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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#71

Post by torben-friis »

Gigachad wrote: post #50
cokeandpepsi wrote: post #13

I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole 'metaverse' social push happend it feels like the people invovled are serverly deteacted on what people want out of VR in general it's hard for me to imagine someone like carmack prefering to work in a envinronment like that (tearing down corp/product walls) vs building his own team and trying to solve technical challenges

I think they might be right in the long run but that they are pushing it too hard when it’s not ready yet. People probably do want to collaborate in virtual rooms at work, but only when it’s better than video calls. Which it currently isn’t. And they don’t want to do it in a world controlled by zucc

I still can’t see what I’d be supposed to do during a work vr “call”.

A physical meeting already has everyone looking at a whiteboard or screen, which is already solved by screensharing. Even if you could fully recreate the experience of being in a physical room, what are you supposed to gain from that?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#72

Post by wpietri »

modeless wrote: post #4

He just founded a new company called Keen Technologies to work on AGI. Not surprising that he wants to focus on that now. He's been part-time at Meta for years. I'm interested to find out what kind of business model he's planning for an AGI company. Edit: he posted his leaving message publicly here: https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvP... Additional public comments on Twitter here: https://twi…

It's very interesting to me that he's giving up on VR entirely. If he thought it was just an issue with Facebook, presumably he'd jump in somewhere else and get the impact he was looking to have.

That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere. Or rather, half of it isn't. Oculus-style VR is two best in one: 3D persistent virtual worlds and stereoscopic facehugger interfaces. The former has had great success, mostly in games, but the latter has spent decades as the thing that people are supposed to want but don't actually use much when they get the chance.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#73

Post by nomel »

dinobones wrote: post #54
qbasic_forever wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is AI really grifting? It's not like mom and pop can sink their savings into AI tech and lose it all to scams, etc. like they can with crypto. At worst some big investors sink a big seed round in and never get it back from a 'grifting' AI company--IMHO no real harm done, if you're an angel investor you're mature enough to deal with getting burned it's just part of the risk (and no one is going to cry for someone rich…

AI in its current form is grifting. Trying to actually productionize anything with GPT3 for example is a nightmare, it can actively lie to you, the embeddings are pretty sub-par, and inference is pretty expensive. But you hear nothing but praise from it here on HN, and people act like the 30 minute web app they built and charge $15/month for is going to change the industry. But it's getting better. GPT3.5/InstructGPT…

> AI in its current form is grifting.

Could you give some actual examples of projects or companies that you see as "grifting"?

Most companies are clearly communicating that they're in the R&D phase of the tech. R&D definitely isn't grifting.

The problem spaces where people find value and pay for AI isn't grifting either, like the bulk of content moderation happening now, recommendation systems, text to speech, speech to text, etc. The camera on my phone uses neural networks, with great success. I use ChatGPT daily, at this point.

What do you see as clearly being "grifting" (ok, lets try to keep Elon Musk related projects out of this)?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#74

Post by [deleted] »

wpietri wrote: post #55
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to u…

> sounds remarkably like corruption In the sense of external entities illegally hoovering up cash, I doubt it. For me this seems more like Soviet central planning, where real-world success is secondary to conformance to big ideas imposed from top personalities. It can work when the idea is correct, useful, and resonant with the people implementing it. But when the idea's off, political realities prevent honest feedba…

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#75

Post by chubot »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to u…

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for them…

I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea

I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists

In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there was a steady trickle of coworkers over to Twitter. Though from what I hear the leadership there was the real problem, and allowed the other problem to fester

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#76

Post by Trex_Egg »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #30
joenathanone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the money in the world can't buy talent. If the talented people don't want to work for or with you, then you end up just burning through cash while the untalented/less talented deliver a subpar product.

This is false. A shit ton of money can buy a ton of talent. Not Carmack level talent though, he made Doom and Quake so he's already a multi-millionaire. You need a metric ton of money to buy out Carmack, which is exactly what they did. The problem with Meta is the same as the problem in any mega corporation at that scale -- warped incentives. The incentive to spend all your time politicking your way up the massive co…

Hey, the equation described in the post does seems to fit the expectations for some scenarios, but as the author mentioned it would be good to work around with much more real world data.

Thanks for the link, it is a good read.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#77

Post by humanizersequel »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #33
nebulous1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lex's guest list is absurd. I'm honestly not sure how he's managed to pull it off.

Honestly his guest list is so good, I thought for several years that he must be working for the Kremlin and honeypotting folks behind the scenes (or something)

>Kremlin

I take seriously the idea that Lex has an under-the-table relationship with government, but if you think the Kremlin is the likely suspect I've got a VR headset to sell you...

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#78

Post by annadane »

cokeandpepsi wrote: post #13

I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole 'metaverse' social push happend it feels like the people invovled are serverly deteacted on what people want out of VR in general it's hard for me to imagine someone like carmack prefering to work in a envinronment like that (tearing down corp/product walls) vs building his own team and trying to solve technical challenges

Forcing a mandatory Facebook account is "doing an ok job"...?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#79

Post by arcticbull »

kentm wrote: post #63
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for them…

I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. Woe be unto you if you worked on a "leaf" system -- something that consumed internal services but did not expose services to other engineering teams. You would have no internal engineers willing to vouch for your promotion because they weren't using your service or codebase. I really wanted to just execute and be rewa…

Their counter-argument is that leaf services like that without measurable impact aren't things the company should be investing in and it is up to the individual to recognize that and re-allocate themselves onto something that's actually aligned with the company's goals.

You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project.

You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out. Just as it's the company's job to figure out what the market needs. Yeah, projects that are most valuable to a company will be competitive. If you don't want to compete, you'll have to figure something out on your own that isn't as sexy but still provides value.

This becomes especially true as you become more senior at this kind of company.

If you don't want to work in that environment that's fine, maybe that's not the right corporate culture for you. I hope you found somewhere that was a better fit!

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#80

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

Whatsapp's developer had a similar frustration. Why are they selling to big companies and expect to have complete control? They aren't being realistic. Big companies are going to do what they feel is best for them not the the other way around. There's nothing new about that. I guess it's too hard to reject the big payday.
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