The Metaverse was always such a bad direction. At the time, I was really unsure about my intuition -- I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have some data to back that up. As it stands, my intuition (and everybody else's) turned out to be right.
It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Researching myself, it always just seemed to be a bullshit fractal. At the height of the crypto boom, I was beginning to doubt my conclusions and started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away. It's no wonder that all the companies are immediately pivoting towards it. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI.
Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto.
It's not about whether or not there is value there to be provided. VR and cyrpto provide value too, it's just that the markets for that tech are way more "niche" than companies were hoping for.
And I don't think VR is going away. If it wasn't dead in the water in the 90s, then it's not going to die because the Metaverse failed. But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software.
The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now?
Generative AI is like electricity, only I don't think quite as useful. The point is that, on its own, it has no value what-so-ever. The value lies in what it is used for.
Right now what I am observing is a phenomenon that is way too common in our industry. Companies are rushing to go to market with some AI "thing." 99.9999% of those "things" will end up being more versions of the Metaverse and crypto. Because most of these companies aren't really sure what problem they are solving for actual people. It's all so novel and abstract and people are seeing dollar signs with very little understanding of how they are going to put it to use.
Where it finds its uses, I predict will be limited to the same applications that we're already using ML for. Chat bots, entertainment, generating document outlines etc. Just because we made a big breakthrough with the technology doesn't mean that we've actually created a solution to real world problems that real world people are having here and now in the real world. No one, other than maybe Open AI, is going to get rich on "generative AI." If they get rich and change the industry, it will be finding a use for it that many people want.
I think crypto, metaverse, and generative AI are all really different -- and I agree with the original poster. Generative AI seems much more likely to be a game changer.
Crypto was something I always struggled to make sense of. My son asked, "why didn't I buy bitcoin when it was a few cents?!" -- The simple answer was it didn't seem like it had much use. The value in crypto eventually came in the form of a pyramid scheme. Admittedly, I do use crypto to do transactions with untrustworthy people (don't have to worry about chargebacks and things like that). But it's hype was around it being a speculative commodity. For normal people -- it's just not all that useful.
The metaverse is different in that I do see the theoretical value in it. But it seems a LONG way off. I haven't seen anything that really makes me think, "wow -- this is it". It doesn't seem like we're close. And honestly I think generative AI maybe a prerequisite to deliver a truly valuable metaverse.
Generative AI is useful now and represents a huge leap over the state of the art, not that long ago. I worked with RNNs and LSTMs to answer questions not that many years ago, and honestly I wouldn't have predicted this level of effectiveness for LLMs for probably 20 plus years -- and I certainly didn't know how we'd do it. But more importantly I'm finding it valuable today. As I noted in another post -- ChatGPT-4 already has shown better differential diagnosis skills than my family's doctor. I use it literally every day already. There are things that I want it to do that would make my life 10x better -- and I could see a clear path to get there (like, if that was my day job I think I could put together a project plan to deliver it).
I just don't think these techs are comparable at all.
You've pretty much nailed what I've been thinking about when comparing generative AI hype to crypto/metaverse hype.
I keep hearing this argument that generative AI has more utility, making it more "real". Sure, but they're missing the point, which is that people made some pretty ridiculous claims about the future utility of crypto / metaverse ($100k bitcoin, metaverse real-estate speculation) rather than the present day possibilities, and they're continuing to make ridiculous claims about the future utility of AI (the end of web development, AGI soon, etc).
The hype isn't about present day possibilities, but about future speculation, and the future speculation can get off-the-rails crazy.
I think you're both right. I think generative AI will be like the internet, and we'll experience a 90s-style bubble first, then it will gradually transform everything.
Personally though, I've already used it for multiple real-world applications in my business and personal life, whereas crypto was only ever a toy. VR I'm less sure about; so far it's only a toy, and I think it will take longer than AI to make a real difference, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least AR and probably VR are both eventually very commonplace.
FWIW, I've found uses for it already that will improve the company I'm building in the very short term. Maybe you disagree in the magnitude of the value, but I find it to be at least somewhat significant. Enough to pursue.
I've never worked for any company where leaning into the Metaverse or crypto would generate any meaningful business value, short or long term. The promises for Metaverse and crypto are always about a nebulous future that could exist if only everyone collectively bought into the vision.
> The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now?
Disagree; I'd argue that the key distinction between generative AI and those other things (metaverse/crypto) is that the value of it is immediately apparent to almost anyone. There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.
I mostly agree with this -- the converged value will be ~1% of the initial hype. 1% of hype is still massive.
After the noise has calmed, I feel generative AI, at its core, will enhance information search and summarization; lookup and compression. That itself will have massive value. It will differentiate roles that require net new thinking from those that require regurgitation.
I'm a paid DAU of ChatGPT. I'm using it regularly as a tutor to help work through a technical online course I'm taking, and it is extremely good at that. My cousin who is in college says basically every student is using it to help study.
There could be an excess of hype, but there is clear significant and immediate value of these tools.
> And I don't think VR is going away. If it wasn't dead in the water in the 90s, then it's not going to die because the Metaverse failed. But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software.
VR will go the way of 3D Printing. A surgeon can walk into one of the largest medical device company's in the world, talk about a new idea for a broken bone transplant and within 24 hours can have a 3D prototype printed out. Great for innovation of broken bones, but it isn't the ubiquity we experienced with something like mobile phones, email, or social media. Meta thinks thats what VR is going to be.
While it's early days yet AI is proving itself much more readily. If you're in the right networks you've heard that several companies who've rolled out AI features are on track to generate >100MM ARR charging for them.
One feature I'm quite confident in: translation services for i18n in websites using GPT-4 + a much smaller number of human translators to check the work of low confidence translations and high value surfaces. I can confirm the end result for French is better than existing human translation services and much cheaper.
Certainly businesses will need to walk back some AI features but it really seems like there's business value now, let alone in 2 years when publicly available LLMs are even better.
> Generative AI is like electricity, only I don't think quite as useful. The point is that, on its own, it has no value what-so-ever. The value lies in what it is used for.
I don't really understand this description - electricity is one of the most useful things in the history of civilization. I think the latter half of what you're saying is true, but it's true of everything. There's nothing inherently useful about my car, except that it gets me places. There's nothing inherently useful about my house, except that it shelters me from the elements.
Generative AI will be useful for creating lots of things (probably primarily code in its various forms). I've used it to write a few Python scripts over the course of the last week that simply wouldn't have been possible for me to do (without a few weeks of teaching myself Python at least - I'm a somewhat-code-literate PM but very much not a programmer). Those have solved real problems for me and added real value to my life.
> Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto.
Generative AI has potential to immediately increase productivity, and thus revenue. The only real way to make money (in the short term at-least) with crypto and the metaverse was to convince other people the digital assets created were rare, valuable and worth paying for.
I heard a great interview response from a YC-related person recently. Might have been SamA:
Nobody you know (roughly) uses VR many times a week/day, not in any extended fashion. Everyone might have them but they're in a drawer somewhere. Compare that to LLM's, which roughly everyone is or should be using. There are very few knowledge-economy jobs where an LLM can't be useful, within hours or days or definitely weeks with a bit of practice. And it'll get better every year. It's here to stay.
I’m starting to agree with this perspective. My opinion on generative AI is shifting from apocalyptic world breaking tech to something more like Siri 2.0.
It’ll be neat for sure, but I think the plateau of useful applications will arrive soon and it won’t be as game-changing as it initially seemed.
I know it sounds stupid, but generative AI has an incredible amount of potential for videogames, making those way more alive.
It might not make millions directly, but it could unleash some very successful videogames, without decreasing accessibility (like vr) or a weird value proposition (crypto)
I wouldn't quite go that far, but the longer I am building these models into systems, I think the good use case for LLMs/Generative AI can be categorized into a few types of systems.
1. Data collection - Obvious, creating a voice/text interface into an existing system where the problem and requirements are well known. Eg, booking a restaurant. It needs a time, place, people. Collecting that from voice/text can be convenient in many situations. Same with different types of models collecting data from video/images/etc.
2. Providing options - When the desired output is unknown, but a human can describe the problem. Eg, coding, art, many "I need an X that can Y for problem Z". ChatGPT does a great job of this and I think most of the value of generative AI is here currently.
Most of the hype is around how far can we take the capabilities of solving this 2nd category to produce the third.
3. Agents - There are examples of solutions showing this potential but the 'killer app' I don't think has been demonstrated, at least well enough. AutoGPT, BabyAGI, etc are interesting, but in my experience don't yet perform nearly well enough. They fail far too often for any trust to be created. This doesn't mean GPT4 native plugins won't get there, they could and that will create a large amount of value in this category (I don't have access to Plugins). This is also where a lot of "selling the dream" is happening. It seems plausible we will get there, but still not clear how these will be accepted and used in the real world, by average users.
One big area of value IMO for Agents is accessibility. People with physical disabilities, but still have the ability to speak I think will provide massive quality of life improvements through being able to interact more easily with more systems.
Very interesting times, the speed of change has seemed amazing, and that for me is the part that creates the most unknown, and is hard to ignore the hype when plotting the rate of improvement and the possibility of Agents becoming an accepted tool in wider society.
The value provided by Crypto/VR is way more limited, and the accessibility of the tech ranges from bad to worse. VR has a lot of utility, but due to the headset requirement, it is disconnected from a lot of the real world. Lots use cases for specific problems, but less widely accessible as generative AI by a long way.
Crypto IMO should be ignored, at best it assists with the financialization of everything which doesn't provide value to a wide portion of society, it provides a means of value extraction.
People seem to misunderstand why the metaverse was pushed so hard. Meta isn't stupid and was doing it for a good reason.
It all comes back to how Meta makes its money - data collection.
Facebook is in a really tricky position right now. They don't control the hardware or OS that it runs on, or the app stores. That means that at any time, Apple or Google can screw them over and deny Facebook from collecting data.
However, what if they had their own hardware (Oculus) running their own OS? Then, they could collect as much data as they wanted without any interference from Google or Apple. That means significantly more profit! There's no way in hell they're going to break into the mobile phone market, so VR was their best option.
That's why they pushed VR so hard. They need it to work because otherwise they have no control over their main source of income, and the squeeze on them is getting tighter ever day.
The squeeze is getting tighter because mass data collection of the world population is perhaps a very questionable and ethically wrong business model for a private company and instead of developing the "Metaverse" which would make it even easier maybe Facebook should have looked at opportunities to turn their users into paying customers by providing valuable products and features that are worth paying for. The way you describe it is as if they have their hands tied together and because ad revenue was their initial model to success it means they cannot ever have any other profit model anymore, but I think that is wrong and that's where they've made a mistake.
It still doesn't change the fact that it was a dumb decision. Facebook would have been much better off simply accepting that they couldn't control the hardware or OS or app stores and continue to do the best they could within those constraints.
Instead they just threw away a ton of money that could have gone to shareholders and employees instead.
> There's no way in hell they're going to break into the mobile phone market, so VR was their best option.
They even tried to break into the mobile phone market at one point back in 2013. Then apple made it's privacy changes and now Google has said they will do something similar on their platform. I think you're right that Facebook got desperate to find a platform they can control.
Err... as much I'd like to have a VR headset and use it, I simply can't.
I don't have time to immerse myself in the environment where I don't see the reality that surrounds me (as in, people which share my public transport, cars that stop at the traffic lights next to me, my kids running around me, people I work with, etc.). It's not that I need the reality, but I can't disconnect safely. Facebook is easy. Just reach the pocket, get the phone, a few swipes and you are using it. Be it in the office, around your kids, in the waiting room, ...
I don't see how VR can provide you a FB scale of users.
None of that does a thing to make people actually want to use the product though. Nobody wants to strap a VR set to their head because it would be good for Facebook. I get why they want that to be true, but spending immense amounts of money trying to force it to be true has been a stupid waste.
That maybe a factor but it's also possible the attention economy is peaking. We always knew attention available is fixed.
Google and Apple have reported slight slow down. Smartphone market in the west has saturated and not growing. Ppl have so many other options where they can spend their time online. Its possible everyone is seeing less ad revenue.
This seems like a bit of 20/20 hindsight. At the time, the biggest concern Zuckerberg had was that they didn't own a platform. Apple had the iOS ecosystem, Google had Android, Microsoft had Windows, Amazon had AWS and their logistical moat. Zuckerberg made a bet that the world would move to VR similarly to the way the world moved to PCs in the 80s, which allowed Microsoft to take over a big chunk of the world.
Zuckerberg's fear wasn't unreasonable, he just bet wrong. Apple's privacy changes had a huge impact to Facebook, and the other FAANG without a "moat-defining platform", Netflix, is also in the most precarious position among the big techs.
That said, I agree with most of the other comments. I can see VR evolving a little beyond gaming I guess, but it's actually kind of a nightmare to imagine myself wearing a fucking headset all day. At this point I think Zuckerberg knows he bet wrong and AI is the future, and he's clearly trying to pivot, but it's really hard to move a big company like Meta quickly, and it also means he has to admit he just lit billions and billions on fire.
2nd Life, The Simms, various MMORPGS. We have loads of experience buildings virtual worlds with virtual belongings and conducting meetings virtually. I was part of a WOW guild that had meetings about raids and other small bits of admin stuff in game.
But a company known for being sketchy as heck slaps on 3D goggles and makes it less fun and I’m supposed to want to be in it?
I think you’ll find that a lot of people were skeptical.
I dunno about you, but I and basically everyone in my circles at the time agreed that it was most likely a terrible idea.
Until and unless there's a truly convenient piece of hardware to get one into a virtual space—I'm talking weight and bulk comparable to prescription eyeglasses, no wires going beyond your body (ie, maybe a pack at the belt/pocket/something like that), and some form of extremely intuitive UI—you're not going to get people interested in regular interactions in a VR/AR space.
Frankly, even once we do have something like that, I think it unlikely that many people would choose to do things like meetings in a virtual space over something simpler like Zoom, even if they did already own the hardware.
And none of these views have changed over the past few years.
No; I think Zuck has been far too isolated and out of touch with how regular people operate for too long, and when faced with, as you say, the fact that Facebook was only running on other people's platforms—and it became clear that no one was interested in making Facebook their platform, like by buying a Facebook phone—he convinced himself that this was The Next Big Thing based on sheer desperation.
> AI is the future, and he's clearly trying to pivot
I don't really understand this take. Generative AI is a complement to the metaverse. Biggest problem metaverses face is having good content since it's quite a bit more difficult to create. Using generative AI to fill the metaverse is not a pivot, it's been the plan all along.
That's how I read this. Facebook already had a failed facebook phone venture everyone seems to have forgotten about. Zuckerberg is trying to get to the new world first this time. Except even if VR takes off it would only be a niche compared to mobile so it doesn't really make sense. But AR could potentially and I guess VR might have been seen as a stepping stone to that.
Meta isn't giving up on the metaverse. The effort is not a failure. The plan was always going to take closer to 10 years to realize. They were explicit about it being a long term goal, not a short term one.
They've made some missteps, but it's not even close to being over.
To me and everyone around me the Metaverse was immediately clear to be a massive flop. First of all, before the Metaverse neither me or any of my tech friends did even know that anyone was still investing into VR. When we heard about Facebook pivoting to the Metaverse we all were like "what? why would you invest into a technology which has been widely rejected already?". It's like Facebook investing in 3D TVs, which had a short blip in the market but then died off, because fundamentally nobody cared about 3D TVs. I don't know anyone who is even remotely excited about VR let alone the Metaverse.
This became even more obvious when shortly after Facebook's pivot nobody, I mean like absolutely nobody was searching or reading up on VR news. It's a topic that people just don't care. They don't want VR in their life. People want more REALITY in their life, not less. Especially after COVID.
On the other hand, AI has sparked everyone's imagination. Only a few weeks ago I showed my wife ChatGPT and we used it for some work she had to do in her field (medicine) and she was completely amazed by it. She's got her own account with OpenAI now and uses it for a variety of things already. My wife is the most non tech person ever. This to me is a strong indication that AI has not even scratched on the surface of its potential.
A far less monetized and more user content focused version of "the Metaverse" already exists: VRChat. It's been around since before Covid and it is still around. Granted, yes, it is still mostly a niche hobby for some very dedicated people, not all of whom even use VR, but it exists. I think the people who would have been interested in Meta's product looked at it and thought "But we already have a less crappy version of this that's not tied to a questionable company." Especially since Meta's handling of Oculus has been far from great (i.e. requiring a Facebook/Meta account just to use any headset, as opposed to the separate account like before).
But as I said, it's still fairly niche and mostly serves as an escape for people. I think slapping the whole "buy in-world items with crypto" thing on top of that just made the target group even smaller than before. It just felt like jumping onto any tech buzz words to broaden appeal, when it actually caused the opposite. For all the data they're supposed to have, that was poor decision making imo.
The data I'm looking at makes the Facebook decision a little more sensical.
Yes there was a Big Spike in VR interest around Oculus, and most of the people who bought one have it sitting in a corner collecting dust...
But a significant subset of people continued to use it, and their usage is steadily growing. There are huge numbers of people willing to pay $500 -$2k, on each new device that comes out, just to "see if its ready".
There are tons of people who work from home on a couple monitors, who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls. Obviously the comfort, battery, and visual performance is not there yet, but most people have a feeling that would could just be a generation or two away from it.
I would guess that more than 50% of hacker news readers over 40 years old had an MP3 player BEFORE the iPod. They were all garbage and completely replaced when the iPod came out, but for the 2-3 years before the iPod, all the early adopters new something like that was coming and they were hungry for it.
VR is kind of a gimmick, but AR will, 100%, be the next frontier of human-computer interaction. It sparks the imagination in an extremely tangible way.
Well Apple are going pretty heavy into VR/AR with there product likely launching this year, so it's not just Meta that got caught up in that wave, a few years ago that was where a lot of people thought the future was, so that is where both Facebook and Apple seemed to put a lot of investment.
It's not done yet. AI is the current buzz because we are starting to see some great products and uses for it, we have yet to see that with VR/AR but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. It's still early, I am not a fan of the 'metaverse' idea, but VR/AR still has a lot left to give.
