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Zuckerberg Pivots to AI After Pivoting to the Metaverse.

https://gizmodo.com/instagram-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-whatsapp-ai-1850232199
The company formerly known as Facebook is shifting its focus once again, this time to enter the artificial intelligence arms race.
Mark Zuckerberg’s tech behemoth released its own research-focused, large language model last month. Just days later, the company announced it would soon be incorporating AI into its consumer-facing products. Now, the CEO has stated that AI won’t just be a facet of Meta’s work going forward, it will be the focus. Meta will be moving its primary goalposts from filling up a sparsely populated virtual world into the increasingly crowded terrain of generative AI.


Under Zuckerberg’s so-called “year of efficiency” company-wide reorganization, Meta’s “single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” he wrote in an official update released Tuesday. “We have the infrastructure to do this at unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it enables will be amazing,” he added. The announcement came in the same letter in which the CEO confirmed Meta would be cutting 10,000 of its employees.

For the past few years, the biggest chunk of the company’s research and development spending outside its direct family of apps has been in its unsettling and uninspiring virtual reality sector. Meta’s expensive VR headset line and VR game platform/Second Life-dupe, Horizon Worlds, have taken priority and execs have hyped them as the company’s future.

In the not-too-distant-past, Zuckerberg has made sweeping claims about its VR. Just a couple of months ago, the CEO said the metaverse would somehow become “as important as smartphones.” He’s also pitched the VR tech as the future of work, though employees who’ve been forced into it don’t seem to like it very much. In 2021, Meta went on a hiring spree, bringing on thousands of employees to build out its virtual reality offerings. The company’s 2022 year end financial report revealed that it has been spending more than $1 billion per month on its metaverse and other VR work.


Now though, that balance seems liable to shift. In a way, Meta has effectively said: ‘Friendship ended with metaverse, now AI is my best friend.’ Though, the company has claimed it won’t be abandoning its virtual reality projects entirely. “Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central,” Zuckerberg wrote in the Tuesday letter.

However, if “efficiency” is truly the aim (and if it wants to appease its investors), the company will likely have to cut back on VR spending to make room for its newly central AI mission. Though maybe there’s room to grow AI and VR together. Potentially, with a generative AI push, Horizon Worlds could finally, actually get legs.

So after Zuckerbergs "great leap forward" which resulted in the loss of thousands of staff just recently, he is now putting primary focus on AI instead of the his Virtual vision verse thing, which is very concerning if you are invested into it, because it means updates and company funding/investment will also decline.

Although he won't kill Horizon Worlds because he put a crazy amount of money into it, he wants to implement AI with what he calls the single largest investment, in all their products.

So the current leaders in VR are about to cause uncertainty and doubt among possible investors and devs from jumping in, by switching primary resources into another market, to chase a trend. Which will in turn, damage other players in the VR market because it's going to cause companies and people to yield back. Because Zuckerberg is smrt or so people keep claiming.

We are what, 8 years into VR since the 2015 boom and we were supposed to have 1 billion in the verse in 10 years, doesn't seem like that's going to happen unless Apple pulls it off which I doubt. However, it does seem like Zucker is basically handing over confidence of sideliners right over to Apple and other competition like TCL, Samsung, etc.

I wouldn't be surprised that as Zucker changes focus, and minimizes his already billions wasted in the metaverse, that someone is going to come out from behind and lap him. That's happened multiple times already.

But this is a pretty big black mark for VR makers like Valve, TCL, Samsung, HTC, PancakeXR, Varjo, and others. This i because there's already a cautious perception from the recent sales reports covering 2022, with the steeper than expected decline from what was expected to be a booming year, lower than expected software sales, lower than expected hardware sales outside of Quest 2, which is currently in decline, and the lack of VR novelty or media coverage bringing in people the same way as in the past. After that people have been waving yellow flags for VR.

But when the market leader is going to draw back support and put primary resources into another market less than two years after setting up the company for a promised long-term investment into the metaverse, and then last year saying that the losses were worth it for the result, companies and people seeing this partial U-turn are going to have people waving red flags now.

He has not done much yet to reassure people on the pivot either, yeah there's a new headset coming but will it have the same push that the company gave the Quest 2? Same with Ventura, which is supposed to be cheaper than Quest 3? Or is he going to ride on minimum effort and depend on low prices to get impulse buyers? Will he invest more in social VR outside of Horizon Worlds? Will he be investing in helping devs reach out to larger audiences? What about bigger updates or improving the ecosystem? Didn't he say he wanted VR to be the new smartphone?

These are all questions folks are going to be asking now after this pivot.

He's basically on the verge of burning bridges in the market he's leading in. What is he doing? Does he even know?
 

Trogdor1123

Gold Member
I’m always surprised why people who had a clear vision of what they wanted their product to be, knew how to get there and did a pretty good job at it, change that vision suddenly to something they probably don’t believe in as much if at all, instead of selling their stake or letting someone else take the wheel.

