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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It wouldn't surprise me if he has a noncompete in play that prevents him from continuing his VR work for a few years.

Oh Meta 100% has some sort of non-compete in writing, especially after his lawsuit with Bethesda when he left Id to work at Oculus[1].

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/zenimax-accuses-john-carmack-of-thef...

There is absolutely no such thing as a non-compete in California.

He lives in Texas still

I really doubt Carmack would decide his life based on NDAs or non-competes.

There is when equity changes hands, which will have been the case with Carmack.

No. Everyone is given equity in Silicon Valley.

See x3n0ph3n3's comment upthread.

There is for C-suite employees.

They are actually permissable in circumstances similar to John Carmack's:

> California employers can sidestep non-competes in the following instances:

> EXCEPTION 1: If the employee sells business goodwill

> EXCEPTION 2: If the owner sells his or her business interests

> EXCEPTION 3: If the owner sells all operating and goodwill assets

> Upon the business’ dissolution, a member of the company may agree to a non-compete if operating a similar business in the geographic area. Goodwill is the company’s name and brand reputation. Employees with stock options are not considered company owners for purposes of non-competition agreements.

https://www.contractscounsel.com/b/non-compete-california

They don't exactly need a non-compete (those are hard to enforce in CA anyway), they can just buy any up-and-coming VR companies. And they do.

You don’t need a noncompete when any investor is going to be scared that a major company will sue over “pilfered secrets”.

Combine that with being burned out and I can see trying something else.

I think it's less of a judgement about VR and more of a judgement about AI. If you believe AGI is within reach (as he does and I agree), working on literally anything else seems like a waste of time. It's impossible to overstate the impact it will have.

Wouldn't be surprised if SD, GPT-3, and other recent releases were what pushed him over the edge and prompted him to leave. He must have felt like he was watching a lot of cool things happen without him.

If I had another 30 IQ points I'd be climbing over walls and sneaking into buildings at night to work on this stuff.

I believe he talked about starting work on AGI at the time he went part-time at Meta, long before GPT-3.

I encourage anyone to try out some AI related stuff, genius IQ not required. It's still a young field so there aren't yet huge towers of knowledge to climb before you can do anything. The core ideas are actually super simple, requiring nothing more than high school math.

Any specifics for trying out AI stuff? Take some online courses? Play around with some simple models in DL frameworks?

Andrew Ng's online courses are great to get your feet wet. You use Octave/Matlab to implement the basics of many machine learning models from scratch, and build yourself up to using python to design several popular deep learning models including convolutional and transformers. It's not required, but a good idea to understand at least the basics of linear algebra and calculus.

I think the course just got updated during the past year and now they use Python instead of Octave/Matlab

Interesting. To be honest I really appreciated how they started with Matlab; it gave a very math-centric focus to the fundamentals, although of course you can do all of that with Python too. And I say this as a professional developer.

FastAI gets recommended a lot I think, if you can already code - focuses on hacking with frameworks instead of starting with the boring linear algebra stuff.

https://course.fast.ai/

It's the mainframe era for AI: ideas are simple, but access to mainframes isn't.

The hardware is fairly accessible. You can start for free with Colab, try a subscription for $9.99/mo, or use the gaming PC you might already have. The hardest thing is data, but again there are lots of free datasets available as well as pretrained models you can fine-tune on a custom smaller dataset that you make yourself.

It's good to have a $50k mini-supercomputer at home though, so you can actually try out your ideas in a reasonable time.

> That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere

That's not Carmack's opinion. To quote from his post:

"Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place."

"the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world"

The main problem with VR in my opinion is a lack of software. Most of the games produced have been either toys that are little more than a tech demo, or ports of other games not designed around VR. There haven't been many serious attempts to harness VR for non-game playing purposes.

I think the future is still bright for VR. We're currently in a bit of a local hype-cycle trough, but the tech is only going to improve.

The main problem with VR is that it is a gimmick that people don't want to use as their main medium of interaction whether with games or job communication.

I see you're getting downvoted, but that's my suspicion as well. Since the 1850s, stereoscopic 3D has had many waves of short-term popularity but has produced no lasting impact. From the Brewster Stereoscope to the Viewmaster to multiple tries at 3D movies and TV, to 30 years of "VR will break out once we improve the tech", each time people get very excited about the novelty and think it will change the world. And each time it doesn't.

The simple answer here is that people's brain hardware is already quite good at turning flat 2D representations into 3D mental experiences, so stereoscopy doesn't add much. Making it, as you say, a gimmick. The historically cyclical interest in the gimmick suggests that it's mainly appealing as a novelty.

When people say one thing with their words and another with their actions, I tend to believe the actions. And "we made cool hardware that doesn't have much practical use" is not the most ringing of endorsements.

Also suspicious to me is the way that Meta still isn't releasing actual use statistics. They're happy to release DAU numbers for Facebook. Where are the equivalent numbers for Oculus? What Carmack says is consistent with my suspicion that a lot of people bought the Quest to try it but don't use it regularly. Which would explain why they keep those numbers very quiet.

>That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere

Maybe it's just a sign of how hot AI is right now.

His goal is artificial general intelligence, something that seemed to grab his attention after he was already actively working on VR. My guess is that when he started teaching himself machine learning, he realized that he needed to focus all his attention on it if he was going to take it seriously. Facebook's failings just accelerated this for him.

I think the truth is that VR is there. They've sold lots of headsets and people who love it, really love it. Expecting it to sell at iPhone levels was never going to happen.

So by "there" you mean that the tech is good enough to provide a good experience, and so they've basically plateaued? That's my guess too. I rented a Quest for a couple of weeks and it was pretty neat. It just didn't fill any needs we actually had. I was thinking of it as a try-before-I-buy situation, but when I sent it back at the end of the two weeks, nobody cared. The kids were already back on their Switches and the Playstation for gaming.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I mean. They aren't some new thing that either has to launch into orbit or crash and burn. The likely path is in between.

VR headsets have improved immensely since I first tried it in 1991 (Dactyl Nightmare) and I suspect they will keep improving. Where we are at today is not necessarily a plateau but it might feel like one if you were expecting a growth curve that looks like a hockey stick.

Try it yourself. Strap something 8 hours or longer around your head, don't move, because every small tremor distorts the vision of the device.

VR in its current form is eye cocaine, nothing more. Why watch poppy avatars hop around in a virtual reality, while you are bound to do nothing?

In every way, VR should be restricted to very few use cases, not to - hello Zuck - rebuild reality completely and hereby track everything you do or see to deliver even more addictive material to your eye vision.

It sounds cool, some use cases look cool, but the very fact that hardly anyone at Meta uses their own device/creature, speaks volumes. I am glad, JC takes consequences and abandons this experiment.

Don't move? Have you ever played Superhot VR or Beat Sabre or Pistol Whip or... etc.? You're jumping around all over the place for some VR games and it's extremely fun and the experience can't be reproduced on a monitor.

I only use Abe for fitness apps about 1 hour a day and frankly the weight isn’t a problem for that period of time with intense movements.

In fact I think the other use cases are bogus, everything else is unimpressive to me except the ability to have a decent fitness experience with FitXR or Beatsaber.

Or maybe you know he is simply a lot more excited about AI than VR now and that's it. No need to stick with something that doesn't excite you any more just because you were excited about it at one point and spent several years working on it :-)

I’d wait and see how Apple’s device is received before making any long-range pronouncements.

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