There are some people who legitimately love VR games like VRChat. I am not one of them, but I have talked to a few. At the time that Facebook made it's initial investments into that space starting in 2014 there was at least some possibility that those people were the early adopters of a technology that would disrupt the social media and entertainment industries. Of course that turned out to be wrong (or at least too early) but at the time it wasn't completely implausible. Large enterprises sometimes have to invest in long shots as a risk mitigation strategy.
> People want more REALITY in their life, not less.
Agree with most of what you said. But my take is, people would LOVE virtual reality if it were done well enough. We just don't seem to have the technical capability to pull it off well enough yet. Uncanny valley and all that.
I feel exactly the same. I have friends that have been trying to explain to me what the huge advantages of crypto and NFTs are for almost a decade and it's still very hazy to me. Nobody explained ChatGPT to me. I saw prompt and started typing some questions about a python library and it was immediately obvious to me that this would be super useful to me.
Sometimes I think you need to use a new tech for a while before the benefits become obvious. I worked for Apple retail back when the iPhone was first released. I remember even after getting our hands on it release day that it was neat and exciting, but also something I'd completely written off at $800 because I just didn't see enough use for what it offered compared to a dumb phone and an iPod.
Part of the sales experience at the time was they gave all of us one to carry around during our shift on the sales floor and encouraged us to show it off and use it to look up things we'd normally have gone to one of the demo computers to look up. About 2 months later, I'm taking a road trip with a destination plugged into my Garmin GPS (remember those?). I'm in the final stretches of getting where I need to go when the GPS says "you've arrived" while I'm driving down a road with nothing on either side of me. I go for another half mile or so just assuming it was off by a few hundred feet and I'd find an entrance but no such luck. Turn around, punch in the destination to the GPS again and try from the other direction, same deal. "You've arrived" in the middle of nowhere. Tried a couple more times and then pulled off to the side of the road and reached for the iPhone in my pocket to pull up some information / a map quest search, and then remembered that I don't have an iPhone in my pocket because I don't own an iPhone and just carry one on shift at work. That experience convinced me that there was value in this whole "smart phone" thing and that I would eventually be getting one.
Which isn't to say that crypto or NFTs are like iPhones, but more that I think you can't necessarily understand how useful a given piece of tech is just by someone else explaining it to you. Some things you just have to use.
I think different technologies are going to appeal to different audiences and users. I've been pretty blown away by generative AI, both stuff like Stable Diffusion and now, these ultra-powerful LLMs (although I didn't much about it before that) - it's obvious that pairing w/ ChatGPT makes me a better programmer, and it functions as a pretty good research assistant as to boot, however, talking/showing it around to a lot of friends, many of them are dismissive or pretty meh around then and so far, and profess to not have any use for it.
But then again, that may be why there's huge adoption of crypto in countries like Nigeria (32%!) or Vietnam (21%) [1] (obviously, crypto is a lot more useful in your life if you have a weaker central currency or less financial access; their deeper dive into Sub-Saharan Africa adoption of crypto in particular is fascinating [2]).
Likewise, I'm a believer in the eventual adoption of XR, but a big part of my excitement is really my desire for infinite screen space. Still, I can see the argument that everything will be spatial in the future and personally, I see these trends tying together a lot more than not. Maybe they're on different hype curves, but decentralized financial transactions on credibly neutral, near real time networks (w/ smart contracts) seem like a natural fit for agentic AI. And in the VR arena, I'm seeing some incredibly compelling stuff happening with NeRFs and other generative media that is going to make virtual/augmented immersion a lot more compelling (one of the big bottlenecks for VR right now is generating compelling evergreen content and experiences).
I think the tricky part with innovation, is almost everything innovative looks like a bad idea to almost everyone. And as the tech or company progresses, more people look at it and think it's a good idea. If it were really obviously a good idea, there's no innovation, there would already be others doing it.
And this is in contrast to what YC likes to call tarpit ideas, because there are lots of ideas that look good but everyone who tries to tackle them fails for whatever reason.
So we can say metaverse was a bad bet for Facebook, but that's sort of looking in hindsight at the struggles that tech has and the unknown market. And it appears to be a big bet and lost.
But comparing to current state of AI, is sort of comparing to a different stage, where there is the beginning of an early majority seeing the progress and now seeing the excitement. But go back a couple of years, and more of us would be naysayers, talking about how bad the tech is, or various failure modes.
> I think the tricky part with innovation, is almost everything innovative looks like a bad idea to almost everyone.
No. No. The steam engine, modern refrigeration and open heart surgery all probably had some naysayers but I don't think they looked like bad ideas to almost everyone. A lot of what qualifies as innovative from your tech community really just might be crap.
From the beginning the complaint with crypto and blockchain is that it didn't fix any problems other than maybe assisting as a tool in laundering/illegal transactions, and it wastes energy to boot. I don't see how the naysayers were wrong.
The metaverse idea didn't even get to the point of hyping a purpose. Nobody even bothered to explain what useful human need or want it fulfilled (beyond what has already been fulfilled for years in gaming).
> But comparing to current state of AI, is sort of comparing to a different stage, where there is the beginning of an early majority
Early majority? That is a bold affirmation.
I think these large language models are pretty neat. I also lived through the first AI winters. I would say the hype at this moment isn't even as great as it was then (especially in the 80s). It is a bit tough to explain for those that weren't there - but numerous knowledgable and intelligent people were convinced that the AI singularity was just moments away.
> almost everything innovative looks like a bad idea to almost everyone
I disagree really strongly with this. Innovative things look like impractical long shots that have obvious upsides but that violate conventional wisdom around what is possible. The smartphone is a great example of this: it was obviously innovative, and the idea was obviously great before it actually became reality, but the practical limitations of hardware made it impossible until one day it wasn’t. Same for generative language models. The real innovation for both of these things is that some element constraining a good idea changes and someone notices and can act on it decisively.
Some version of the Metaverse has always been possible in one form or another, but no one acts on it because it doesn’t benefit the users it depends on for success. The fundamental limiting factor is participation incentive, and technology doesn’t change that.
> that's sort of looking in hindsight at the struggles that tech has and the unknown market
There is innovating, trend following and what I’ll term trend completion.
Innovation creates new categories. Crypto was innovative. It looks like a losing bet, but nobody can doubt it was daring. Trend completion doesn’t create new categories, but it delivers on a promise. The iPhone is in this category. A product delivered against the incompleteness preceding it. (And synthesising categories.)
Absent that tangibility or specificity you have trend following. Facebook didn’t create the VR/AR category. It hasn’t delivered a product. It hasn’t even described a uniquely compelling vision. It jumped into a fad because others were doing it and then flailed around helplessly while executives penned PowerPoints.
Even if you accept that anything innovative looks like a bad idea to almost anyone[1] that doesn't mean that anything that looks like a bad idea is per se innovative and just misunderstood. There are things that are just terrible ideas. Lead swimming trunks. Asbestos baby clothes. etc I could come up with thousands of things that the vast majority of people would think are a bad idea because _they are_.
[1] which I totally don't buy. If you think about the early internet as an example - the vast majority of people I knew didn't _understand_ it, and/or didn't _care_ and certainly didn't have any sense of its future, but no one that I knew thought it was a bad idea. If they thought about it all they thought it was irrelevant to them until they absolutely got it and couldn't get on board fast enough.
> almost everything innovative looks like a bad idea to almost everyone
But some ideas are obviously bad within that framework. I could invest millions trying to build a commuter-friendly transportation rocket, but that's obviously not worth trying. Any potential critics would almost certainly be right.
It's too easy / lazy to joke about Meta and their bet on a future AR/VR world.
But what I don't see is people willing to do the same with Apple who has also invested billions in the space and will be showcasing their Reality platform in the next couple of months at WWDC.
Do people really want to bet against the company that has had so many consumer product successes even ones for which there was widespread doubt e.g. Apple Watch, AirPods etc.
And what if it takes off ? There will need to be another platform similar to iPhone/Android and isn't that the type of bet Meta should be making.
I think the Apple headset will be a (relative) disaster. I'm sure it will sell OK, but we're talking Apple TV numbers not iPhone numbers.
What AR/VR needs is a mass market killer app, like Pokémon GO (in its heyday) or World of Warcraft or something. Not another headset. People will put up with all kinds of discomfort/inconvenience/cost if there's something interesting to do. The current crop of Metaverses don't cut it in this regard.
I think the Apple headset will be successful primarily because it's an Apple product. As a VR headset it'll probably be technically worse for higher prices than comparable non-Apple headsets (although it'll probably be better than competing AR headsets simply because there aren't any), the software will be top notch and it'll "just work", and most importantly devs will get excited about it and build apps for it.
> But what I don't see is people willing to do the same with Apple who has also invested billions in the space and will be showcasing their Reality platform in the next couple of months at WWDC.
Nobody is criticizing because... there's nothing to base those criticisms on - there's no product (yet) and WWDC is rumor. Once (if) it launches, the praises and critiques will follow.
> I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have some data to back that up.
I am quite sure he had the data that growth with Facebook, Insta, etc. was limited and threatened by TikTok and others. The Meta stuff was an attempt to break out of that I to a different space, where they could be the early mover. And then being blinded by own fascination for the space. I think many share the assumption that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook never really understood what users actually want and had luck their platform matched the spirit for some time.
Staying ahead in this game by pivoting to metaverse was very silly. Even if there is no growth in Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, it could remain a stable cash cow for years.
Not to mention that Facebook was a perfectly fine and popular social networking platform until Facebook itself poisoned it with the engagement algos that put politics and fake news on top, and drove people away.
Exactly this - it's a real startup move, done by a company that probably shouldn't be doing startup pivots at this stage. I think he got the thrust right - Facebook will continue losing share if they continue the 90s MS buy all your competitors strategy which it is obvious at this stage wasn't working for them, and Meta was an attempt to get ahead again rather than just try to scoop up from behind. This approach will necessarily be built on some kind of intuition rather than data, but should have been a well funded skunkworks project instead of gambling many peoples livelihood on something that will take a while to pay off.
I'm probably one of the few that thinks the pivot overall isn't a bad idea, but it was just done in such an irresponsible way and they're paying the price now. We've seen this many times (notably Uber, WeWork, Google, and arguably Apple until Jobs returned from his exile with a new skillset), but the best person to start a company is often not the best to run it when it's established. But Mark has been so good at keeping equity and control that Facebook will fail unless he learns how to adapt. It usually takes a real low point for people to get out of established mindsets. Just putting this out there so I can point to this in 10 years: If I were to predict the future, I'd say Facebook stock plummets and everyone writes it off, and Mark wises up, bringing it back much stronger. I don't particularly like him, but I think he's got it in him.
I am not so sure about the generative models thing. Everyone is losing their shit about ChatGTP et al, yet I am sitting here saying yeah neat trick but I cannot trust anything it generates since anything and everything can be 100% made up and totally inaccurate and outright false. It is neat technology, but ultimately it is like a dictionary where you have to double-check that it is telling you the correct spelling every single time you look up a word - totally useless in other words: why bother using the dictionary at all if you then need to go check that the dictionary is right using some other source of truth? Why not just go straight to that and skip the dictionary in the first place since it is so untrustworthy.
Every single time I've asked ChatGTP or Bard a "simple" question that I know the answer to, there has always (always!) been something simply outright wrong. It is just not ready to be trusted right now, but I look forward to the day when hallucinations are solved.
Until we can be sure that LLMs do not hallucinate, I struggle to see the value to everyday-people for LLMs beyond use cases where accuracy and facts are unimportant. So ignore google-killing search engines, ignore medical diagnosis, ignore programming, ignore legal advice, and instead embrace making up stories or poems about unicorns or whatever where facts, accuracy, and correctness simply don't matter. It will still have a big impact sure, but I don't think it will be as world-changing as people think once the novelty wears off and people realise that LLMs are generally not very reliable when it comes to giving accurate info, and are better suited to "creative" tasks where correctness/accuracy doesn't matter. E.g. with stable diffusion (remember that?) no one expected a perfectly anatomically accurate picture of a dog or whatever - it did a passable picture of a dog eating a burrito or whatever the prompt asked for, but no one confused it with reality or treated it as fact. This is where I feel that we are with LLMs right now - passable, but does not hold up to detailed scrutiny.
But obviously yes the metaverse is obviously total bullshit and facebook have totally jumped-the-shark on this. They're currently deep in restructuriung to undo over-hiring during the pandemic - it would not surprise me at all to see them also re-pivot away from the metaverse too (couching it as some sort of "focusing on efficiency" or whatever, i.e. continue working on FB, instagram and whatsapp core features)
High-income Westerners do not like to engage in activities that make them appear like mindless consumer zombies.
In Denmark the highest income households have small cheap TVs they can hide away while low income households have big 4K TVs as the main attraction in their living room. The reason is that the former don't want to appear like passive mindless consumer zombies who watch TV.
It is a very superficial opinion but wearing a VR headset is literally the most 1984 consumer zombie thing you could possibly do.
Why does it matter if I'm gaming while looking at a screen which is half a metre away, or while looking at a screen which is in front of my face and allows me to move around, in fact making me less like a zombie because I don't have to be stationary.
It's been a couple of months since I've done anything in VR, but I don't understand why you're being so overly dramatical about it, comparing it to 1984 and consumerist zombies.
Not to mention, ruined the brand value along with it. People knew Facebook, good or bad, Facebook was Facebook. There was still a lot that facebook could do. Could gradually evolve into integrating payments becoming a PayPal in the process, a store front and what not. Bringing a video platform of its own with same revenue sharing model fully integrated and what not.
Yes, there are other companies and products in similar spaces but Facebook would have been cash positive in each of those ventures pretty soon if not crazy profitable.
Whereas the Meta VR demos are almost close to what we can see from 80s, not to mention that they add no value to gaming, entertainment, communication or commerce.
I don't think the European Union regulatory bodies would have allowed Facebook/Meta to integrate stuff like payments and, as such, to "become PayPal in the process". Maybe if that all had happened before 2015-2016, but in today's political and business climate I see no way for that being allowed to happen.
The Metaverse is coming along just fine. Roblox, Fortnite, VRchat, and Second Life all work. None are ad-supported. It's not compatible with Facebook's business model.
There's no real role for "brands" in the metaverse. Or even ads.
All the successful systems charge the user, although many have a free to play tier.
As a branch of gaming, the metaverse works reasonably well, and is getting better.
Gaming itself is huge, has passed Hollywood, and is going on from there. See the current issue of The Economist.
You know Fortnite has a huge ad business right? Like in the hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter.
Roblox also has a branded games business. It does not mediate ads but it also has advertising of other games on its platform. They are definitely working on automatic ad mediation.
It is Nov 14 2018. Facebook share price is $139. The WSJ publishes reports that Facebook morale is tanking. The top HN comment reads that Zuckerberg doesn't understand Facebook.
A year later, Facebook ends 50% higher. Another year later, Facebook is 30% again higher. And it happens for another year. In the end, what gets Facebook is Apple AAT but it still ends up 60% higher than when that comment was posted.
> I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have some data to back that up
Maybe like 10 years ago when PG was more active on here he was participating in a thread (honestly forgot about what) where I ended up asking him “If Mark Zuckerberg applied to YC with objectively the worst idea you’ve ever heard, would you invest?”
And he said, “of course!”
I think at the time VR started making headlines, I thought was a pretty cool concept. I loved that Valve and Oculus (private at the time) were both going after it.
When FB bought Oculus I didn’t see an obvious connection, but like you’re saying I just assumed Zuckerberg knew exactly what he was doing.
Over time I’ve come to appreciate WHY they made the investment. If they had been right, they were going to be very right (and frankly in kind of a terrifyingly dystopian way imo).
I also wonder if FB could go back in time would they completely scrap VR investment? What (at the time) would have been their big bet instead?
>I also wonder if FB could go back in time would they completely scrap VR investment? What (at the time) would have been their big bet instead?
I think this is the relevant question. So many people fall into the Trap stop thinking in terms of binary outcomes, especially with hindsight information. This isn't how business investment works at all.
The same people that are quick to judge investment failures can rarely produce an alternative idea with multi-billion dollar upside.
I think the reality is that the useful part of meta-verse, the meta part, runs contradictory to the interests of a company like meta. Because it involves:
1) De-proprietorizing user data
2) Handing identity from identity providers (like meta) to open systems
3) Allowing foreign content into the walled garden
So Meta built the least useful but snazziest part of the meta-verse, the verse part. And they built it in the face of a bunch of other already extant "verses", like Roblox which offer a more intersting landscape for interaction.
They made Second Life but without the ability to ruin a CNN press conference with flying human genitalia, which basically means they made a worse version of Second Life.
All 3 of these technologies retain a very strong, putrid stink when given a rational smell test. Until someone finds a way to permanently wash away this foul odor, I will remain skeptical of them.
Metaverse stink: "This could have been an email" in 3-D!
Bitcoin has 2 stinks:
A)Find a lot of computing energy. Think about building power plants to make coins, and you're starting to get somewhere.
B)Price will rapidly drop and spike, maybe thousands of dollars per day. That's a feature!?
LLM AI: 60% of the time, it's right every time! This tech includes very nice graphics to back up any of its highly confident and hallucinogenic bullshit. Until this phenomenon is well understood, it stinks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_inte...
Mark Zuckerberg believed VR would be the key to the company's future expansion. Unfortunately, he was wrong. However, it is important for leaders to take risks and lead their companies in new directions. So he has my respect.
Simultaneously, it is worth noting that major technology companies did not develop working generative AI. Examples include Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and even Google's search algorithms, they all fall short of user expectations. And they had years and years and billions of $$.
The parallel between virtual reality and artificial intelligence is intriguing. If some company can successfully develop a VR system which does not suck, it could revolutionize the industry in much the same way as a openAI.
But that company will not be any of these big ones…
> It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto.
Were these reasonable people banking with Silicon Valley Bank like all the smart guys? Crypto is promising a financial system that has so far appeared to be much more resilient than the traditional system and bitcoin is currently at $30k. Tether has survived something like 2x depegs so far.
