John Carmack, a well-known co-founder of id software, video game developer, and Oculus’s CTO, is forming a new Artificial General Intelligence startup called Keen Technologies.
The startup recently held its funding round led by GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to gather funds. According to Carmack, Keen Technologies managed to raise $20M from a number of well-known investors.
The participating companies in the funding round include Cue founder Daniel Gross, Stripe co-founder & CEO Patrick Collison, Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke, Jim Keller, Capital Factory, and Sequoia, a venture capital.
According to Carmack, Nat was an influential figure in motivating him with this project. He also shared that raising $20M in funds from other people gives him a sense of responsibility to do well.
However, netizens believe this startup is an obvious fraud because AGI is still not possible in the universe yet. @ccguy on slashdot.org said “he went with the most naive "investors" he could find.”
Carmack shared he will continue working with Meta regarding VR matters but also focus 20% of his time on Keen Technologies while Nat expressed his excitement in seeing Carmack’s work come to life.
The AGI stuff explained by Carmack in the TechCrunch article also seems to be quite vague to a general audience. He only got funding from unimportant rich investors because of his reputation.
Will Carmack’s AGI startup be successful? Netizens believe it’s impossible but Carmack plans on putting an effort into it.