John Carmack Steps Back From Oculus Role To Work On Artificial Intelligence Posted on : Nov 14 - 2019

John Carmack, CTO of Oculus and recent recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in VR, is scaling back his duties at Oculus.

In a Facebook post, he states that he will become a ‘Consultant CTO’ for Oculus while pursuing a much more ambitious goal: Artificial General Intelligence. In other words, technical genius John Carmack, who revolutionised video games and then VR, is now going to help bring about human-like, or even human-surpassing, AI.

While a radical shift in focus like this may seem out of the blue, there have been hints recently that Carmack isn’t as engaged by VR as he once was. In his recipients’ speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s VR Awards, he talked about how he felt VR wasn’t advancing quickly enough for him to feel satisfied.

In the Facebook announcement, Carmack mentions how the fact generalised AI is still so far ahead of our understanding appeals to him,

As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: 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. 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.

As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: 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. 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.

If ‘bring about the rise of the all-powerful Machine Gods’ is how he gets job satisfaction, all power to him.

Artificial General Intelligence is essentially the end goal of current AI research. While current AI can be better than humans at highly specified tasks, they’re much poorer at learning to do other things than their human counterparts. Artificial General Intelligence would allow an AI to move from one task to another as easily, or even better, than a human being, without having the creators of the AI necessarily train or program in knowledge on how to do anything. The AI would be able to learn for itself. View More