Hubris I guess…
 

Spyxos

Gold Member
Will Forte Fml GIF by The Lonely Island
 
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I do wonder in what way AI can be integrated into Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram.
I still think that with metaverse they were too early. But in the future it will be possible.

For Google AI search + Google Workspace (or whatever it is called) AI would make sense, with Microsoft with Bing and their chokehold on corporate solutions it would make sense. But Facebook? OpenAI is an open platform so a lot of solutions will be based on that anyway.

Zucker is pretty much giving his lead away and going to hurt Quest's progress going forward causing uncertainty and hurting the VR market indirectly.
Erm, VR market did not show any future prospects at this point.
 
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This is rather funny but I think we're going to see more and more companies trying to put aí in everything.

The new revolution in the AI is here, I work with technology and I have to admit I'm s little bit scared.
 

Arsic

Loves his juicy stink trail scent
Zuck going to build an AI sex doll that will revolutionize the world.
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
This man is neither a leader nor a visionary. The board of directors needs to replace him if they want the company to be more than apps for sharing pictures.
 

SJRB

Gold Member
This man is neither a leader nor a visionary. The board of directors needs to replace him if they want the company to be more than apps for sharing pictures.

Zuck is just a punk who was good at coding, stole someone’s ideas and had an enormous amount of luck. The book about the haydays of Facebook is crazy. He has no idea how to manage anything, let alone an insanely huge company like Facebook.

He’s not a leader, not an innovator, not a visionary, not a manager. He’s literally wasting BILLIONS of dollars on a vanity project and has clearly never heard of the sunk cost fallacy. He seems to have such a warped view on real life.
 

Biff

Member
Can we agree the odds of being a human capable of creating a billion dollar company is 1 in 100 million?

Can we agree the odds of being a human capable of effectively running a $100-billion company are probably also 1 in 100 million?

Therefore the odds of THE ZUCC being the right person to run Meta is 1 in 10 quadrillion KEKW
 

KXVXII9X

Member
Jumping from one trend to another doesn't spark confidence in me for someone's vision. Zuckerberg was so dead set on the Metaverse that he changed everything and renamed his company and now since AI is taking off, he quickly jumps ship. It makes his ambitions shallow. it is sad because I actually like the Quest 2. John Carmack seemed like the real visionary.
 
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damidu

Member
what a fucking clown, just because you lucked out at stealing someone else’s idea doesn’t make you “the big visionary”
keep running your company to ground chasing the next big thing
 

JimboJones

Member
At least ai has actual applications, metaverse was total nonsense from the start, hopefully we'll here less of that and web3.0 rubbish.
 
In business, you want to create trends by figuring out how to solve key problems that others may not be looking at or identifying. Nintendo saw gaming becoming too complicated for the masses and exclusive to a set of younger people that grew up on NES/Playstation. That's why the Wii Remote was designed with two key buttons and shaped like a television remote, and Wii Sports was a simple game with rules (Tennis, Bowling, etc) that most kids and elders can understand right away.

I don't think Mark will be the guy to lead the next breakthrough when his mindset appears to be of chasing the next hyped up trend with no clear vision for application to a person's everyday life. Granted, I never imagined people would be so willing to give up their privacy and place their lives on Facebook the way so many have done, but Mark struck a home-run providing a platform for that need and demand (and quite a bit of luck, but that's required for everything).
 
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diffusionx

Gold Member
Friendly reminder Zuckerberg stole the idea for FB and then basically turned into a massive spying operation for the entire world. I wouldn't doubt if his operation got propped up by the feds/CIA too. He has no vision.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
I see a lot more uses for AI than VR.

All this crazy AI you hear about from answer questions, dong kids homework, and the voice work sound very authentic sometimes it can lead to some very big social uses:

- Social factor. Youre going to get crazy AI celebs people will love having fun interacting with

- Going beyond kids homework and shit like that you hear about, if the algorithm can become legit you can skip googling articles or hiring coaches and consultants, a good answer to a problem can be either text or voice and you go with it.

For example, if you need help filling out taxes, instead of googling it and sifting through shitloads of sites hoping one of them fits your needs, you ask AI [How to File Taxes in Nova Scotia] and you get a detailed text or verbal answer you know is a legit answer the AI rounded up.
 

Fredrik

Member
As a fan of VR this honestly sucks donkey balls, Metaverse was a shitty idea but Meta has pushed VR hard, now it sounds like they’re pulling the plug and that means it’ll most definitely stay niche.
Obi Wan GIF by Star Wars


And I don’t trust Apple to do anything properly in this space tbh.
Game Over
☹️
 

PSYGN

Member
Friendly reminder Zuckerberg stole the idea for FB and then basically turned into a massive spying operation for the entire world. I wouldn't doubt if his operation got propped up by the feds/CIA too. He has no vision.
Small wonder since he's a computer. Computers are based on patterns. The trend right now is AI and he is patterning the others.
 
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