We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.
> Crypto is promising a financial system that has so far appeared to be much more resilient than the traditional system
I strongly disagree with this. When SVB failed, there was a system in place to insure some of the depositors' funds. The government chose to augment that by insuring all the depositors' funds. That was an unusual move, and then the banking system returned to normal when a better capitalized bank took over SVB's assets and liabilities. The bank failure cost those who invested in the bank. It cost the bank management. It did not cost the depositors.
When a crypto exchange fails, depositor funds are unrecoverable. There is no system to protect the depositors, no system to recover funds from the failed exchange.
While financial authoritarianism is imperfect, its rules are designed to reduce fraud and to reduce the impact of fraud on innocent bystanders.
> Crypto is promising a financial system that has so far appeared to be much more resilient than the traditional system and bitcoin is currently at $30k.
What is bitcoin resilient to? Not falling to $0?
> We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.
I don't think that our current financial system fails that often because some transactions were stopped.
Not a Mark fan but the Meta Quest Pro and Oculus are great and innovative devices. The obvious flaw in Meta business execution is that there is no content there! If you bet on the Metaverse you should build it and not wait developers to come. Or incentivize developers to use your platform.
From the business perspective I think they failed in playing the Japanese console game old strategy (Nintendo and Sony): work obsessively to have great and high quality content and synchronize this with the console launch. Not saying that Nintendo and Sony are not nightmares for producers but they are very obsessive about details.
I think in Zuck’s mind the analogy is Bill Gates pivoting Microsoft to GUIs in 1983. Which seemed pretty crazy at the time when PCs ran at 4 megahertz and could barely fill a 320*200 screen with four ugly colors. But Gates had seen Xerox Star and Smalltalk and Lisa prototypes.
VR’s “Mac moment” may be happening this year with Apple’s hardware unveiling. I suppose Zuck hopes to ship his mass-market “Windows 3.0” soon after. I’m very curious to find out what consumers think of the Apple product.
> I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI
I'm pretty sure that I agree with you, but what would Facebook/Meta do with LLMs? You wouldn't want to generate fake people to interact with (well, someone might, but Facebook wouldn't). Because that's what data they had would have been useful for. I mean, if you can predict what a person will say, or how they will react to an ad, that has value... but I'm not sure I know where that value is for a Facebook, outside of better targeting of ads.
Maybe predicting consumer/voter sentiment about a policy or product before it's released?
The same applies to Google in aa certain respect actually. I assume they have enough data from gmail to effectively recreate a conversation with me. This could be lucrative for some targets (not me!), but probably not in a way that Google would be able to legitimately capture.
I could completely see how other actors would be able to use LLMs to predict or impersonate people on the Facebook/Google platforms, just not how the platforms themselves would be able to generate value.
Google at least could merge generic LLMs into their search mission to catalog the world's information. But that's a harder pitch to figure out how Facebook would generate value from it.
Am I missing something, or am I thinking too much about this like West World?
Sure, but VR isn't, they're different things. For VR they've sold somewhere around 15-20 million headsets, and many people use it quite a bit. I have no doubt VR is/will be big, but the path to finding what's compelling in VR will be strange. Personlly I rediscovered a love for table tennis and play every single day now, I'd probably pay $2-3k for a Quest 2 if I had no choice.
That said I think trying to build the "Metaverse" in a top-down way will be very difficult, and Meta will probably not be the ones pulling it off since they don't have much good will, people actively avoid their social platforms if they can. But to me, what we need is not a Metaverse, but a good OS/platform with integrated social/identity, where friends can easily join each other's games, voice is enabled by default and provided as part of platform, not individual apps etc. Meta has been working on making this easier, but with my friends group the friction is still too high. And it's super annoying when third party apps (like Rec Room) needs their own login, friends/social features etc making it cumbersome to find your friends in there.
Statistically speaking - people who have brilliant innovative ideas that result in successful businesses are exceedingly rare and those ideas often come from experiences outside of the main line of work by combining ideas from disparate disciplines to have a true breakthrough. We as a society really need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that those ideas are likely to cluster on a small set of individuals that continue to crank them out. We've developed such an extreme cult of personality around the rich and it's pretty baffling to see when, if you actually sit down to talk to people - we're all pretty brilliant.
Companies that get big and then score repeated out of the park hits do so by attracting and nurturing talent[1] - they don't do so by having one brilliant star that shines eternal.
1. And that is a really good and honestly rare talent in the modern marketplace - it can be hard to let creativity thrive.
It's worth remembering that unlike with cryptocurrency, our ("reasonable people" as you put it) apathy for the "metaverse" stems from the fact that most of us experienced it a long time ago, long before that term even came into common(?) use: Multiplayer games, and especially MMORPGs.
Be it Ragnarok Online, Runescape, Ultima Online, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Minecraft, or whatever, anyone who has played multiplayer games of any kind know exactly what the "metaverse" was trying to sell to us and the common masses. We also know that multiplayer games, unlike practically every romanticized depiction, generally sucks to play with strangers. You absolutely need a tightly knit group of good friends to play with to be able to truly enjoy them.
So when we said the "metaverse" would never take off, it's because we have literally been there and done that.
Aren't we on a multiplayer chat board with strangers here?
I think you hit the nail on the head as far as how the metaverse is not new, but I think your pessimistic take is not so obvious to me and presumably many people bullish on metaverse ideas.
I agree. I have 4 Quests and know many with Quests. It's funny how all of us used it very frequently in the first couple months and now they're gathering dust.
The fact of the matter is, if you have people you can hang out with in person you're not going to bother with VR, or the metaverse.
I use my Quest regularly, although mainly for gaming and fitness.
I've played around with the social aspects, and they're interesting, but I don't really have friends with a Quest and I struggle to make friends just by butting in on random conversations, so I haven't really done it much.
Have had a couple of interesting conversations about movies with a movie nerd in a virtual hangout in the Bigscreen app, though, and did some dancing in a virtual nightclub a couple times, which was actually pretty fun (I think I'd feel a little too weird doing going to an actual nightclub nowadays, I'm a little old for the scene).
> The fact of the matter is, if you have people you can hang out with in person you're not going to bother with VR, or the metaverse.
Several of my friends have Quests, and we use them regularly with each other, but the catch here is that we all live in different parts of the country, so it's great for some more informal goofing off while we chitchat.
The thing about the metaverse (and related tech) is that its success or failure rested entirely on the rate of improvement of the hardware. If the headset could present, say, an office that I could work from for 8 hours -- this would represent a massive disruption to the commercial real estate market. If I could sit down for a real conversation with my mother (who lives a 2 hour drive away) without it feeling like Zoom with motion sickness, that's a social game changer.
The problem is that the tech cannot actually do things even close to this caliber yet. The fidelity has not reached the uncanny valley yet, much less gotten over it. Zuckerberg clearly thought he could make this possible with Meta's resources, but that just didn't happen.
I'm not a crypto advocate, but I don't understand on what basis people think crypto has been empirically disproven, at least separate from any disproof that wasn't ~equally true at its peak. It's not like Bitcoin has failed; it's down 2x from its recent spike, but it's up almost 10x from its Jan 2019 dip. Ethereum is more wounded but still expensive. Look on a log plot as is apt for these things, and it's hard to argue ruin here, especially given they've dipped before.
I wouldn't be too shocked if crypto did peter out or flatline over the coming years, just it doesn't seem a priori obvious, given my broad criticisms of it have not stopped its success to date.
There was a time around 2020 I believe, where everyone and their mother was talking about crypto and the blockchain, and how it's going to be this big technological revolution. All kinds of private and public initiatives decided to include "the blockchain" in their projects, NFTs became huge, and there was talk of putting real estate, healthcare, and logistics "onto the blockchain".
It's been three years since then, and still no real-world use case has emerged. I don't dispute that there are completely valid use cases for cryptocurrencies, mainly around avoiding governmental financial restrictions and safeguards, and there are still loads of people using cryptocurrencies for speculation and/or as a "store of value". But the whole ecosystem of distributed apps, smart contracts, DAOs, and so on, still mainly revolves around itself, without wider societal impact.
Maybe I'm in a minority with this argument - but just because something has a big market cap or a positive trend line, it doesn't automatically make it valid. (Bernie Madoff, Archegos, ...)
Bitcoin has proven itself to be a useful financial speculation object.
Initially, I didn't see much value in the metaverse due to the high barrier to entry for end users and the limited network effect. However, I am bullish now. With the advancement of technologies like GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion, there is potential for more interesting NPCs in the metaverse. Additionally, Virtual Reality (VR) could serve as a superior user interface for these technologies compared to text-based interfaces like chatGPT. This could enable the metaverse to scale without solely relying on the network effect, as engaging NPCs and VR experiences can provide value to users even in the early stages of development, and continue to evolve and expand as technology progresses.
If "bullshit fractal" wasn't a thing before, it deserves to be one now. The kind of bullshit which just invites even more bullshit when you dive in and try to pick it apart.. its turtles of bullshit all the way down.
> It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be
I agree it's clear on day one that these models will be useful.
What's less clear is how useful they are -- a year ago most experts would have told you that an architecture that "predicts the next word" won't be powerful enough to make a model that could lead to AGI-alike abilities (and many people here still argue the same today), but here we are now.
> Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early
That's just a lack of vision. GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. He had plenty of time to commit to AI development instead of Metaverse.
A lot of self-proclaimed technologists counterintuitively love to see technology fail, especially when they predicted so ahead of time.
That's some frustrating shit, because it rewards the least patient and surface-level analyses which (correctly!) identify deficiencies and lulls in activity, but mislabels them as stagnation or dead-ends or fundamental flaws.
It took us 20 years from General Magic to a passable iPhone.
VR will take time, and AI is likely more fruitful to prioritize currently (not saying that's a bad idea!) - but we don't yet have enough historical perspective to declare VR - or even (ick) crypto - as bad directions.
> I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI.
I don't think so -- generative AI doesn't really provide strategic advantages to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp the way it seems to hold promise for search (Google/Bing) and productivity software and certain jobs. Same way crypto isn't strategic to Meta either.
You don't have to pivot your company. If you're still raking in cash, it can be much smarter to just continue that, rather than make a giant bet that might ultimately sink everything.
You cannot compare VR with Crypto. VR can be super useful but the tech isn't there yet, similarly to where generative AI was two years ago. Once we have a breakthrough with VR it'll also be amazing and useful.
VR is as useful as the whole movie industry and the game industry. Yes, it is important for entertainment. With all the streaming services the movie industry is moving from central cinemas to your home.
So VR will be in competition with all the other entertainment industries. But is that useful in any sense just besides entertainment? I doubt.
It started all years ago with Google Glass. Even at that time I doubted that there is value in this. Now, we are here and Google Glass is finally dead. I know it is in the rumors that Apple will bring its VR headset soon. But really? Will that make it better? I doubt.
VR will be in competition with all the other forms of entertainment. It is something, you can't just do besides. It will need your full attention. I doubt that there is some real usefulness.
In my (admittedly uneducated) view, VR can be useful for some professional tasks in the immediate future. Things like 3D modeling, architecture, explorative data analysis. But Facebook is a social media company. Aside from a small proportion of enthusiastic users, people won't want to socialize with VR. They'd rather check an app on their phone every so often while doing something else. If they want a more personal and engaged conversation, a video chat is better than VR. The Metaverse makes no sense beyond games. And the heyday of socializing in MMOs has long passed (much to my dismay).
Completely agree. I'm frustrated that Oculus and VR tech in general has been lumped in, via the "metaverse", with a bunch of less useful and less interesting crypto/NFT stuff. All I wanted was some cool niche flight and mech sims, maybe some interesting AR projects beyond what Niantic could offer. Instead, we got a bunch of ugly tech demos, outright scams, and virtual meeting rooms that nobody uses.
Being able to buy drugs online was cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the billions of dollars invested and vast amounts of carbon emitted.
Yeah, Facebook's Metaverse pivot made VR pretty toxic right at the point where they were getting a significant level of adoption amongst the public.
They needed to focus on making a few more games with the mass appeal of Beat Saber and making entry level machines a bit cheaper again so there was enough users to make the social aspect actually have some value.
> Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away. It's no wonder that all the companies are immediately pivoting towards it. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI.
I think fundamentally Facebook is not a product company and is consequently bad at actually making products. Apple has been moving very cautiously on the AR/VR front in contrast. Granted, Apple moves cautiously on everything, but they do seem more intentional about what to leave up to users to figure out on their own vs the Facebook approach of assuming you can just solve the interesting engineering problems and have the cool technology and people will just figure out how to use it. Smart watches and smartphones existed for a while before the Apple Watch and the iPhone, but what really kicked off the market for them was just a design that put it out there for people to explore with it so Apple could then iterate and figure out what the real niche was. But that will never happen if your initial test cases are just tech nerds. Tech nerds love the technology qua technology too much to figure out why things are interesting outside that.
While generative AI may be useful, to what extent is it useful to Facebook right now? I mean as a new business model, as opposed to helping them do better software development or moderation?
Meta can't afford not to invest into generative AI. They are constantly fighting to stay relevant. Just see how TikTok's better recommender algorithm and content creation tools made Instagram play catch-up.
I'm not certain about the direction of Meta, but for now it seems that their most important areas are entertainment (Instagram, Reels) and messaging (WhatsApp, Messenger), not social networking (Facebook), which is dying.
For entertainment and messaging, generative AI is going to be huge. In entertainment, content creation and discovery will be severely advanced by AI. For messaging, at the very least, users will expect AI support in message composition and company-customer communication.
Generative AI makes their business case for the meta-verse actually work. You can populate the meta-verse with convincing NPCs: they fit in, they finesse social interactions, they kickstart communities and befriend the unpopular, and every once in a while they drop some product placement. For an introverted, anxious, and digital-preferring generation, this could be perfect.
It has a lot of uses for their metaverse push. You could imagine a future social platform where AI generated pictures and video instead of selfies is the communication medium du jour.
But in that sense they're not far behind the pack as it is.
Great point, there might not be anything for them there despite the insane hype right now. A couple of useful things here and there, sure, but not much to profitably "pivot" their billion users into.
Just to get the facts right: The "bullshit fractal" Bitcoin is currently at about 50% of it's all time high, and is raising again constantly since beginning of 2023.
OTOH: Whether generative AI has any value beyond mass desinformation and making "creative people" unemployed only the future may show. Also: Given than you need super-computers to do the training it's unlikely it will become a technology that can be used by everyone. (The situation here is imho similar to "open hardware": You may be able to design the hardware but you're not able to actually build it in your basement—like it's the case for open source software, which made kind of a revolution possible. AI will likely remain purely a toy for the few richest companies on this planet, without any access for the masses, beyond being "customers").
Regarding VR (the "metaverse"): This was a dead idea already as Second Life was hyped. VR pops up every 10 - 20 years since the 60's, but never caught on; and likely never will for practical reasons. Even Bitcoin has more real wold applications average people would care about than VR (e.g. you can at least buy "stuff" with Bitcoin, or send and receive money against the will of your government).
> Just to get the facts right: The "bullshit fractal" Bitcoin is currently at about 50% of it's all time high, and is raising again constantly since beginning of 2023.
Is the economy of Bitlandia on the rise in real terms, or what? Huge export surplus, something like that? If not, then WTF is that to brag about?!?
Big unmotivated swings in the exchange rate are a failure in a currency. What you're crowing about is that as a currency, Bitcoin sucks.
I don't think the metaverse is such a bad idea, I just think we're not there yet, and also that Meta isn't a trusted or cool enough company to pull it off. VR now is like a 1995 laptop, and it needs to be an iPhone for the metaverse to happen. And probably more than that, it'll need to be AR before it could happen. It needs to be Google Glass, but what that can be 10 years from now, and made by a company people like enough to generate FOMO.
Personally I think it's going to come from the gaming space, as they already know how to create virtual spaces people want to be in. Either a really good MMO (World of Warcraft had people glued to CRTS) or something like Fortnite, where we already have celebrities doing "live concerts".
> But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
Just looked it up. Between BTC, ETH & top stablecoins, crypto has $900B+ market cap and $60B+ in 24-hour volume. I'm not saying your conclusions are wrong (though I disagree), just that you're calling the game "over" at the end of the first quarter based on one hype-cycle. I remember people doing something similar in the dotcom bust: "WWW is dead."
There have been multiple hype cycles for crypto. In over a decade, I have yet to see something priced in cryptocurrency. Pricing something in dollars and then converting that amount in cryptocurrency for the next 15 minutes is still a dependence on government backed currency.
There are $7.5T worth of foreign exchange transactions per day. If BTC can take 1% of that it's currently worth $1.5M/btc. The rest of the crypto market shadows btc with other blockchains having niche uses.
BTC/crypto is a natural alternative to USD settlement. If you believe the USD is sunsetting as the global reserve currency then crypto, especially btc is probably a good long term investment.
You can ignore the grandiose claims of crypto savants and still accept how its unrivaled cloud development platform is going to continue to attract developers, accept that the entertainment sector is valuable, accept that the collectibles sector is valuable and we just never had transparency into the size of that while reducing friction for some aspects of the collectibles market, that financial services is valuable solely because there are some frictions to solve from people already there, that gambling is valuable, that flash loans are not paralleled by any other platform except the central banks overnight market, and so on. Outside of crypto its still hard to get free live transaction data for your trading algorithm.
None of this needs ideology about the consensus layer or fandom about how transactions are settled with claims of “hard money” thats going to take over the world, but that sentiment does harden it and is intrinsically intertwined. But you can ignore it and still recognize the parts that are valuable, even if there is no value to you.
Meh. I'd argue that the conclusion for Metaverse/crypto hasn't been reached yet. (Why? There's a 1.2T market cap saying it hasn't). It's like saying internet grocery delivery is dead because Webvan died in the early 2000s.
I'd give those two another 5-10 years before I expect to see real results — so much needs to be built first at the foundational layer.
I mined bitcoin in 2011 which didn't go well and then made first transaction in 2017 which took 2days to be processed as a result i ruled it as stupidest digital currency.
