John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
This doesn&#x27;t surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that&#x27;s all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I&#x27;m not claiming he&#x27;s a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics)<p>As recent as his last Oculus Connect keynote, he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of &quot;managing up&quot; of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical. He&#x27;s clearly the type that is happiest when he&#x27;s deep in a technical problem rather than bureaucracy, and he likes moving fast.<p>On top of that, he likes sharing with the community with talks and such, and ever since going under the FB umbrella, he&#x27;s had to clear everything he says in public with Facebook PR, which clearly annoyed him.<p>He&#x27;s hungry for a new hard challenge. VR isn&#x27;t really it right now since it&#x27;s more hardware-bound by the need for hard-core optical research than software right now. With the Quest, he (in my opinion) solidified VR&#x27;s path to mobile standalones. It&#x27;s time to try his hand at another magic trick while he&#x27;s on his game.<p>John&#x27;s the very definition of a world-class, tried and true engineer&#x2F;scientist. He&#x27;s shown time and time again the ability to dive into a field and become an expert very quickly (he went from making video games to literally building space rockets for a good bit before inventing the modern VR field with Palmer).<p>If there&#x27;s anyone I&#x27;d trust to both be able to dive into AGI quickly and do it the right(tm) way, it&#x27;s John Carmack.