John Carmack is an American programmer best known for work that reshaped two industries before he turned to artificial intelligence. At id Software he wrote the engines behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, defining the first-person shooter genre, and he later “ushered in the modern era of virtual reality with the Oculus Rift prototype,” serving as Oculus and Meta’s CTO.
In 2022 Carmack founded Keen Technologies, a Dallas-based startup pursuing artificial general intelligence, and he departed Meta in December 2022 to focus on it full time. In 2023 he announced a partnership with reinforcement learning pioneer Richard Sutton to accelerate that work, with a stated aim of building a genuine AI prototype by 2030. Of his motivation, Carmack said: “The AI space is awash in capital, compute, and data, but it is still dominated by fashions that may yet hinder important breakthroughs. Rich and I both stand somewhat outside the mainstream, with a focus on agency and the temporal as central themes.”
Carmack approaches AGI as an outsider engineer rather than a credentialed researcher, betting that a small team focused on fundamentals can find paths the well-funded labs overlook. He has called Sutton’s work “formative to my AI education.”