Even though I feel technical right all these years i regret for not buying as many as i could have even back in 2017/18.
Centeral banks turned everything like a Ponzi scheme. How the heck borrowing and spending is a better option than saving.
> Centeral banks turned everything like a Ponzi scheme. How the heck borrowing and spending is a better option than saving.
Central banks are just playing a larger game, they aren't causing it, the game is: ever increasing growth capitalism. Borrowing and spending creates "growth", saving doesn't. While we exist in this system we can try to pinpoint the blame at different actors but they aren't the cause of it, they are just playing along.
The incentives for growth don't align with what's best for society, they align with making people indebted so companies can grow their revenues.
> How the heck borrowing and spending is a better option than saving.
Oney is worthless. Unless you like pieces of paper representing defunct national heroes you should not hold money but assets, stock, estate, things that have intrinsic value.
Save for tax cheats (even though the laws are clear) and speculators, crypto just doesn't provide that much value. There are some neat use cases but they are just that.
The "metaverse" stuff... I don't think it was a bad bet to buy up Occulus, they still haven't found a great nail for that hammer but pivoting the entire company seems questionable. There is so much toxicity on the internet, why would you want to be "immersed" in it?
I'm not anti-generative AI, I don't want to sound that way but Zuck and company have some interesting data on large scale systems with giant amounts of data and information, they certainly have invested in it too. Maybe it's wasn't "luck" so much as they might have some intuitions about the negatives uses of the technology. It's seriously cool stuff but I think we're still collectively in the honey-moon period. I do forecast a world where we will need to exponentially strengthen our BS meters.
I'm not sure if Metaverse was a bad idea so much as selling out everything else to go full steam on Metaverse was a bad idea. It felt like they sold out their core user base and destroyed their existing platforms to get there. They were simultaneously tanking their image and reputation with users while asking them to commit and invest in a new platform.
I agree, but I also think the marketing around the ideas wasn't good either. You need public mindshare to build an ecosystem like this, and a lot of the potential audience never understood the point of it. To this day, I have no idea what problem the Metaverse is supposed to solve.
The only reason Zuckerberg wanted to pivot to the Metaverse was because he wanted to be president of the US but couldn't. The idea was spread briefly, and he found out that the general public hated him and he had no chance to win political office. He decided to make his own universe where he could be the virtual president / tyrannical dictator.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the metaverse isn't a bad idea, but the implementations just aren't there yet. Or at least, folks aren't coming up with applications that are both compelling and supportable with affordable hardware.
Google Glass had similar problems.
Eventually someone's going to nail both these things, we just haven't seen it yet.
I can see the tech being super interesting for video games. But the angle of going to work, going to a mall etc. in the metaverse is just super unappealing. The nice thing about working remotely is that I don't have to go to an office and the nice thing about shopping online is that I don't have to go to a mall. So, why would I want to emulate the these things on a platform where something better already exists?
> But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
The faithful have managed to get BTC up over $30K again, though. Saw Tim Bray posit the other day that if the US Gov just dumped all of it's BTC holdings (mostly seized from criminals) they could crash crypto quickly since the liquidity isn't there.
I think in a room with enough sycophants one could be made to believe in the vision of the Metaverse being the answer to Facebooks current problems;
- Lack of relevance on the big blue site.
- Huge slide in ad revenue.
- Expensive acquisition of Oculus with not much revenue to show for it. $2bn is not a bet-the-company amount of money for Facebook, but it is something, and that $2bn spent on Oculus is op cost taken from somewhere else.
- Reduction in moats for FB, Web shifted to mobile, FB tried bets on mobile + gaming, but those moats have receded.
I imagine Mark wanted something that could increase ad spend, new revenue stream (increase revenue from micro transactions, digital asset ownership) and something to give them some platform strength to shore up their future.
If you look around there is no other technology that is offering itself as a platform to own apart from the meta verse.
Now, I absolutely do not think this bet will pay off - but I can see how he would think it would.
The best theory I've seen is that Zuckerberg was looking for an angle where Facebook could control a platform, rather than simply be a program on somebody else's. Look around, see VR, and think "This space is in its infancy, and doesn't currently have a market-dominant platform" and then bet big.
Because at the end of the day, Facebook didn't have much to lose. The social media wars were over, FB and especially Instagram had won. As long as they didn't actively break anything, the information->ads->money pipeline will keep flowing until the entire space gets disrupted by something fundamental shifting under their feet.
A VR-2ndLife that actually caught on could honestly be a relatively believable such shift. Ultimately it didn't, but that's still alright news for FB: no big changes means the gravy train is still rolling.
It's pretty silly to compare metaverse to crypto. Crypto is a solution looking for a problem where as the metaverse exists in many forms today with the question being whether the tech and userbase can evolve fast enough to sustain Meta.
They could both fail but I don't think you can predict one from the other.
The crypto problem has an army and intelligence apparatus and ostensibly, legality. Some people may think it would be nice to not have to lose portions of your savings by indirect taxation whenever the problem decides to print money, plus of course the rest of the spectrum of wild authoritarian control.
It seems crazy to me that Amazon laid off a lot of the Alexa and robotics teams.
You'd think if anything they'd want to invest in that more now that LLMs could be used in combination to produce a much more natural home assistant experience.
That said, whilst I think VR doesn't have a huge amount of potential (the equipment is expensive and awkward), I think there is still a lot of space for making it easier to meet and communicate with people virtually. There's still a huge amount of friction where nowadays almost every service has limited public messaging and comments, etc., and online communities are fractured across dozens of Discord or Matrix servers. I think one of the main parts of Tiktok's success has been that it makes it easy to speak to new people either via public comments or video replies, etc.
There was a story about the Metaverse and Carmak and some discussion and disagreement about issues like not being able to host stadium sized experiences (not all the avatars could be in the same room) and other topics like avatar quality in meetings.
I couldn’t help but think that I have zero interest in a stadium or any size meeting where I have to put a VR helmet on….
I can imaging Zuck and Carmak and others would love that people listen to them in stadium sized meetings, but I’m not sure how users feel. I’m sure one day there will be such experiences, but there seems to be nothing appealing to many individuals about them now.
God help me when some CEO declares a VR mandatory meeting…
Metaverse can and probably will eventually pan out when tech is ready for it. I'm really happy Meta is subsidzing Oculus head sets, and I hope they keep cranking out new versions. That is one piece of hardware I can't live without, though I don't do metaverse or even game with it.
Crypto seems to have been an easy money scam from almost day one.
>> As it stands, my intuition (and everybody else's) turned out to be right.
It’s been 18 months since they “pivoted”. Come back in 5-10 years to see who was right. Assuming the metaverse is a failure at this point is simply arrogant.
> I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have some data to back that up.
You know, I never really though these founders were visionary geniuses. For the most part they are well connected/already well off, and did the right thing at the right time. I think the last couple of years have made that even more clear.
Facebook really started taking off about the time that a second golden age of tech was starting, fueled largely by near-zero interest rates and a focus on massive IPO exits without any proof of profitability. Nobody had to make any money for years, if at all. Uber hasn't made any money and neither has Spotify. Tesla does make cars, but its real product is arguably its absurdly valued stock that has allowed it a large runway fueled for the most part by the delusions of grandeur of its CEO. During this time larger companies simply acquired everything in sight, hoping that it would pay off. I mean, of all these acquisitions by Meta, which have been worth it? They're not all Instagrams.
Facebook made it, but not because Zuckerberg made the best PHP site ever. Right place, right time, maybe among the first to realize that any engagement is good engagement, and I doubt it was Zuckerberg himself who had that realization.
On top of that, Google, Meta, and advertising companies in general have grown mostly on the theory that the mass amounts of data that they collect and use to sell hyper-focused ads is worth something. Recently it's been revealed that this isn't true, and you get just as good or better results by simply advertising the last thing somebody looked at, or whatever they are currently standing next to IRL. Knowing that you looked at hemorrhoid cream 3 years ago doesn't help you sell anything today. So it's arguably based on lies as well.
Now with interest rates up, I think we'll see how that plays out as advertisers finally start pulling back due to economic conditions. Uber turned off 2/3 of its ad spend in 2017 after it found that most of "conversions" were in fact fraud. Curious to see what other companies experience on this front. We'll find out how many of these founders are true geniuses or were just burning cash. I mean shit, give me a billion dollars and I'll give you something that looks like the next big thing no matter what...
Given Facebook’s track record with politics, I am glad they didn’t pivot to generative AI. I don’t see anything “good” coming from that push as far as societal outcomes are concerned.
To be fair, when Facebook was created there was no data either. Data can be useful but I have yet to hear a story where data played a pivotal role in creating a successful startup
VR will be something eventually. Bandwidth/Storage isn't there and the device technology isn't there. I would love to be able to walk around Pyramids or Petra and have it be life like and not make me sick.
Zuck doesn't care about the metaverse, he's chasing the next consumer device since he missed the smart phone. He knows that if he doesn't control the hardware, his business is at risk. Apple has reinforced this.
"Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away."
> But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
You say that, but crypto bubble hasn't really popped. At 30K, BTC is only down around 55% from the highs, that's about in the same league as many tech stock declines this year. A true bubble pop should be like 90%+ down. The masses clearly don't agree that it's bullshit so far.
I just think the massive spending is a bit premature. Keeping a R&D division inside Meta makes sense. Betting the farm does not.
VR has enormous potential but we are still lacking more ergonomic headsets and killer apps. I want to do 3D modelling in VR - except for some simple apps, I can't do that.
> It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Researching myself, it always just seemed to be a bullshit fractal.
I consider myself to be a pretty reasonable person and I think the value in something like Bitcoin is as a backup or alternative to the traditional system. Similar to how someone would invest in gold. Except Bitcoin is much easier to transfer, requires much less space to store, etc., vs gold. I think 95% of crypto is bullshit though, and there are a lot of scams.
If you look at recent bank collapses, high inflation, etc., I think a reasonable person might question how long modern monetary theory can go on like this. I'm not a gloom and doom person. I still hold fiat, haven't given up on banks, still invest in US treasuries, stocks, etc. But I think holding some in crypto and gold, etc., also makes sense.
I think this only holds if enough other people believe in gold or crypto as a backup system.
If I had some extra zucchini and potatoes, and you were running very low on food, it would take quite a bit to convince me that a piece of shiny metal or numbers in a distributed ledger would be worth the calories I'm surrendering.
Right now, dollars would be worth it, because nearly everyone believes in their utility, despite being a very similar faith-based currency.
> started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent.
This is essentially how fiat currency works, isn’t it?
That's a bit simplistic. Fiat currency "works" by being backed by a state, implying that the state will work to protect the fiat currency's value, be that through fiscally responsible governing and/or the use of force to protect its interests. For states which can not guarantee that, the currency tends to rapidly lose its purchase power.
When I mentioned the societal nature of crypto, I meant something different. People who hold crypto have a vested interest in the wider adoption of crypto, and they often tend to become vocal proponents of crypto projects. I don't even claim bad intentions – I believe there is some psychological effect at play here that causes people to hold opinions that serve their interests, and becoming a crypto holder means that from that moment on, the spread of crypto is in one's interests.
Now, my point was, that perhaps I overlooked this sociopsychological aspect of crypto. If enough people in power are personally invested in crypto, and they use their power to advance crypto adoption because it personally benefits them, then at some point it doesn't matter whether there's any intrinsic value in crypto or not – it becomes a self-reinforcing system.
My understanding is that he pushes hard in hardware department to pivot into company like Apple because without owning hardware and OS he knows that FB days are numbered. Especially when privacy will take some steam in US
> Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI.
It's also important to remember that Facebook was staring down the barrel of a bunch of investigations regarding election misinformation and basically tailoring their products to be addictive to teenagers while they internally realized it was harmful. The rebrand was much more about rebranding than meaningfully changing the direction of the company. I think he just figured with ZIRP he could do the direction change as well at 0 risk.
I think there is value in creating an alternative financial system. It doesn’t have to replace your currency or be the only financial system you align yourself with, but I do believe that given the tools we currently have, locking yourself solely into a financial system you have so little visibility and control in is a little foolhardy.
>I was beginning to doubt my conclusions and started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
This is what Ron Paul and others have been saying about fiat currency for decades.
"What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party."
> But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
In case it's a surprise to you; crypto, after one of the worst bear markets, has now around $1.2 Trillion market cap.
So sure maybe it's bullshit but so is facebook and tiktok. They still make money selling BS ads and toxic content. Crypto will be an upgrade comparing to their present business model (Zuck tried to get on crypto but was discouraged by regulators).
This is a silly comment. Crypto has tons of amazing use cases which existed before the community got hijacked by grifters.
The hilarious thing is how much these use cases will fold back into AI.... how else do you expect an autonomous agent to manage its finances? Or for a global autonomous economy to emerge?
You should do yourself a service and read the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Learn about Ethereum. Learn about the drama and history surrounding the space; who the good guys and bad guys are. It's a really complex subject and I understand if you don't want to set aside the time to fully learn about it, but you do yourself a disservice by sharing an ignorant perspective of the space. At least have the courtesy in such case to recognize that your opinions are not fully informed.
The mixed messaging is pretty stunning. Pushing the metaverse, but simultaneously pushing "be at the office". Then seniors leaders spending more time on LLM projects than on the metaverse concept. All from their new remote homes rather than the office.
I think it’s getting toward that dystopian future where we are forced to Jack into the matrix only from regulated spots in the physical world.
So rather than just putting on your goggles from wherever you are and working, Meta wants you to drive into the office, sit in a tiny cubicle, put your goggles on and work there.
Hopefully it’s just stupidity and culture clash and not maliciousness.
It’s similar to an early push at my org for “return to office” that involved everyone coming in and zooming all day with people in mostly different spots. Some people like this, but for many it seemed like a waste.
I've got a friend who works for a government agency up here in BC, Canada. She's been all remote for years, but they now want her (and everyone else) in the office 2 days a week, likely going up to 3. Problem is, the office is almost a 2-hour drive, one way, from home, and she's not doing anything there that can't be done from home. Her manager (who has no power over the policy itself) thinks he has a solution though; there's a different government office in her city that she could probably work at instead, at least most of the time. She doesn't know anyone there, and there's no work done there related to her work (let alone anything she couldn't do at home), but they think it could check the "be in the office" box.
You left out getting paid (well) every two weeks and receiving options that are increasing in value as the company becomes more efficient. It’s not personal, it’s not stupidity it’s just business and there are hundreds of thousands of developers who are willing and capable of replacing any of us.
The alternative is to start your own business. If you did and generated more revenue while your employees were in the office based on previous data, I think you’d end your remote work policy for all but the people who are irreplaceable to your revenue stream.
> It’s similar to an early push at my org for “return to office” that involved everyone coming in and zooming all day with people in mostly different spots. Some people like this, but for many it seemed like a waste.
Would have made sense in the early 2000's. Back in the days, corporate HQs had fast networking. Even lugging a machine home, doing anything over 56k would have been a pain. Now folks have dedicated fiber going straight to their router.
No defense of meta, but this doesn’t seem like a contradiction. If they thought the metaverse was done and ready to use for work, they wouldn’t need to invest in building it. Seems a bit like wondering why the construction management team doesn’t just use the office building they’re constructing rather than a trailer.
I was assuming the metaverse was an extension/improvement on doing things remotely, rather than a pre-requisite for it to work at all. Meaning you would have to believe remote is a solid concept to start with. And, there's the obvious contradiction that working remote seems fine for a lot of the senior leadership.
Zuckerburg was always a bit of a hypocrite. "Facebook's mission is to create a more open and transparent world", while simultaneously buying the 4 properties around his Palo Alto estate so that he'd have privacy from the neighbors and general public.
Seems like a pretty stretched comparison. Transparency and fairness can be applied to different topics and domains. It's like saying that If Zuckerberg really believed in transparency, he should work naked and have a public webcam in his bedroom.
I don't know that Facebook is living up to an ideal of fairness and transparency, but I don't think bad comparisons really shed any light on the topic
I'm sure they do dogfood but insisting every meeting is in VR is like banning the command line while working on an unfinished GUI OS.
It's also not a realistic dogfood either. Users are not going to be fully in VR so why dogfood that way? It's better to figure out what flexible and low friction workflows.
About ... 10 years ago I got a recruitment offer from a company working on remote collaboration tools for software developers. it was going to 'revolutionize' what was possible. but... i had to move to SF to work in their office. they didn't even see anything wrong or odd or off about the requirement.
This description makes me think of ScreenHero, which really was an incredible leap for remote collaboration until it was eventually bought by Slack — and the thing Slack eventually came out with for screen collaboration was weak by comparison. That was a real shame.
It’s not mixed to me. VR and mixed reality failed for work. Text is too hard to read and the headsets are too heavy for all day use. Still, VR is great for gaming though
Completely agree. I love games like Beat Saber and Half-Life: Alyx. But it doesn't work for fine text and it's very very hard to make VR presence feel like anything other than a game.
There's also mixed messaging about being at the office. They're cutting transportation programs and in-office benefits. Even reducing the variety of sodas stocked in the kitchens (you would think there isn't much cost saving there).
The major selling points of metaverse is that you can do work or play from anywhere (why else would you wear a 1500$ helmet that makes you look like a goofball). The push to "be at the office" is proof that metaverse does NOT work. It's truely ironic.
In a comment I made about 18 months ago, I noted that Facebook's insufficient investment in anything useful would hold them back. The true cost of the Metaverse isn't solely the capital needed for development; it's also the opportunity cost that will become apparent in the future. What aren't they doing that they could be?
There is also another aspect to consider. The swift expansion of generative AI is driving the transition from a Social Graph to a Content Graph. Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube pioneered this trend, while Twitter's timeline modifications serve as a functional yet imperfect example. Content discovery now takes precedence over static friend lists.
The core principle that Facebook was built on is gradually crumbling. This isn't just about Apple's privacy policies or regulatory constraints; it's a fundamental shift in user behavior. The primary reason people visit Facebook—connecting with people they know—is now at odds with their main online activity: consuming content from strangers. Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections.
