There will be no press release or huge announcement because he would have to admit he was incorrect. But make no mistake about it: Mark Zuckerberg has just buried the metaverse. The metaverse is no longer alive.
The metaverse was expected to be the Next Big Thing for the social-media tycoon, who renamed his empire (made up of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) Meta Platforms in 2021.
Simply told, the metaverse is a virtual world in which we are expected to interact with one another via specialized glasses and virtual reality headsets.
According to Zuckerberg, who Tesla CEO Elon Musk dubbed “Zuck the Fourteenth” in an apparent homage to the French king Louis the XIV, noted for his vanity and extravagance, it was the future of technology.
Meta Forms a High-Level AI Team
Meta has put billions of dollars into this highly publicized project, much to the dismay of the company’s shareholders. This shows that Meta is committed to the idea.
Reality Laboratories, the division that houses metaverse initiatives, lost over $24 billion in 2021 and 2022, including $13.7 billion only last year.
Because the metaverse has ended, the losses will be greatly reduced in the next months.
Zuckerberg has just held a funeral for the next great shiny thing, artificial intelligence.
“We’re forming a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to accelerate our work in this field,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook on February 27.
“We’re starting by grouping together a number of the teams working on generative AI across the firm into one group focused on delivering delightful experiences around this technology. …“
“In the near future, we’ll concentrate on developing creative and expressive tools,” he added. “In the long run, we’ll concentrate on creating AI characters that can assist people in a variety of ways.“
The metaverse’s legacy will live on because Meta will continue to produce relics of this virtual world, such as headsets, but for a specific audience, such as videogames and the crypto world.
To his credit, Zuckerberg avoids public humiliation by subtly and expertly shifting his detractors’ focus to AI, which most experts regard as a legitimate scientific breakthrough.
The benefits to consumers and businesses are undeniable: ChatGPT, the most apparent manifestation of the AI breakthrough, has fundamentally altered internet search. Queries will now receive human-like replies. Chatbots can now efficiently perform repetitive and uninteresting jobs for businesses.
The Metaverse Was a Nightmare
We are also coming closer to AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which refers to highly autonomous systems that mimic and outperform humans in the majority of economically valuable tasks.
Essentially, the expected paradigm change since the internet revolution occurred. Zuckerberg recognizes this and has instantly shifted his position.
Even if he is not as much of a pioneer as he once was, the computer tycoon nonetheless reacts fast to new ideas and trends. He always adapts and gives the appearance that he is immediately on the trail.
Then again, who doesn’t? This is his strength, and it is what allows him to bury the metaverse on the sly today.
“Around 80% of our investments – a little more — go towards the core business, what we call our family of apps, so that’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the ads business associated with that. Then, less than 20% of our investment goes to Reality Labs,” the CEO said at the New York Times Dealbook conference in November.
Whether by coincidence or not, the OpenAI firm introduced the ChatGPT chatbot on the same day Zuckerberg made this comment, thoroughly convincing millions of customers that AI is already a part of their daily lives and would, in the future, nearly control their interactions with technology.
Don’t bring up the metaverse with Zuckerberg from now on.
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