John Carmack
Programmer & AGI Researcher
The legendary programmer behind Doom and Quake now works on artificial general intelligence at his startup Keen Technologies — and publicly defends AI as the latest in a long line of “power tools” that have driven all progress in computing.
In his words
“Don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.
AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.
Biography
John Carmack (born 1970) co-founded id Software in 1991 and wrote the engines behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake — code that essentially invented the modern 3D game and earned him a reputation as one of the greatest programmers alive. He later spent nearly a decade as CTO of Oculus, shipping consumer virtual reality at Meta, before leaving in 2022 to chase what he calls the most important problem left: artificial general intelligence.
Betting his last act on AGI
His startup Keen Technologies, founded in 2022 with $20 million from investors including Sequoia and Nat Friedman, pursues AGI research with no product roadmap — Carmack has said the team is trying to learn fundamental things about architecture and learning that nobody yet knows. Characteristically, his optimism is bounded: he told D Magazine in 2025 that AI will change the world in significant ways, “although not as much or as quickly as people believe.”
In April 2025, when Microsoft demoed an AI-generated Quake II level and a longtime fan called the technology disgusting and a threat to industry jobs, Carmack pushed back with a widely shared post — joined by Tim Sweeney — reframing AI as the next power tool in a lineage he has lived personally.
My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance. Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers.
He acknowledged in the same thread that prompt-generated games, novels, and films are coming — while predicting that the best works of the medium will still come from dedicated, passionate teams wielding better tools, in a world “vastly wealthier” in creative content.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/john-carmack