Facebook is attempting to adapt, but their efforts only diminish the platform's value for average users. Instagram's discovery page and Reels are examples, but the latter pales in comparison to TikTok. Facebook's endeavors in short-form video are likely a futile game of catch-up, a classic innovator's dilemma.
The Metaverse's introduction seemed like a desperate, last-minute attempt from the C-suite to save face. Anyone who has worked at a high-profile tech company has likely seen this tactic before: weak financial quarters lead to premature product announcements. The all-encompassing nature of the Metaverse announcement signals that something is amiss. It's only more futile now.
>The swift expansion of generative AI is driving the transition from a Social Graph to a Content Graph. . . .
The core principle that Facebook was built on is gradually crumbling.
Arguably, the proliferation of cheap generative AI content will cause the value of that “fake” content to decrease. Users may begin to value the “real” content created by one’s friends. So Meta’s social graph may become increasingly valuable in the age of AI content.
I just don't see any evidence that social graphs are becoming more relevant or even that they exist for many people onboarding on to the internet/apps for the first time. You can use Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and even Facebook now without creating any social graph at all. In fact, it seems like they prefer it that way.
One Nit: I'd say that it's not just friends that will generate 'real' content, it's 'trusted' people. Some of that will be AIs and more of it will be strangers that you know produce 'good' content, but most will be friends, as you say.
So, the combination between the social graph and the content graph, with a dash of AI, will be the outcome I see coming.
> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities.
You can't infer what people want to do from what they are doing when the platform is trying to influence their behavior.
Facebook has not been a good platform for keeping up with your friends in 10+ years. The main reason is that Facebook is a business that needs a business model. It's not enough to provide a useful service to the users, but you must also be able to monetize it. For FB that meant ads, and then it meant an addictive algorithmic feed to make more money.
That happens often when you run an online service as a business. First you have a good service that attracts a lot of users, and then you gradually destroy it and replace it with something similar but worse to make money. When young people started preferring other social networks, it was a clear sign that Facebook had done that.
> Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections.
At some point, the social internet started existing primarily to make people feel good about their own strongly held controversial opinions.
Why would I go on Facebook, where the experience is seeing an old friend hold some dumb half baked opinion they picked up from Fox/CNN then bicker with them, when I could go to twitter and watch the top influencer in my ring dunk on the top influencer in the competitions ring, making myself instantly feel more right?
> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube pioneered this trend, while Twitter's timeline modifications serve as a functional yet imperfect example.
Aren't users mostly forming parasocial relationships with "creators" and consider them friends, and want to be with those friends, regardless what they'll do?
I never understood the reaction videos and found them boring and stupid, if I wanted to have an idiot constantly pause the video and say something dumb that shows they didn't understand it, I'd watch it together with my 15yo self. But when I read discussions about it, users commented that they like it because it's something they can do "with" the content creator and they'll get signals to what their famous friend thinks about some topic etc.
I think that's fair, but it's not like it's actually a 2-way relationship. It's just some approximation of one. One that is easier to consume and requires less commitment.
It all feels like the groundwork for "AI lovers" anyway. Our desire to reshape the world in our own view and to our own desires is how this feedback loop is going to be used. We do it now in social groups that are self-reinforcing, like churches, cults, interest related groups, workplaces (one team!) etc, but I think those will all become superfluous to our desire to just feel seen, heard and entertained. In a group you have to compete to have those needs met, in the future it might be easier to just get it from a robot that understands us far better, gives us undivided attention, and only responds in ways that elicit the feelings and experiences we want.
> Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections
This is it. FB was actually super fun in college: it was a virtual dorm hall. It was a party. You could post crazy shit, post party pictures, and hope that girl you liked saw it.
Now it's a combination of a class reunion and your aunt's 70th birthday party, but the usual social restraint is conspicuously absent.
Meta as a company seems unable to recognize the change, because doing so would have threatened their cash cow.
> Meta as a company seems unable to recognize the change, because doing so would have threatened their cash cow.
While I agree with the rest of what you say, I don't know if this is true.
They pushed their platform to this. They pushed the controversial and divisive content. They platformed questionable advertisers. The negative interaction was more profitable than a place to share pics of your kids with friends or plan a birthday party.
I think they absolutely know but you can't unring that bell which is why they were running so hard at something else to be their primary product.
> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities.
I'm still interested in keeping up with friends, but Facebook has undermined this by anti-patterns that show me more ads, more trashy content, more recommendations, and less actual content from friends. If Facebook wasn't incentivized to maximize the number of ads it showed, maybe it would be able to actually deliver on that value proposition to users.
The core principle that Facebook was built on is nearly as strong as ever , doubly so with the demographics that actually have money to burn. Facebook's core principle was to make you feel less lonely so you'd give them outrageously specific data about yourself—for free—which they would then sell to someone else who would use that information to sell you things that prey on your specific insecurities.
You can do this on TikTok with a new generation today, and Facebook is banking on being able to do this in VR tomorrow.
Tell us what makes you happy and sad. Tell us everything about you. Tell us for free and we will give you an endless stream of content/notifications/things to do that make you feel less lonely. We will then work with companies that inject ads that directly prey on your insecurities. You need these things or you can't be happy. All your friends have these things. We will reinforce this message several times per hour.
The only way for Facebook to "double down" on its core principle within its current platform is to do something like buy QVC and start to really focus on bleeding seniors. There's a lot of money to be made on Social Security Wednesdays.
1) The author seems to think 2 rounds of layoffs have already been executed and now a third is coming, when actually the 2nd round of layoffs is still being executed.
2) The author mentions twice that the coming round of layoffs will affect engineering for the first time; this is not true -- thousands of eng were laid off in the first round.
3) The author mentions that the stock price has dropped 43% from its peak as evidence that Meta faces a precarious future. No mention that META has been one of the hottest tech stocks in 23Q1, gaining more than 75%.
I'm no Meta apologist, and this is really a "dog bites man" story anyway ("layoffs announced; morale bad") but I don't really trust this author's general reporting competence.
The problem I have with articles like this is, well, sample size. They talked to 9 former and current employees, out of 60,000 employees. I'm no fan of Meta, but is it really fair to say there is a "crisis" of morale at a company with such a tiny sample size?
When I was at Facebook the same kinds of articles would pop up all the time while morale + trust in leadership was pretty high internally. It made me think a lot about how we perceive other companies and even governments from the outside versus what the reality can be.
Sounds like you've independently observed the Gell-Mann amnesia effect[1]
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
One of the heads of microkitchens expressed to me how they received lots of unpleasant messages recently. I expressed my support to them and how people may not be wanting to necessarily attack them, but are frustrated at the company as an entity and in the time. I think would ask for communicating changes and avenues for feedback more actionably and precisely.
All of these changes create uncertainty and ruin morale, especially the uncertainty around multiple rounds layoffs.
I'm looking passively because the team I'm on isn't interesting in doing anything resembling professional software engineering and there aren't enough cool, fun people around.
The food is no longer good, the offices are unremarkable, and there's no real reason to go to the office because I don't know anyone, the people there aren't social people, and I don't have anything in common with them.
Yeah, Facebook is just the company that everyone loves to hate, and the NYT often joins in the chorus. This one seems especially agenda-laden, however:
> absentee leadership,
> Mr. Zuckerberg, 38, is on parental leave after the birth of his third child
> The company’s stock price has dropped 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago
This is pretty disingenuous, considering nearly all tech stocks fell off, and Meta stock has more than doubled since bottoming out at around 90/share several months ago.
The metaverse is stupid and nobody wants it!
> While the company has sold 20 million virtual reality headsets — more than any other company producing similar tech —
It's not just Meta, journalists and commenters even on tech sites like Ars Technica or Verge seem to love piling on any negative coverage about working at big tech companies (Google, Uber, even Apple occasionally).
I think Meta and Google are particularly disliked by journalists due to both specifically cutting into news industries. But I think a bigger part of it is the idea that software engineers are overpaid and spoiled brats!
> [Meta] has conducted two rounds of cuts over the past six months, eliminating more than 26,000 people, or nearly 30 percent of his company’s work force.
I thought the same thing about the sample size but if a third of the company gets chopped, you’re going to have major morale problems. It points to many, many leadership and management problems.
Even if you have access to employee survey data, what constitutes a "morale crisis" exactly?
So a variety of metrics are down after layoffs, general online negativity, and bad press. In other news, water is wet. And doubtless execs are concerned. But is that really a "morale crisis" or just what to expect in a belt-tightening era at just about any company (and certainly one whose employees expected great stock appreciation and job stability and now don't have either)?
That also jumped out at me. I think they're probably right in the sense that moral isn't great, but their methodology doesn't show that very persuasively.
Remember that this is the NYT which has a directive that tech coverage must be critical (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473275). Not that I'm implying you were dumb enough to trust the NYT in the first place.
Also important to remember that FB is a competitor to legacy media.
People look at Meta with these bizarro rose-colored glasses, as if it was once a company with some nobel mission that lost its way.
Facebook, from the very beginning, knew what it was doing once they found the "secret". They found, by accident, the ability tap into people's insecurities and exploit that to extract data and then serve ads that further insecurities. They found an emotional loop that printed dollars. People gave up an entire lifetime of information for free so they could feel connected.
The Metaverse is just trying to get lightning to strike twice. It will probably get there. As people become more isolated they will become more insecure and place an even higher value on social interaction.
VR sucks. Flat screens and fixed focal point lenses result in a huge out of focus area—you move your eyes within the headset and you can't focus—which feels unnatural. Eventually we will solve this, and once we do it will go mainstream. If you can look past the crappy optics and you log into VRChat today it feels… good. It feels like you are actually interacting with people. It simply feels good. Most people just can't look past the poor optics. You put a $2000 headset on the average person and their response is always, "Cool, but it's kinda heavy. Also, why is it so blurry?" Someone will solve this, eventually.
Meta is banking on exactly what made Facebook. They will create a space that makes you feel good, and then get you to give up even more information and see even more ads designed explicitly to manipulate you because the advertiser knows so much about you. Honestly, it's a brilliant idea to try and do the same thing again but harder. Possible it's too early, but if you have billions to blow why not. Right now it's a product that only caters to the most socially isolated individuals. That will change.
Why did my parents join Facebook? They did it because they were lonely. It's why the Facebook audience is now so old. It took them a while to come up with a UI that was easy enough for old people to use it, but they did. They are trying to do the same with VR. There's a pretty good chance of success in my opinion.
> you log into VRChat today it feels… good. It feels like you are actually interacting with people.
That's exactly it: you're actually interacting with people. In the beginning, Facebook had _only_ people: your friends. If you logged into Facebook then and had 0 friends, arguably nothing would happen.
Today, only about every 3rd post is by a person, even if you have hundreds of friends. There probably is a ratio of algorithmically-generated v.s human content that is acceptable to their users.... but I'm chasing the 100% too :)
Eventually we will solve this, and once we do it will go mainstream.
Another point of view is that VR sucks for what it is, even if all the technical glitches were resolved tomorrow and everything worked perfectly.
Why? People just don't want to zone out and spend that much time in a made-up universe. It's just not an appealing or interesting or useful experience for most folks (outside the niche universes of gaming, porn and certain teleconferencing use cases).
Meanwhile the recent past is bursting with example of technologies that not only worked, but positively exploded from the get-go -- despite offering a plainly crappy experience on basic sensory levels. Hand-held TVs, VCRs (until something infinitely better came along), the first 20 years of the internet by and large -- for example. People didn't have to look past their shortcomings because they fulfilled obvious, basic needs and desires.
It feels like you are actually interacting with people.
Sorry, but if you're referring to the current state of the art here (overtly cartoon-like 3D avatars that sort of look like your friends) - that's plainly ludicrous.
> "Sorry, but if you're referring to the current state of the art here (overtly cartoon-like 3D avatars that sort of look like your friends) - that's plainly ludicrous."
Welcome to being old, mate. You don't even need state of the art. Literally hundreds of millions of people sit around in Fortnite and Roblox. That's more than good enough. Then you get to VRchat and it's next level. It doesn't just feel like you are interacting with people. You are interacting with people.
> Why? People just don't want to zone out and spend that much time in a made-up universe
Sure this is why people don't binge watch Netflix, looking at purely made up stories.
I'm sure there's a usecase for VR in entertainment. It's just that the killer app hasn't been found yet. Meta has been pushing things too hard and going down the traditional way. But the tech will succeed I'm sure.
To play devil's advocate here, do you really think the actual problems with VR have anything to do with "spending time in a made-up universe"? In the future, why couldn't we have VR that didn't require you to wear a headset, that felt, smelt, looked and tasted just like the physical universe in every way? Would it really matter that the VR universe is "made-up"? Sure, that technology is far-off, but isn't it "just" a technology problem?
I can't disagree with any of your points, which is quite depressing because none if it points towards a particularly inspiring future version of human civilization.
It's slowly, inevitably moving towards / increasing the farming of humans.
> the cuts expected this month will be the first to affect tech departments, including engineers, which has surprised employees
Huh? The earlier layoffs definitely affected tech. I know of a bunch of former colleagues in engineering roles that were laid off in the first round. Sure, recruiting was affected more, which makes sense when hiring was reduced to almost zero, but this is very much not the first time engineers will be included in layoffs.
Back in a previous life in a chemical R&D lab the company did layoffs and claimed to the media that it was all to marketing and administration. In the lab we lost about 50% of our researchers but weren't allowed to talk to anyone about it. I'm guessing companies really want to make it look like layoffs aren't impacting the people responsible for the product, and feed questionable data to that effect.
> Within Meta, there is pressure to demonstrate that people are working hard, two employees said. Intense scrutiny has come in recent workplace reviews, which the management consultancy firm Bain and Company is assisting. Workers, especially in middle management, are being asked to justify why their jobs are crucial to Meta’s goals.
I thought scenes like this would only happen in movies like The Office. Never did I expect something like that to happen in real life.
FAANG hires 2 types of people: people who are good and people who are good at working the system. A lot of people who are good at working the system worked their way up to VP of very little, but even that comes with VP pay. It happens on the IC track, too. There are people who have big, handwavey ideas, but in hindsight, didn't deliver anything concrete other than google docs.
Readit News
It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Researching myself, it always just seemed to be a bullshit fractal. At the height of the crypto boom, I was beginning to doubt my conclusions and started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away. It's no wonder that all the companies are immediately pivoting towards it. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI.
It's not about whether or not there is value there to be provided. VR and cyrpto provide value too, it's just that the markets for that tech are way more "niche" than companies were hoping for.
And I don't think VR is going away. If it wasn't dead in the water in the 90s, then it's not going to die because the Metaverse failed. But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software.
The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now?
Generative AI is like electricity, only I don't think quite as useful. The point is that, on its own, it has no value what-so-ever. The value lies in what it is used for.
Right now what I am observing is a phenomenon that is way too common in our industry. Companies are rushing to go to market with some AI "thing." 99.9999% of those "things" will end up being more versions of the Metaverse and crypto. Because most of these companies aren't really sure what problem they are solving for actual people. It's all so novel and abstract and people are seeing dollar signs with very little understanding of how they are going to put it to use.
Where it finds its uses, I predict will be limited to the same applications that we're already using ML for. Chat bots, entertainment, generating document outlines etc. Just because we made a big breakthrough with the technology doesn't mean that we've actually created a solution to real world problems that real world people are having here and now in the real world. No one, other than maybe Open AI, is going to get rich on "generative AI." If they get rich and change the industry, it will be finding a use for it that many people want.
Crypto was something I always struggled to make sense of. My son asked, "why didn't I buy bitcoin when it was a few cents?!" -- The simple answer was it didn't seem like it had much use. The value in crypto eventually came in the form of a pyramid scheme. Admittedly, I do use crypto to do transactions with untrustworthy people (don't have to worry about chargebacks and things like that). But it's hype was around it being a speculative commodity. For normal people -- it's just not all that useful.
The metaverse is different in that I do see the theoretical value in it. But it seems a LONG way off. I haven't seen anything that really makes me think, "wow -- this is it". It doesn't seem like we're close. And honestly I think generative AI maybe a prerequisite to deliver a truly valuable metaverse.
Generative AI is useful now and represents a huge leap over the state of the art, not that long ago. I worked with RNNs and LSTMs to answer questions not that many years ago, and honestly I wouldn't have predicted this level of effectiveness for LLMs for probably 20 plus years -- and I certainly didn't know how we'd do it. But more importantly I'm finding it valuable today. As I noted in another post -- ChatGPT-4 already has shown better differential diagnosis skills than my family's doctor. I use it literally every day already. There are things that I want it to do that would make my life 10x better -- and I could see a clear path to get there (like, if that was my day job I think I could put together a project plan to deliver it).
I just don't think these techs are comparable at all.
I keep hearing this argument that generative AI has more utility, making it more "real". Sure, but they're missing the point, which is that people made some pretty ridiculous claims about the future utility of crypto / metaverse ($100k bitcoin, metaverse real-estate speculation) rather than the present day possibilities, and they're continuing to make ridiculous claims about the future utility of AI (the end of web development, AGI soon, etc).
The hype isn't about present day possibilities, but about future speculation, and the future speculation can get off-the-rails crazy.
Personally though, I've already used it for multiple real-world applications in my business and personal life, whereas crypto was only ever a toy. VR I'm less sure about; so far it's only a toy, and I think it will take longer than AI to make a real difference, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least AR and probably VR are both eventually very commonplace.
I've never worked for any company where leaning into the Metaverse or crypto would generate any meaningful business value, short or long term. The promises for Metaverse and crypto are always about a nebulous future that could exist if only everyone collectively bought into the vision.
Disagree; I'd argue that the key distinction between generative AI and those other things (metaverse/crypto) is that the value of it is immediately apparent to almost anyone. There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.
After the noise has calmed, I feel generative AI, at its core, will enhance information search and summarization; lookup and compression. That itself will have massive value. It will differentiate roles that require net new thinking from those that require regurgitation.
There could be an excess of hype, but there is clear significant and immediate value of these tools.
