John Carmack Steps Down From Oculus To Pursue 'Strong AI' Passion

Legendary coder John Carmack has announced his resignation from his position at Facebook’s Oculus after six years of being a part of it. The reason, as he revealed, is so that he can focus more on his personal projects and dreams, which includes the realization of AI.

However, Carmack will still be part of Oculus, only now just as a “Consulting CTO.” His focus will now be on working on artificial general intelligence, also known as AGI. He calls this “Strong AI.”

In layman’s terms, AGI is AI as it is often depicted in popular science fiction. This is the kind of AI that will be able to learn by itself independently and will be able to perform thinking and thought processes just like we human beings do.

“When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace, and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague ‘line of sight’ to the solutions, even if they were unconventional or unproven,” Carmack explained through a Facebook post. “I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.”

On his venture on working more in AGI, Carmack believes that while we are still far from fully realizing it, he is still game to take the leap to do it.

“I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal’s Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it,” he added.

Carmack is known for a lot of things in the world of technology, including being the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, being the lead programmer for id Software (which he also co-founded) and for games including “Commander Keen,” “Wolfenstein 3D,” “Doom,” and “Quake.”