John Carmack Attempts Fundamental AI Research
The famed game developer is a skilled software engineer who has lent his talents to advancing space and virtual reality technology in the past. He now hopes to crack the code of general-purpose AI.
John Carmack is an American software engineer and video game developer who cofounded the game studio id Software, whose game series including Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein have been widely credited with not just popularizing but laying the technical groundwork for fast-paced video games utilizing three-dimensional graphics in the 1990s, in particular the “first-person shooter” (FPS) genre. Carmack was the lead programmer on these series and has been credited with developing multiple techniques that made it possible to smoothly render computationally-intensive graphics. Carmack’s early software work thus helped to drive adoption of specialized, high-performing computer chips called graphics processing units (GPUs), designed by Nvidia. Decades later, Nvidia’s powerful GPUs have become the standard for developing and using computationally-intensive artificial intelligence software, and, since 2022, Carmack has in turn devoted his time to running his own AI research lab aiming to build artificial general intelligence (AGI).