VR will go the way of 3D Printing. A surgeon can walk into one of the largest medical device company's in the world, talk about a new idea for a broken bone transplant and within 24 hours can have a 3D prototype printed out. Great for innovation of broken bones, but it isn't the ubiquity we experienced with something like mobile phones, email, or social media. Meta thinks thats what VR is going to be.
A common thread tying those three things together is that, in large part, they're all impressive technologies in search of problems to solve.
Technologies like that are pretty much always overhyped and oversold.
One feature I'm quite confident in: translation services for i18n in websites using GPT-4 + a much smaller number of human translators to check the work of low confidence translations and high value surfaces. I can confirm the end result for French is better than existing human translation services and much cheaper.
Certainly businesses will need to walk back some AI features but it really seems like there's business value now, let alone in 2 years when publicly available LLMs are even better.
I don't really understand this description - electricity is one of the most useful things in the history of civilization. I think the latter half of what you're saying is true, but it's true of everything. There's nothing inherently useful about my car, except that it gets me places. There's nothing inherently useful about my house, except that it shelters me from the elements.
Generative AI will be useful for creating lots of things (probably primarily code in its various forms). I've used it to write a few Python scripts over the course of the last week that simply wouldn't have been possible for me to do (without a few weeks of teaching myself Python at least - I'm a somewhat-code-literate PM but very much not a programmer). Those have solved real problems for me and added real value to my life.
Generative AI has potential to immediately increase productivity, and thus revenue. The only real way to make money (in the short term at-least) with crypto and the metaverse was to convince other people the digital assets created were rare, valuable and worth paying for.
Deleted Comment
Nobody you know (roughly) uses VR many times a week/day, not in any extended fashion. Everyone might have them but they're in a drawer somewhere. Compare that to LLM's, which roughly everyone is or should be using. There are very few knowledge-economy jobs where an LLM can't be useful, within hours or days or definitely weeks with a bit of practice. And it'll get better every year. It's here to stay.
I don't disagree, but I think making that claim right now is saying the emperor has no clothes lol.
Deleted Comment
And military. There's a lot of videos showing VR being used to control drones in the Russian-Ukrainian War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5lKupps8CM
Tech should hire more broadly.
It’ll be neat for sure, but I think the plateau of useful applications will arrive soon and it won’t be as game-changing as it initially seemed.
I kinda hope I’m wrong, but also hope I’m right.
It might not make millions directly, but it could unleash some very successful videogames, without decreasing accessibility (like vr) or a weird value proposition (crypto)
Adobe will launch a ai driven graphics tool.
I have tons of more examples.
This never happened with crypto or VR.
Chatgpt has real big impacts on school kids who use it for generating text too.
I'm not understanding your analysis. We already have more usable ai than usable crypto or vr
Show them some of the power of an LLM and they too will realize the power I predict.
1. Data collection - Obvious, creating a voice/text interface into an existing system where the problem and requirements are well known. Eg, booking a restaurant. It needs a time, place, people. Collecting that from voice/text can be convenient in many situations. Same with different types of models collecting data from video/images/etc.
2. Providing options - When the desired output is unknown, but a human can describe the problem. Eg, coding, art, many "I need an X that can Y for problem Z". ChatGPT does a great job of this and I think most of the value of generative AI is here currently.
Most of the hype is around how far can we take the capabilities of solving this 2nd category to produce the third.
3. Agents - There are examples of solutions showing this potential but the 'killer app' I don't think has been demonstrated, at least well enough. AutoGPT, BabyAGI, etc are interesting, but in my experience don't yet perform nearly well enough. They fail far too often for any trust to be created. This doesn't mean GPT4 native plugins won't get there, they could and that will create a large amount of value in this category (I don't have access to Plugins). This is also where a lot of "selling the dream" is happening. It seems plausible we will get there, but still not clear how these will be accepted and used in the real world, by average users.
One big area of value IMO for Agents is accessibility. People with physical disabilities, but still have the ability to speak I think will provide massive quality of life improvements through being able to interact more easily with more systems.
Very interesting times, the speed of change has seemed amazing, and that for me is the part that creates the most unknown, and is hard to ignore the hype when plotting the rate of improvement and the possibility of Agents becoming an accepted tool in wider society.
The value provided by Crypto/VR is way more limited, and the accessibility of the tech ranges from bad to worse. VR has a lot of utility, but due to the headset requirement, it is disconnected from a lot of the real world. Lots use cases for specific problems, but less widely accessible as generative AI by a long way.
Crypto IMO should be ignored, at best it assists with the financialization of everything which doesn't provide value to a wide portion of society, it provides a means of value extraction.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
It all comes back to how Meta makes its money - data collection.
Facebook is in a really tricky position right now. They don't control the hardware or OS that it runs on, or the app stores. That means that at any time, Apple or Google can screw them over and deny Facebook from collecting data.
However, what if they had their own hardware (Oculus) running their own OS? Then, they could collect as much data as they wanted without any interference from Google or Apple. That means significantly more profit! There's no way in hell they're going to break into the mobile phone market, so VR was their best option.
That's why they pushed VR so hard. They need it to work because otherwise they have no control over their main source of income, and the squeeze on them is getting tighter ever day.
It still doesn't change the fact that it was a dumb decision. Facebook would have been much better off simply accepting that they couldn't control the hardware or OS or app stores and continue to do the best they could within those constraints.
Instead they just threw away a ton of money that could have gone to shareholders and employees instead.
But you can't will something into existence, and that’s why Meta’s approach was baffling.
They even tried to break into the mobile phone market at one point back in 2013. Then apple made it's privacy changes and now Google has said they will do something similar on their platform. I think you're right that Facebook got desperate to find a platform they can control.
I don't have time to immerse myself in the environment where I don't see the reality that surrounds me (as in, people which share my public transport, cars that stop at the traffic lights next to me, my kids running around me, people I work with, etc.). It's not that I need the reality, but I can't disconnect safely. Facebook is easy. Just reach the pocket, get the phone, a few swipes and you are using it. Be it in the office, around your kids, in the waiting room, ...
I don't see how VR can provide you a FB scale of users.
They make their money selling ads _using_ that data.
Google and Apple have reported slight slow down. Smartphone market in the west has saturated and not growing. Ppl have so many other options where they can spend their time online. Its possible everyone is seeing less ad revenue.
This seems like a bit of 20/20 hindsight. At the time, the biggest concern Zuckerberg had was that they didn't own a platform. Apple had the iOS ecosystem, Google had Android, Microsoft had Windows, Amazon had AWS and their logistical moat. Zuckerberg made a bet that the world would move to VR similarly to the way the world moved to PCs in the 80s, which allowed Microsoft to take over a big chunk of the world.
Zuckerberg's fear wasn't unreasonable, he just bet wrong. Apple's privacy changes had a huge impact to Facebook, and the other FAANG without a "moat-defining platform", Netflix, is also in the most precarious position among the big techs.
That said, I agree with most of the other comments. I can see VR evolving a little beyond gaming I guess, but it's actually kind of a nightmare to imagine myself wearing a fucking headset all day. At this point I think Zuckerberg knows he bet wrong and AI is the future, and he's clearly trying to pivot, but it's really hard to move a big company like Meta quickly, and it also means he has to admit he just lit billions and billions on fire.
2nd Life, The Simms, various MMORPGS. We have loads of experience buildings virtual worlds with virtual belongings and conducting meetings virtually. I was part of a WOW guild that had meetings about raids and other small bits of admin stuff in game.
But a company known for being sketchy as heck slaps on 3D goggles and makes it less fun and I’m supposed to want to be in it?
I think you’ll find that a lot of people were skeptical.
I dunno about you, but I and basically everyone in my circles at the time agreed that it was most likely a terrible idea.
Until and unless there's a truly convenient piece of hardware to get one into a virtual space—I'm talking weight and bulk comparable to prescription eyeglasses, no wires going beyond your body (ie, maybe a pack at the belt/pocket/something like that), and some form of extremely intuitive UI—you're not going to get people interested in regular interactions in a VR/AR space.
Frankly, even once we do have something like that, I think it unlikely that many people would choose to do things like meetings in a virtual space over something simpler like Zoom, even if they did already own the hardware.
And none of these views have changed over the past few years.
No; I think Zuck has been far too isolated and out of touch with how regular people operate for too long, and when faced with, as you say, the fact that Facebook was only running on other people's platforms—and it became clear that no one was interested in making Facebook their platform, like by buying a Facebook phone—he convinced himself that this was The Next Big Thing based on sheer desperation.
I don't really understand this take. Generative AI is a complement to the metaverse. Biggest problem metaverses face is having good content since it's quite a bit more difficult to create. Using generative AI to fill the metaverse is not a pivot, it's been the plan all along.
I believe the concerns around the lack of a platform were both about "moat-defining" and the possibility of being deplatformed by Apple and/or Google.
Only people who are deeply involved in tech think that Mark Zuckerberg investing in something makes it happen.
Everyone else correctly understands he is not a main character, but someone who rode the wave of social media adaptation.
Except for all of the people who were saying it was a bad direction from the start. It certainly looked like a bad direction.
Everybody was making fun of it since it was announced.
They've made some missteps, but it's not even close to being over.
This became even more obvious when shortly after Facebook's pivot nobody, I mean like absolutely nobody was searching or reading up on VR news. It's a topic that people just don't care. They don't want VR in their life. People want more REALITY in their life, not less. Especially after COVID.
On the other hand, AI has sparked everyone's imagination. Only a few weeks ago I showed my wife ChatGPT and we used it for some work she had to do in her field (medicine) and she was completely amazed by it. She's got her own account with OpenAI now and uses it for a variety of things already. My wife is the most non tech person ever. This to me is a strong indication that AI has not even scratched on the surface of its potential.
A far less monetized and more user content focused version of "the Metaverse" already exists: VRChat. It's been around since before Covid and it is still around. Granted, yes, it is still mostly a niche hobby for some very dedicated people, not all of whom even use VR, but it exists. I think the people who would have been interested in Meta's product looked at it and thought "But we already have a less crappy version of this that's not tied to a questionable company." Especially since Meta's handling of Oculus has been far from great (i.e. requiring a Facebook/Meta account just to use any headset, as opposed to the separate account like before).
But as I said, it's still fairly niche and mostly serves as an escape for people. I think slapping the whole "buy in-world items with crypto" thing on top of that just made the target group even smaller than before. It just felt like jumping onto any tech buzz words to broaden appeal, when it actually caused the opposite. For all the data they're supposed to have, that was poor decision making imo.
Yes there was a Big Spike in VR interest around Oculus, and most of the people who bought one have it sitting in a corner collecting dust...
But a significant subset of people continued to use it, and their usage is steadily growing. There are huge numbers of people willing to pay $500 -$2k, on each new device that comes out, just to "see if its ready".
There are tons of people who work from home on a couple monitors, who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls. Obviously the comfort, battery, and visual performance is not there yet, but most people have a feeling that would could just be a generation or two away from it.
I would guess that more than 50% of hacker news readers over 40 years old had an MP3 player BEFORE the iPod. They were all garbage and completely replaced when the iPod came out, but for the 2-3 years before the iPod, all the early adopters new something like that was coming and they were hungry for it.
I feel that's exactly where VR is.
It's not done yet. AI is the current buzz because we are starting to see some great products and uses for it, we have yet to see that with VR/AR but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. It's still early, I am not a fan of the 'metaverse' idea, but VR/AR still has a lot left to give.
For myself, I 100% agree.
Tired: Metaverse; Wired: Protoverse.
But that is all orthogonal to the "metaverse" as Meta envisions it, and I really don't see the utility of that.
Agree with most of what you said. But my take is, people would LOVE virtual reality if it were done well enough. We just don't seem to have the technical capability to pull it off well enough yet. Uncanny valley and all that.
Part of the sales experience at the time was they gave all of us one to carry around during our shift on the sales floor and encouraged us to show it off and use it to look up things we'd normally have gone to one of the demo computers to look up. About 2 months later, I'm taking a road trip with a destination plugged into my Garmin GPS (remember those?). I'm in the final stretches of getting where I need to go when the GPS says "you've arrived" while I'm driving down a road with nothing on either side of me. I go for another half mile or so just assuming it was off by a few hundred feet and I'd find an entrance but no such luck. Turn around, punch in the destination to the GPS again and try from the other direction, same deal. "You've arrived" in the middle of nowhere. Tried a couple more times and then pulled off to the side of the road and reached for the iPhone in my pocket to pull up some information / a map quest search, and then remembered that I don't have an iPhone in my pocket because I don't own an iPhone and just carry one on shift at work. That experience convinced me that there was value in this whole "smart phone" thing and that I would eventually be getting one.
Which isn't to say that crypto or NFTs are like iPhones, but more that I think you can't necessarily understand how useful a given piece of tech is just by someone else explaining it to you. Some things you just have to use.
But then again, that may be why there's huge adoption of crypto in countries like Nigeria (32%!) or Vietnam (21%) [1] (obviously, crypto is a lot more useful in your life if you have a weaker central currency or less financial access; their deeper dive into Sub-Saharan Africa adoption of crypto in particular is fascinating [2]).
Likewise, I'm a believer in the eventual adoption of XR, but a big part of my excitement is really my desire for infinite screen space. Still, I can see the argument that everything will be spatial in the future and personally, I see these trends tying together a lot more than not. Maybe they're on different hype curves, but decentralized financial transactions on credibly neutral, near real time networks (w/ smart contracts) seem like a natural fit for agentic AI. And in the VR arena, I'm seeing some incredibly compelling stuff happening with NeRFs and other generative media that is going to make virtual/augmented immersion a lot more compelling (one of the big bottlenecks for VR right now is generating compelling evergreen content and experiences).
[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-global-crypto-adop...
[2] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/sub-saharan-africa-cryp...
And this is in contrast to what YC likes to call tarpit ideas, because there are lots of ideas that look good but everyone who tries to tackle them fails for whatever reason.
So we can say metaverse was a bad bet for Facebook, but that's sort of looking in hindsight at the struggles that tech has and the unknown market. And it appears to be a big bet and lost.
But comparing to current state of AI, is sort of comparing to a different stage, where there is the beginning of an early majority seeing the progress and now seeing the excitement. But go back a couple of years, and more of us would be naysayers, talking about how bad the tech is, or various failure modes.
No. No. The steam engine, modern refrigeration and open heart surgery all probably had some naysayers but I don't think they looked like bad ideas to almost everyone. A lot of what qualifies as innovative from your tech community really just might be crap.
From the beginning the complaint with crypto and blockchain is that it didn't fix any problems other than maybe assisting as a tool in laundering/illegal transactions, and it wastes energy to boot. I don't see how the naysayers were wrong.
The metaverse idea didn't even get to the point of hyping a purpose. Nobody even bothered to explain what useful human need or want it fulfilled (beyond what has already been fulfilled for years in gaming).
> But comparing to current state of AI, is sort of comparing to a different stage, where there is the beginning of an early majority
Early majority? That is a bold affirmation.
I think these large language models are pretty neat. I also lived through the first AI winters. I would say the hype at this moment isn't even as great as it was then (especially in the 80s). It is a bit tough to explain for those that weren't there - but numerous knowledgable and intelligent people were convinced that the AI singularity was just moments away.
I disagree really strongly with this. Innovative things look like impractical long shots that have obvious upsides but that violate conventional wisdom around what is possible. The smartphone is a great example of this: it was obviously innovative, and the idea was obviously great before it actually became reality, but the practical limitations of hardware made it impossible until one day it wasn’t. Same for generative language models. The real innovation for both of these things is that some element constraining a good idea changes and someone notices and can act on it decisively.
Some version of the Metaverse has always been possible in one form or another, but no one acts on it because it doesn’t benefit the users it depends on for success. The fundamental limiting factor is participation incentive, and technology doesn’t change that.
There is innovating, trend following and what I’ll term trend completion.
Innovation creates new categories. Crypto was innovative. It looks like a losing bet, but nobody can doubt it was daring. Trend completion doesn’t create new categories, but it delivers on a promise. The iPhone is in this category. A product delivered against the incompleteness preceding it. (And synthesising categories.)
Absent that tangibility or specificity you have trend following. Facebook didn’t create the VR/AR category. It hasn’t delivered a product. It hasn’t even described a uniquely compelling vision. It jumped into a fad because others were doing it and then flailed around helplessly while executives penned PowerPoints.
[1] which I totally don't buy. If you think about the early internet as an example - the vast majority of people I knew didn't _understand_ it, and/or didn't _care_ and certainly didn't have any sense of its future, but no one that I knew thought it was a bad idea. If they thought about it all they thought it was irrelevant to them until they absolutely got it and couldn't get on board fast enough.
Deleted Comment
But some ideas are obviously bad within that framework. I could invest millions trying to build a commuter-friendly transportation rocket, but that's obviously not worth trying. Any potential critics would almost certainly be right.
But what I don't see is people willing to do the same with Apple who has also invested billions in the space and will be showcasing their Reality platform in the next couple of months at WWDC.
Do people really want to bet against the company that has had so many consumer product successes even ones for which there was widespread doubt e.g. Apple Watch, AirPods etc.
And what if it takes off ? There will need to be another platform similar to iPhone/Android and isn't that the type of bet Meta should be making.
What AR/VR needs is a mass market killer app, like Pokémon GO (in its heyday) or World of Warcraft or something. Not another headset. People will put up with all kinds of discomfort/inconvenience/cost if there's something interesting to do. The current crop of Metaverses don't cut it in this regard.
Nobody is criticizing because... there's nothing to base those criticisms on - there's no product (yet) and WWDC is rumor. Once (if) it launches, the praises and critiques will follow.
I am quite sure he had the data that growth with Facebook, Insta, etc. was limited and threatened by TikTok and others. The Meta stuff was an attempt to break out of that I to a different space, where they could be the early mover. And then being blinded by own fascination for the space. I think many share the assumption that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook never really understood what users actually want and had luck their platform matched the spirit for some time.
Not to mention that Facebook was a perfectly fine and popular social networking platform until Facebook itself poisoned it with the engagement algos that put politics and fake news on top, and drove people away.
