leaves Meta with a memo" — engadget.com
• https://dallasinnovates.com/exclusive-qa-john-carmacks-different-path-to-artificial-general-intelligence/ — "Carmack's Different Path to AGI" — dallasinnovates.com
• https://www.dmagazine.com/business-economy/2025/11/conversation-with-john-carmack-keen-technologies/ — "John Carmack Predicts AI Won't Change the World as Much as People Think" — dmagazine.com
• https://dallasinnovates.com/john-carmacks-keen-technologies-partners-to-accelerate-development-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ — Keen + Sutton partnership — dallasinnovates.com
• https://notesbylex.com/john-carmack-is-working-on-game-playing-robots — "Carmack is working on game-playing robots" — notesbylex.com