You’d think one of the biggest supporters of Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to create a “metaverse” would be John Carmack, the former chief technology officer for Facebook’s Oculus division. But it turns out he’s not a fan.
“I really do care about that (the metaverse), and I buy into the vision,” he said during a talk at the Facebook Connect event on Thursday.
“But that leaves many people surprised to find out that I’ve been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times,” he added. (Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion in 2014).
On Thursday, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be renamed Meta in an all-out effort to create the metaverse, a virtual reality platform that Zuckerberg envisions will one day supplant the conventional internet.
“In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine—get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create—as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today,” he said.
However, Carmack’s main gripe is Zuckerberg’s approach to creating the sprawling VR ecosystem. “I want it to exist. But I have pretty good reason to believe setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse,” he said.
According to Carmack, building the metaverse is a “honey pot trap for architecture astronauts”—a class of programmers who only look at the issues from the highest levels in abstract terms.
“I just want to tear my hair out at that, because that’s just so not the things that are actually important when you’re building something,” he said. In reality, building a metaverse will also require developing the “nuts and bolts details” necessary to make the technology work, such as figuring out GPU architectures and streamlining network capacity.
“But here we are. Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build a metaverse,” Carmack said. “So enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing, and effort is definitely going to be made.”
Carmack left his role as Oculus’s CTO in 2019, but he remains onboard as a consulting CTO. His advice for Zuckerberg is to focus on creating actual products that people can use, instead of developing futuristic technologies that’ll struggle to scale to consumers in the near-term.
“My worry is that we could spend years, and thousands of people possibly, and wind up with things that didn’t contribute all that much to the ways people are actually using the devices and hardware today,” he said.
“I worry about this in a lot of ways with our advanced technologies,” he added. “We’re happy when interesting little proof of concept things come out, but if it’s not showing up on the big board as like ‘Okay, hundreds of thousands of people are using this, it’s delivering millions of hours of value,’ maybe they aren’t actually all that important.”