All of Meta's current issues were self inflicted.
I'm probably one of the few that thinks the pivot overall isn't a bad idea, but it was just done in such an irresponsible way and they're paying the price now. We've seen this many times (notably Uber, WeWork, Google, and arguably Apple until Jobs returned from his exile with a new skillset), but the best person to start a company is often not the best to run it when it's established. But Mark has been so good at keeping equity and control that Facebook will fail unless he learns how to adapt. It usually takes a real low point for people to get out of established mindsets. Just putting this out there so I can point to this in 10 years: If I were to predict the future, I'd say Facebook stock plummets and everyone writes it off, and Mark wises up, bringing it back much stronger. I don't particularly like him, but I think he's got it in him.
Every single time I've asked ChatGTP or Bard a "simple" question that I know the answer to, there has always (always!) been something simply outright wrong. It is just not ready to be trusted right now, but I look forward to the day when hallucinations are solved.
Until we can be sure that LLMs do not hallucinate, I struggle to see the value to everyday-people for LLMs beyond use cases where accuracy and facts are unimportant. So ignore google-killing search engines, ignore medical diagnosis, ignore programming, ignore legal advice, and instead embrace making up stories or poems about unicorns or whatever where facts, accuracy, and correctness simply don't matter. It will still have a big impact sure, but I don't think it will be as world-changing as people think once the novelty wears off and people realise that LLMs are generally not very reliable when it comes to giving accurate info, and are better suited to "creative" tasks where correctness/accuracy doesn't matter. E.g. with stable diffusion (remember that?) no one expected a perfectly anatomically accurate picture of a dog or whatever - it did a passable picture of a dog eating a burrito or whatever the prompt asked for, but no one confused it with reality or treated it as fact. This is where I feel that we are with LLMs right now - passable, but does not hold up to detailed scrutiny.
But obviously yes the metaverse is obviously total bullshit and facebook have totally jumped-the-shark on this. They're currently deep in restructuriung to undo over-hiring during the pandemic - it would not surprise me at all to see them also re-pivot away from the metaverse too (couching it as some sort of "focusing on efficiency" or whatever, i.e. continue working on FB, instagram and whatsapp core features)
In Denmark the highest income households have small cheap TVs they can hide away while low income households have big 4K TVs as the main attraction in their living room. The reason is that the former don't want to appear like passive mindless consumer zombies who watch TV.
It is a very superficial opinion but wearing a VR headset is literally the most 1984 consumer zombie thing you could possibly do.
It's been a couple of months since I've done anything in VR, but I don't understand why you're being so overly dramatical about it, comparing it to 1984 and consumerist zombies.
Yes, there are other companies and products in similar spaces but Facebook would have been cash positive in each of those ventures pretty soon if not crazy profitable.
Whereas the Meta VR demos are almost close to what we can see from 80s, not to mention that they add no value to gaming, entertainment, communication or commerce.
The Metaverse is coming along just fine. Roblox, Fortnite, VRchat, and Second Life all work. None are ad-supported. It's not compatible with Facebook's business model.
There's no real role for "brands" in the metaverse. Or even ads. All the successful systems charge the user, although many have a free to play tier. As a branch of gaming, the metaverse works reasonably well, and is getting better. Gaming itself is huge, has passed Hollywood, and is going on from there. See the current issue of The Economist.
Roblox also has a branded games business. It does not mediate ads but it also has advertising of other games on its platform. They are definitely working on automatic ad mediation.
A year later, Facebook ends 50% higher. Another year later, Facebook is 30% again higher. And it happens for another year. In the end, what gets Facebook is Apple AAT but it still ends up 60% higher than when that comment was posted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18450058
Comparitively, NASDAQ and SP500 are up 69% and 55%, respectively. Even GOOG is up 100%.
Facebook is performing worse than the natural growth of the markets, so maybe moral is important?
Maybe like 10 years ago when PG was more active on here he was participating in a thread (honestly forgot about what) where I ended up asking him “If Mark Zuckerberg applied to YC with objectively the worst idea you’ve ever heard, would you invest?”
And he said, “of course!”
I think at the time VR started making headlines, I thought was a pretty cool concept. I loved that Valve and Oculus (private at the time) were both going after it.
When FB bought Oculus I didn’t see an obvious connection, but like you’re saying I just assumed Zuckerberg knew exactly what he was doing.
Over time I’ve come to appreciate WHY they made the investment. If they had been right, they were going to be very right (and frankly in kind of a terrifyingly dystopian way imo).
I also wonder if FB could go back in time would they completely scrap VR investment? What (at the time) would have been their big bet instead?
I think this is the relevant question. So many people fall into the Trap stop thinking in terms of binary outcomes, especially with hindsight information. This isn't how business investment works at all.
The same people that are quick to judge investment failures can rarely produce an alternative idea with multi-billion dollar upside.
1) De-proprietorizing user data
2) Handing identity from identity providers (like meta) to open systems
3) Allowing foreign content into the walled garden
So Meta built the least useful but snazziest part of the meta-verse, the verse part. And they built it in the face of a bunch of other already extant "verses", like Roblox which offer a more intersting landscape for interaction.
Metaverse stink: "This could have been an email" in 3-D!
Bitcoin has 2 stinks:
A)Find a lot of computing energy. Think about building power plants to make coins, and you're starting to get somewhere.
B)Price will rapidly drop and spike, maybe thousands of dollars per day. That's a feature!?
LLM AI: 60% of the time, it's right every time! This tech includes very nice graphics to back up any of its highly confident and hallucinogenic bullshit. Until this phenomenon is well understood, it stinks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_inte...
Simultaneously, it is worth noting that major technology companies did not develop working generative AI. Examples include Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and even Google's search algorithms, they all fall short of user expectations. And they had years and years and billions of $$.
The parallel between virtual reality and artificial intelligence is intriguing. If some company can successfully develop a VR system which does not suck, it could revolutionize the industry in much the same way as a openAI.
But that company will not be any of these big ones…
Were these reasonable people banking with Silicon Valley Bank like all the smart guys? Crypto is promising a financial system that has so far appeared to be much more resilient than the traditional system and bitcoin is currently at $30k. Tether has survived something like 2x depegs so far.
We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.
I strongly disagree with this. When SVB failed, there was a system in place to insure some of the depositors' funds. The government chose to augment that by insuring all the depositors' funds. That was an unusual move, and then the banking system returned to normal when a better capitalized bank took over SVB's assets and liabilities. The bank failure cost those who invested in the bank. It cost the bank management. It did not cost the depositors.
When a crypto exchange fails, depositor funds are unrecoverable. There is no system to protect the depositors, no system to recover funds from the failed exchange.
While financial authoritarianism is imperfect, its rules are designed to reduce fraud and to reduce the impact of fraud on innocent bystanders.
What is bitcoin resilient to? Not falling to $0?
> We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.
I don't think that our current financial system fails that often because some transactions were stopped.
Deleted Comment
From the business perspective I think they failed in playing the Japanese console game old strategy (Nintendo and Sony): work obsessively to have great and high quality content and synchronize this with the console launch. Not saying that Nintendo and Sony are not nightmares for producers but they are very obsessive about details.
A metaverse-like concept is conceivable, but a long long way out.
VR’s “Mac moment” may be happening this year with Apple’s hardware unveiling. I suppose Zuck hopes to ship his mass-market “Windows 3.0” soon after. I’m very curious to find out what consumers think of the Apple product.
I'm pretty sure that I agree with you, but what would Facebook/Meta do with LLMs? You wouldn't want to generate fake people to interact with (well, someone might, but Facebook wouldn't). Because that's what data they had would have been useful for. I mean, if you can predict what a person will say, or how they will react to an ad, that has value... but I'm not sure I know where that value is for a Facebook, outside of better targeting of ads.
Maybe predicting consumer/voter sentiment about a policy or product before it's released?
The same applies to Google in aa certain respect actually. I assume they have enough data from gmail to effectively recreate a conversation with me. This could be lucrative for some targets (not me!), but probably not in a way that Google would be able to legitimately capture.
I could completely see how other actors would be able to use LLMs to predict or impersonate people on the Facebook/Google platforms, just not how the platforms themselves would be able to generate value.
Google at least could merge generic LLMs into their search mission to catalog the world's information. But that's a harder pitch to figure out how Facebook would generate value from it.
Am I missing something, or am I thinking too much about this like West World?
Sure, but VR isn't, they're different things. For VR they've sold somewhere around 15-20 million headsets, and many people use it quite a bit. I have no doubt VR is/will be big, but the path to finding what's compelling in VR will be strange. Personlly I rediscovered a love for table tennis and play every single day now, I'd probably pay $2-3k for a Quest 2 if I had no choice.
That said I think trying to build the "Metaverse" in a top-down way will be very difficult, and Meta will probably not be the ones pulling it off since they don't have much good will, people actively avoid their social platforms if they can. But to me, what we need is not a Metaverse, but a good OS/platform with integrated social/identity, where friends can easily join each other's games, voice is enabled by default and provided as part of platform, not individual apps etc. Meta has been working on making this easier, but with my friends group the friction is still too high. And it's super annoying when third party apps (like Rec Room) needs their own login, friends/social features etc making it cumbersome to find your friends in there.
Companies that get big and then score repeated out of the park hits do so by attracting and nurturing talent[1] - they don't do so by having one brilliant star that shines eternal.
1. And that is a really good and honestly rare talent in the modern marketplace - it can be hard to let creativity thrive.
Be it Ragnarok Online, Runescape, Ultima Online, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Minecraft, or whatever, anyone who has played multiplayer games of any kind know exactly what the "metaverse" was trying to sell to us and the common masses. We also know that multiplayer games, unlike practically every romanticized depiction, generally sucks to play with strangers. You absolutely need a tightly knit group of good friends to play with to be able to truly enjoy them.
So when we said the "metaverse" would never take off, it's because we have literally been there and done that.
I think you hit the nail on the head as far as how the metaverse is not new, but I think your pessimistic take is not so obvious to me and presumably many people bullish on metaverse ideas.
The fact of the matter is, if you have people you can hang out with in person you're not going to bother with VR, or the metaverse.
I've played around with the social aspects, and they're interesting, but I don't really have friends with a Quest and I struggle to make friends just by butting in on random conversations, so I haven't really done it much.
Have had a couple of interesting conversations about movies with a movie nerd in a virtual hangout in the Bigscreen app, though, and did some dancing in a virtual nightclub a couple times, which was actually pretty fun (I think I'd feel a little too weird doing going to an actual nightclub nowadays, I'm a little old for the scene).
Deleted Comment
Several of my friends have Quests, and we use them regularly with each other, but the catch here is that we all live in different parts of the country, so it's great for some more informal goofing off while we chitchat.
The problem is that the tech cannot actually do things even close to this caliber yet. The fidelity has not reached the uncanny valley yet, much less gotten over it. Zuckerberg clearly thought he could make this possible with Meta's resources, but that just didn't happen.
I wouldn't be too shocked if crypto did peter out or flatline over the coming years, just it doesn't seem a priori obvious, given my broad criticisms of it have not stopped its success to date.
It's been three years since then, and still no real-world use case has emerged. I don't dispute that there are completely valid use cases for cryptocurrencies, mainly around avoiding governmental financial restrictions and safeguards, and there are still loads of people using cryptocurrencies for speculation and/or as a "store of value". But the whole ecosystem of distributed apps, smart contracts, DAOs, and so on, still mainly revolves around itself, without wider societal impact.
Bitcoin has proven itself to be a useful financial speculation object.
a) people didn't join metaverse because there's nobody else there
b) generative AI like GPT and Stable Diffusion enable the creation of real-looking and real-sounding bots for a VR world
c) metaverse is now interesting again because you're not there alone
I don't know that a sparsely populated metaverse is THE reason to be skeptical about Meta's metaverse.
Dead Comment
New one to me, love it. Synonymous with ideology, IMO — keep zooming in, the answers are there, we promise! Those who zoom out are lost!
I agree it's clear on day one that these models will be useful.
What's less clear is how useful they are -- a year ago most experts would have told you that an architecture that "predicts the next word" won't be powerful enough to make a model that could lead to AGI-alike abilities (and many people here still argue the same today), but here we are now.
> Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early
That's just a lack of vision. GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. He had plenty of time to commit to AI development instead of Metaverse.
That's some frustrating shit, because it rewards the least patient and surface-level analyses which (correctly!) identify deficiencies and lulls in activity, but mislabels them as stagnation or dead-ends or fundamental flaws.
It took us 20 years from General Magic to a passable iPhone.
VR will take time, and AI is likely more fruitful to prioritize currently (not saying that's a bad idea!) - but we don't yet have enough historical perspective to declare VR - or even (ick) crypto - as bad directions.
I don't think so -- generative AI doesn't really provide strategic advantages to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp the way it seems to hold promise for search (Google/Bing) and productivity software and certain jobs. Same way crypto isn't strategic to Meta either.
You don't have to pivot your company. If you're still raking in cash, it can be much smarter to just continue that, rather than make a giant bet that might ultimately sink everything.
So VR will be in competition with all the other entertainment industries. But is that useful in any sense just besides entertainment? I doubt.
It started all years ago with Google Glass. Even at that time I doubted that there is value in this. Now, we are here and Google Glass is finally dead. I know it is in the rumors that Apple will bring its VR headset soon. But really? Will that make it better? I doubt.
VR will be in competition with all the other forms of entertainment. It is something, you can't just do besides. It will need your full attention. I doubt that there is some real usefulness.
Being able to buy drugs online was cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the billions of dollars invested and vast amounts of carbon emitted.
They needed to focus on making a few more games with the mass appeal of Beat Saber and making entry level machines a bit cheaper again so there was enough users to make the social aspect actually have some value.
I think fundamentally Facebook is not a product company and is consequently bad at actually making products. Apple has been moving very cautiously on the AR/VR front in contrast. Granted, Apple moves cautiously on everything, but they do seem more intentional about what to leave up to users to figure out on their own vs the Facebook approach of assuming you can just solve the interesting engineering problems and have the cool technology and people will just figure out how to use it. Smart watches and smartphones existed for a while before the Apple Watch and the iPhone, but what really kicked off the market for them was just a design that put it out there for people to explore with it so Apple could then iterate and figure out what the real niche was. But that will never happen if your initial test cases are just tech nerds. Tech nerds love the technology qua technology too much to figure out why things are interesting outside that.
I'm not certain about the direction of Meta, but for now it seems that their most important areas are entertainment (Instagram, Reels) and messaging (WhatsApp, Messenger), not social networking (Facebook), which is dying.
For entertainment and messaging, generative AI is going to be huge. In entertainment, content creation and discovery will be severely advanced by AI. For messaging, at the very least, users will expect AI support in message composition and company-customer communication.
But in that sense they're not far behind the pack as it is.
OTOH: Whether generative AI has any value beyond mass desinformation and making "creative people" unemployed only the future may show. Also: Given than you need super-computers to do the training it's unlikely it will become a technology that can be used by everyone. (The situation here is imho similar to "open hardware": You may be able to design the hardware but you're not able to actually build it in your basement—like it's the case for open source software, which made kind of a revolution possible. AI will likely remain purely a toy for the few richest companies on this planet, without any access for the masses, beyond being "customers").
Regarding VR (the "metaverse"): This was a dead idea already as Second Life was hyped. VR pops up every 10 - 20 years since the 60's, but never caught on; and likely never will for practical reasons. Even Bitcoin has more real wold applications average people would care about than VR (e.g. you can at least buy "stuff" with Bitcoin, or send and receive money against the will of your government).
Is the economy of Bitlandia on the rise in real terms, or what? Huge export surplus, something like that? If not, then WTF is that to brag about?!?
Big unmotivated swings in the exchange rate are a failure in a currency. What you're crowing about is that as a currency, Bitcoin sucks.
Just looked it up. Between BTC, ETH & top stablecoins, crypto has $900B+ market cap and $60B+ in 24-hour volume. I'm not saying your conclusions are wrong (though I disagree), just that you're calling the game "over" at the end of the first quarter based on one hype-cycle. I remember people doing something similar in the dotcom bust: "WWW is dead."
So more of a speculative investment asset than a currency, then?
Currencies aren't usually said to have a “market cap”. Investment assets – i.e, shit stocks – do.
BTC/crypto is a natural alternative to USD settlement. If you believe the USD is sunsetting as the global reserve currency then crypto, especially btc is probably a good long term investment.
None of this needs ideology about the consensus layer or fandom about how transactions are settled with claims of “hard money” thats going to take over the world, but that sentiment does harden it and is intrinsically intertwined. But you can ignore it and still recognize the parts that are valuable, even if there is no value to you.
I'd give those two another 5-10 years before I expect to see real results — so much needs to be built first at the foundational layer.
Even though I feel technical right all these years i regret for not buying as many as i could have even back in 2017/18.
Centeral banks turned everything like a Ponzi scheme. How the heck borrowing and spending is a better option than saving.
Central banks are just playing a larger game, they aren't causing it, the game is: ever increasing growth capitalism. Borrowing and spending creates "growth", saving doesn't. While we exist in this system we can try to pinpoint the blame at different actors but they aren't the cause of it, they are just playing along.
The incentives for growth don't align with what's best for society, they align with making people indebted so companies can grow their revenues.
Oney is worthless. Unless you like pieces of paper representing defunct national heroes you should not hold money but assets, stock, estate, things that have intrinsic value.
Save for tax cheats (even though the laws are clear) and speculators, crypto just doesn't provide that much value. There are some neat use cases but they are just that.
The "metaverse" stuff... I don't think it was a bad bet to buy up Occulus, they still haven't found a great nail for that hammer but pivoting the entire company seems questionable. There is so much toxicity on the internet, why would you want to be "immersed" in it?
I'm not anti-generative AI, I don't want to sound that way but Zuck and company have some interesting data on large scale systems with giant amounts of data and information, they certainly have invested in it too. Maybe it's wasn't "luck" so much as they might have some intuitions about the negatives uses of the technology. It's seriously cool stuff but I think we're still collectively in the honey-moon period. I do forecast a world where we will need to exponentially strengthen our BS meters.
