Virtual Reality Pioneer Is Leaving Meta

Yet even though Meta was moving swiftly into an area that Mr. Carmack specialized in, he was sometimes a dissenting voice about how the effort was going. He became known for internal posts that criticized the decision-making and direction set forth by Mr. Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer. Mr. Carmack had been working part-time for the company in recent years.

Mr. Carmack and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Meta’s earnings have been hit hard by its spending on the metaverse and its slowing growth in social networking and digital advertising. In July, the Silicon Valley company posted its first sales decline as a public company. Last month, Meta said it was laying off about 11,000 employees, or about 13 percent of its work force, in what amounted to the company’s most significant job cuts.

In a podcast interview in August, Mr. Carmack said Meta’s $10 billion loss at the time in the division housing its augmented reality and virtual reality initiatives made him “sick to my stomach.” He added that the company’s metaverse efforts have been hampered by bureaucracy and dogged by concerns about diversity and privacy.

In other posts seen by The Times from this year, Mr. Carmack criticized features on the company’s Quest virtual reality headsets. In his farewell post, he commended the Quest 2 headset as “almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning” in terms of its cost and mobile hardware, though he was still critical of its software.

“We built something pretty close to The Right Thing,” he said.

Mr. Carmack’s post, which said he was ending his decade in V.R., concluded by saying he had “wearied of the fight” and would focus on his own start-up. (He announced in August that his artificial intelligence firm, Keen Technologies, had raised $20 million.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/technology/virtual-reality-pioneer-is-leaving-meta.html