VR pioneer John Carmack leaves Meta after disappointment with management

John Carmack leaves Meta. The virtual reality pioneer worked for years as chief technical officer at Oculus and has been working at an AI start-up for a few years. Carmack leaves with much criticism of Meta’s management.

Carmack announces his departure in a post on Facebook. In it he also expresses strong criticism of the current management of Meta and the way in which that company works on virtual reality.

According to Carmack, Meta is an inefficient company. “We have a crazy amount of people and resources, but we constantly sabotage ourselves and miss opportunities,” he writes. Carmack says Meta is “half as efficient as he would like to be.” He compares the organization to a GPU that uses only five percent of its capacity. Carmack also says he has had a lot of difficulty adjusting the organization and that he is ‘tired of that fight’.

Carmack has always been critical of Meta. During his keynote at Meta Connect in October, he expressed his disappointment with the Quest Pro headset, which costs $1,500. Carmack has been advocating for a VR headset for years that should cost ‘$250 for 250 grams’. Also on Twitter Carmack confirms that he is disappointed in Meta. Carmack was chief technical officer at Oculus in 2013. After its acquisition by Facebook in 2014, he remained associated with Oculus, but in a different role. In recent years, Carmack’s official job title was executive consultant for vr. He also guided internal start-ups in artificial intelligence.