John Carmack (the creator of Doom) Reveals AGI Future: Robots, Videogames and AI Agents...

From Wes and Dylan

In this episode, John Carmack, creator of Doom and former Oculus CTO, pulls back the curtain on Keen Technologies, his secretive AGI research venture. He traces his path from pioneering first-person shooters and GPU adoption to VR systems engineering, and explains why he left Meta to pursue artificial general intelligence. Carmack makes the case that large language models, despite their impressive capabilities, cannot be the whole answer to AGI, and he shares his alignment with Richard Sutton...

Key Takeaways

  • Carmack argues LLMs can't be the whole AGI answer, since human learning works nothing like training on the internet's blended text.
  • Original Quake's GL variant helped drive early GPU adoption, quietly laying groundwork for today's AI boom.
  • Carmack went from 'Victorian gentleman scientist' to founding a venture-backed lab, proving even solo geniuses need a team.
  • Keen Technologies is deliberately heads-down: no product, no fundraising, just unglamorous research on problems with no known answers.
  • Carmack's shift from engineering to science: he now chases knowledge nobody has, not endpoints he can already see.

Who is mentioned in this episode?

4 people come up, including Greg Brockman, Richard Sutton, Ilia Sutskever.

Mentioned in this episode