Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On Friday, John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and chief technology officer of Oculus, announced on Twitter that his AGI (general artificial intelligence) start-up Keen Technologies had raised $20 million in a round of financing.

Investors include Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, Daniel Gross, founder of Cue, Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, Tobi L ü tke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify, Legend Venture Capital and Sequoia Capital.

With regard to this round of investment, Carmack said he was not short of money and could write a check for $20 million himself, but in order to make himself more determined and self-disciplined in starting a business, he chose to spend investors' money.

In addition, the company's name seems to come from Commander Keen (Commander Keane), an action game produced and released by id Software.

At the same time, Carmack said he would continue to advise Meta on VR affairs, but would only take up 20 per cent of his time.

John Carmack is no stranger to people in the tech and gaming circles, and the awesome guy has too many flashy labels: legendary programmers, fathers of 3D games, tech fanatics, open source software advocates, and so on.

His strong programming ability has brought many technological innovations to the game industry. He designed the most powerful 3D engine in game history and entered the American Interactive Art and Design Hall of Fame before the age of 30. After the establishment of id Software, he and game software genius John Romero jointly developed the world's first 3D shooting game "Wolfenstein 3D" (German headquarters 3D), which uses his original 3D game engine and has achieved great success in the game community.

Note: game Wolfenstein 3D

He then developed two well-known 3D games, Doom and Quake (Thor Hammer), which are highly sought after by gamers.

Note: game Quake

It is widely rumored that he gave one of his Ferrari sports cars as a prize to the winner of a Thor Hammer race in 1997.

The start-up of AGI optimists this time Carmack chose to start a business on the AGI track, but it was not on a whim. He has always been in the optimism camp of AGI, and on the security issues of AGI that many people are worried about, he said: we don't know what AGI will be like, so it's too early to talk about security.

In a recent interview, Carmack pointed out that his interest in AGI was inspired in part by Sam Altman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, who Altman tried to recruit to OpenAI. Altman has previously expressed his concerns about the security of AGI.

As soon as this post was sent, there were congratulations and joins, and people began to care about how Carmack's company was profitable, what products it wanted to build, and who its target users were. AGI has always been so controversial that even Yann LeCun, the chief scientist of Carmack's current employer, often "shoots" AGI. Therefore, this time, his start-up business has also attracted a lot of people to "badmouth":

Humbly advise you not to participate in the AGI arms race.

20 million dollars could make a handful of technology leaders rich briefly, but at the cost of accelerated human extinction. You were one of my heroes. You are lost.

In addition to security considerations, from the perspective of technological development itself, the current popular AGI also seems to show a "bubble" trend. Berkeley Ma Yi complained under the Weibo Technology V "teacher Wood" post:

Carmack hasn't responded much to these voices yet, and it remains to be seen how his AGI company will develop.

On the other hand, as teacher Mu said, a big trend is that legendary programmers and engineers are increasingly attacking the AI field. For example, Google Daniel Jeff Dean, compiler god / father of LLVM Chris Lattner,Windows NT, etc., are now active in the AI community, as well as Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Mustafa Suleyman, a founding member of DeepMind, who also founded AI: Inflection AI. In addition, Dario Amodei, the former vice president of research at OpenAI, as one of the co-founders of Anthropic, has devoted a lot of energy to the AI text generation system.

Reference link:

Https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1560728042959507457

Https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BA%A6%E7%BF%B0%C2%B7%E5%8D%A1%E9%A9%AC%E5%85%8B/1072333?fromtitle=John%20Carmack&fromid=1290553&fr=aladdin

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