Google Glass had similar problems.
Eventually someone's going to nail both these things, we just haven't seen it yet.
Meanwhile, Facebook's notion of "The Metaverse" is downright dystopian, and I'm happy that it's proving to be a demoralizing money pit.
We're just getting out of the pandemic and people are excited to be outdoors.
I wouldn't want to spend time in the Metaverse after all the lockdowns and travel restriction during the pandemic.
> But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
The faithful have managed to get BTC up over $30K again, though. Saw Tim Bray posit the other day that if the US Gov just dumped all of it's BTC holdings (mostly seized from criminals) they could crash crypto quickly since the liquidity isn't there.
- Lack of relevance on the big blue site.
- Huge slide in ad revenue.
- Expensive acquisition of Oculus with not much revenue to show for it. $2bn is not a bet-the-company amount of money for Facebook, but it is something, and that $2bn spent on Oculus is op cost taken from somewhere else.
- Reduction in moats for FB, Web shifted to mobile, FB tried bets on mobile + gaming, but those moats have receded.
I imagine Mark wanted something that could increase ad spend, new revenue stream (increase revenue from micro transactions, digital asset ownership) and something to give them some platform strength to shore up their future.
If you look around there is no other technology that is offering itself as a platform to own apart from the meta verse.
Now, I absolutely do not think this bet will pay off - but I can see how he would think it would.
Because at the end of the day, Facebook didn't have much to lose. The social media wars were over, FB and especially Instagram had won. As long as they didn't actively break anything, the information->ads->money pipeline will keep flowing until the entire space gets disrupted by something fundamental shifting under their feet.
A VR-2ndLife that actually caught on could honestly be a relatively believable such shift. Ultimately it didn't, but that's still alright news for FB: no big changes means the gravy train is still rolling.
They could both fail but I don't think you can predict one from the other.
You'd think if anything they'd want to invest in that more now that LLMs could be used in combination to produce a much more natural home assistant experience.
That said, whilst I think VR doesn't have a huge amount of potential (the equipment is expensive and awkward), I think there is still a lot of space for making it easier to meet and communicate with people virtually. There's still a huge amount of friction where nowadays almost every service has limited public messaging and comments, etc., and online communities are fractured across dozens of Discord or Matrix servers. I think one of the main parts of Tiktok's success has been that it makes it easy to speak to new people either via public comments or video replies, etc.
I couldn’t help but think that I have zero interest in a stadium or any size meeting where I have to put a VR helmet on….
I can imaging Zuck and Carmak and others would love that people listen to them in stadium sized meetings, but I’m not sure how users feel. I’m sure one day there will be such experiences, but there seems to be nothing appealing to many individuals about them now.
God help me when some CEO declares a VR mandatory meeting…
Metaverse seems like a top down driven thing.
Crypto seems to have been an easy money scam from almost day one.
It’s been 18 months since they “pivoted”. Come back in 5-10 years to see who was right. Assuming the metaverse is a failure at this point is simply arrogant.
You know, I never really though these founders were visionary geniuses. For the most part they are well connected/already well off, and did the right thing at the right time. I think the last couple of years have made that even more clear.
Facebook really started taking off about the time that a second golden age of tech was starting, fueled largely by near-zero interest rates and a focus on massive IPO exits without any proof of profitability. Nobody had to make any money for years, if at all. Uber hasn't made any money and neither has Spotify. Tesla does make cars, but its real product is arguably its absurdly valued stock that has allowed it a large runway fueled for the most part by the delusions of grandeur of its CEO. During this time larger companies simply acquired everything in sight, hoping that it would pay off. I mean, of all these acquisitions by Meta, which have been worth it? They're not all Instagrams.
https://www.techwyse.com/blog/general-category/facebook-acqu...
Facebook made it, but not because Zuckerberg made the best PHP site ever. Right place, right time, maybe among the first to realize that any engagement is good engagement, and I doubt it was Zuckerberg himself who had that realization.
On top of that, Google, Meta, and advertising companies in general have grown mostly on the theory that the mass amounts of data that they collect and use to sell hyper-focused ads is worth something. Recently it's been revealed that this isn't true, and you get just as good or better results by simply advertising the last thing somebody looked at, or whatever they are currently standing next to IRL. Knowing that you looked at hemorrhoid cream 3 years ago doesn't help you sell anything today. So it's arguably based on lies as well.
Now with interest rates up, I think we'll see how that plays out as advertisers finally start pulling back due to economic conditions. Uber turned off 2/3 of its ad spend in 2017 after it found that most of "conversions" were in fact fraud. Curious to see what other companies experience on this front. We'll find out how many of these founders are true geniuses or were just burning cash. I mean shit, give me a billion dollars and I'll give you something that looks like the next big thing no matter what...
The Facebook of 2023 is not a scrappy little startup with nothing to lose.
It was called myspace.
Zuck doesn't care about the metaverse, he's chasing the next consumer device since he missed the smart phone. He knows that if he doesn't control the hardware, his business is at risk. Apple has reinforced this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-...
You say that, but crypto bubble hasn't really popped. At 30K, BTC is only down around 55% from the highs, that's about in the same league as many tech stock declines this year. A true bubble pop should be like 90%+ down. The masses clearly don't agree that it's bullshit so far.
Oh my. Such a good way to put it. Thank you.
I don't think so.
I just think the massive spending is a bit premature. Keeping a R&D division inside Meta makes sense. Betting the farm does not.
VR has enormous potential but we are still lacking more ergonomic headsets and killer apps. I want to do 3D modelling in VR - except for some simple apps, I can't do that.
I think he's just desperate to have what Apple has; A hardware platform on which to hang other services and applications.
I consider myself to be a pretty reasonable person and I think the value in something like Bitcoin is as a backup or alternative to the traditional system. Similar to how someone would invest in gold. Except Bitcoin is much easier to transfer, requires much less space to store, etc., vs gold. I think 95% of crypto is bullshit though, and there are a lot of scams.
If you look at recent bank collapses, high inflation, etc., I think a reasonable person might question how long modern monetary theory can go on like this. I'm not a gloom and doom person. I still hold fiat, haven't given up on banks, still invest in US treasuries, stocks, etc. But I think holding some in crypto and gold, etc., also makes sense.
If I had some extra zucchini and potatoes, and you were running very low on food, it would take quite a bit to convince me that a piece of shiny metal or numbers in a distributed ledger would be worth the calories I'm surrendering.
Right now, dollars would be worth it, because nearly everyone believes in their utility, despite being a very similar faith-based currency.
As far as I know the last bust wasn’t much different to the ones that came before it.
This is essentially how fiat currency works, isn’t it?
When I mentioned the societal nature of crypto, I meant something different. People who hold crypto have a vested interest in the wider adoption of crypto, and they often tend to become vocal proponents of crypto projects. I don't even claim bad intentions – I believe there is some psychological effect at play here that causes people to hold opinions that serve their interests, and becoming a crypto holder means that from that moment on, the spread of crypto is in one's interests.
Now, my point was, that perhaps I overlooked this sociopsychological aspect of crypto. If enough people in power are personally invested in crypto, and they use their power to advance crypto adoption because it personally benefits them, then at some point it doesn't matter whether there's any intrinsic value in crypto or not – it becomes a self-reinforcing system.
Deleted Comment
These statements do not contradict- they can both be true
But they didn't really do much public messaging around it.
I think it's clear they will (and are) be useful, but how useful is very much an open question
It's also important to remember that Facebook was staring down the barrel of a bunch of investigations regarding election misinformation and basically tailoring their products to be addictive to teenagers while they internally realized it was harmful. The rebrand was much more about rebranding than meaningfully changing the direction of the company. I think he just figured with ZIRP he could do the direction change as well at 0 risk.
And he would have been too late.
This is what Ron Paul and others have been saying about fiat currency for decades.
But you're making an error if you're lumping Bitcoin in with "crypto".
"What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party."
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
In case it's a surprise to you; crypto, after one of the worst bear markets, has now around $1.2 Trillion market cap.
So sure maybe it's bullshit but so is facebook and tiktok. They still make money selling BS ads and toxic content. Crypto will be an upgrade comparing to their present business model (Zuck tried to get on crypto but was discouraged by regulators).
“Market cap”?!? So WTF is it; some stock you want people to buy? Shitstocks usually brag about their “market cap”. Currencies don't.
The hilarious thing is how much these use cases will fold back into AI.... how else do you expect an autonomous agent to manage its finances? Or for a global autonomous economy to emerge?
You should do yourself a service and read the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Learn about Ethereum. Learn about the drama and history surrounding the space; who the good guys and bad guys are. It's a really complex subject and I understand if you don't want to set aside the time to fully learn about it, but you do yourself a disservice by sharing an ignorant perspective of the space. At least have the courtesy in such case to recognize that your opinions are not fully informed.
Really? Which ones?
So rather than just putting on your goggles from wherever you are and working, Meta wants you to drive into the office, sit in a tiny cubicle, put your goggles on and work there.
Hopefully it’s just stupidity and culture clash and not maliciousness.
It’s similar to an early push at my org for “return to office” that involved everyone coming in and zooming all day with people in mostly different spots. Some people like this, but for many it seemed like a waste.
The alternative is to start your own business. If you did and generated more revenue while your employees were in the office based on previous data, I think you’d end your remote work policy for all but the people who are irreplaceable to your revenue stream.
They want you to sit in an open office, which is even worse imo.
Would have made sense in the early 2000's. Back in the days, corporate HQs had fast networking. Even lugging a machine home, doing anything over 56k would have been a pain. Now folks have dedicated fiber going straight to their router.
I don't know that Facebook is living up to an ideal of fairness and transparency, but I don't think bad comparisons really shed any light on the topic
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/6/23391895/meta-facebook-ho...
It's also not a realistic dogfood either. Users are not going to be fully in VR so why dogfood that way? It's better to figure out what flexible and low friction workflows.
But it wasnt very popular.
I think it was this or around that time: https://futurism.com/the-byte/leaked-memo-facebook-metaverse
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
There is also another aspect to consider. The swift expansion of generative AI is driving the transition from a Social Graph to a Content Graph. Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube pioneered this trend, while Twitter's timeline modifications serve as a functional yet imperfect example. Content discovery now takes precedence over static friend lists.
The core principle that Facebook was built on is gradually crumbling. This isn't just about Apple's privacy policies or regulatory constraints; it's a fundamental shift in user behavior. The primary reason people visit Facebook—connecting with people they know—is now at odds with their main online activity: consuming content from strangers. Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections.
Facebook is attempting to adapt, but their efforts only diminish the platform's value for average users. Instagram's discovery page and Reels are examples, but the latter pales in comparison to TikTok. Facebook's endeavors in short-form video are likely a futile game of catch-up, a classic innovator's dilemma.
The Metaverse's introduction seemed like a desperate, last-minute attempt from the C-suite to save face. Anyone who has worked at a high-profile tech company has likely seen this tactic before: weak financial quarters lead to premature product announcements. The all-encompassing nature of the Metaverse announcement signals that something is amiss. It's only more futile now.
Arguably, the proliferation of cheap generative AI content will cause the value of that “fake” content to decrease. Users may begin to value the “real” content created by one’s friends. So Meta’s social graph may become increasingly valuable in the age of AI content.
I just don't see any evidence that social graphs are becoming more relevant or even that they exist for many people onboarding on to the internet/apps for the first time. You can use Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and even Facebook now without creating any social graph at all. In fact, it seems like they prefer it that way.
So, the combination between the social graph and the content graph, with a dash of AI, will be the outcome I see coming.
You can't infer what people want to do from what they are doing when the platform is trying to influence their behavior.
Facebook has not been a good platform for keeping up with your friends in 10+ years. The main reason is that Facebook is a business that needs a business model. It's not enough to provide a useful service to the users, but you must also be able to monetize it. For FB that meant ads, and then it meant an addictive algorithmic feed to make more money.
That happens often when you run an online service as a business. First you have a good service that attracts a lot of users, and then you gradually destroy it and replace it with something similar but worse to make money. When young people started preferring other social networks, it was a clear sign that Facebook had done that.
At some point, the social internet started existing primarily to make people feel good about their own strongly held controversial opinions.
Why would I go on Facebook, where the experience is seeing an old friend hold some dumb half baked opinion they picked up from Fox/CNN then bicker with them, when I could go to twitter and watch the top influencer in my ring dunk on the top influencer in the competitions ring, making myself instantly feel more right?
Aren't users mostly forming parasocial relationships with "creators" and consider them friends, and want to be with those friends, regardless what they'll do?
I never understood the reaction videos and found them boring and stupid, if I wanted to have an idiot constantly pause the video and say something dumb that shows they didn't understand it, I'd watch it together with my 15yo self. But when I read discussions about it, users commented that they like it because it's something they can do "with" the content creator and they'll get signals to what their famous friend thinks about some topic etc.
It all feels like the groundwork for "AI lovers" anyway. Our desire to reshape the world in our own view and to our own desires is how this feedback loop is going to be used. We do it now in social groups that are self-reinforcing, like churches, cults, interest related groups, workplaces (one team!) etc, but I think those will all become superfluous to our desire to just feel seen, heard and entertained. In a group you have to compete to have those needs met, in the future it might be easier to just get it from a robot that understands us far better, gives us undivided attention, and only responds in ways that elicit the feelings and experiences we want.
This is it. FB was actually super fun in college: it was a virtual dorm hall. It was a party. You could post crazy shit, post party pictures, and hope that girl you liked saw it.
Now it's a combination of a class reunion and your aunt's 70th birthday party, but the usual social restraint is conspicuously absent.
Meta as a company seems unable to recognize the change, because doing so would have threatened their cash cow.
While I agree with the rest of what you say, I don't know if this is true.
They pushed their platform to this. They pushed the controversial and divisive content. They platformed questionable advertisers. The negative interaction was more profitable than a place to share pics of your kids with friends or plan a birthday party.
I think they absolutely know but you can't unring that bell which is why they were running so hard at something else to be their primary product.
I'm still interested in keeping up with friends, but Facebook has undermined this by anti-patterns that show me more ads, more trashy content, more recommendations, and less actual content from friends. If Facebook wasn't incentivized to maximize the number of ads it showed, maybe it would be able to actually deliver on that value proposition to users.
You can do this on TikTok with a new generation today, and Facebook is banking on being able to do this in VR tomorrow.
Tell us what makes you happy and sad. Tell us everything about you. Tell us for free and we will give you an endless stream of content/notifications/things to do that make you feel less lonely. We will then work with companies that inject ads that directly prey on your insecurities. You need these things or you can't be happy. All your friends have these things. We will reinforce this message several times per hour.
The only way for Facebook to "double down" on its core principle within its current platform is to do something like buy QVC and start to really focus on bleeding seniors. There's a lot of money to be made on Social Security Wednesdays.
1) The author seems to think 2 rounds of layoffs have already been executed and now a third is coming, when actually the 2nd round of layoffs is still being executed. 2) The author mentions twice that the coming round of layoffs will affect engineering for the first time; this is not true -- thousands of eng were laid off in the first round. 3) The author mentions that the stock price has dropped 43% from its peak as evidence that Meta faces a precarious future. No mention that META has been one of the hottest tech stocks in 23Q1, gaining more than 75%.
I'm no Meta apologist, and this is really a "dog bites man" story anyway ("layoffs announced; morale bad") but I don't really trust this author's general reporting competence.
All of these changes create uncertainty and ruin morale, especially the uncertainty around multiple rounds layoffs.
I'm looking passively because the team I'm on isn't interesting in doing anything resembling professional software engineering and there aren't enough cool, fun people around.
The food is no longer good, the offices are unremarkable, and there's no real reason to go to the office because I don't know anyone, the people there aren't social people, and I don't have anything in common with them.
> absentee leadership,
> Mr. Zuckerberg, 38, is on parental leave after the birth of his third child
> The company’s stock price has dropped 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago
This is pretty disingenuous, considering nearly all tech stocks fell off, and Meta stock has more than doubled since bottoming out at around 90/share several months ago.
The metaverse is stupid and nobody wants it!
> While the company has sold 20 million virtual reality headsets — more than any other company producing similar tech —
I think Meta and Google are particularly disliked by journalists due to both specifically cutting into news industries. But I think a bigger part of it is the idea that software engineers are overpaid and spoiled brats!
I thought the same thing about the sample size but if a third of the company gets chopped, you’re going to have major morale problems. It points to many, many leadership and management problems.
So a variety of metrics are down after layoffs, general online negativity, and bad press. In other news, water is wet. And doubtless execs are concerned. But is that really a "morale crisis" or just what to expect in a belt-tightening era at just about any company (and certainly one whose employees expected great stock appreciation and job stability and now don't have either)?
Also important to remember that FB is a competitor to legacy media.
Does it? That "directive" appears to have been hearsay -- and the original "source" tweet has been deleted.
Dead Comment
Facebook, from the very beginning, knew what it was doing once they found the "secret". They found, by accident, the ability tap into people's insecurities and exploit that to extract data and then serve ads that further insecurities. They found an emotional loop that printed dollars. People gave up an entire lifetime of information for free so they could feel connected.
The Metaverse is just trying to get lightning to strike twice. It will probably get there. As people become more isolated they will become more insecure and place an even higher value on social interaction.
VR sucks. Flat screens and fixed focal point lenses result in a huge out of focus area—you move your eyes within the headset and you can't focus—which feels unnatural. Eventually we will solve this, and once we do it will go mainstream. If you can look past the crappy optics and you log into VRChat today it feels… good. It feels like you are actually interacting with people. It simply feels good. Most people just can't look past the poor optics. You put a $2000 headset on the average person and their response is always, "Cool, but it's kinda heavy. Also, why is it so blurry?" Someone will solve this, eventually.
Meta is banking on exactly what made Facebook. They will create a space that makes you feel good, and then get you to give up even more information and see even more ads designed explicitly to manipulate you because the advertiser knows so much about you. Honestly, it's a brilliant idea to try and do the same thing again but harder. Possible it's too early, but if you have billions to blow why not. Right now it's a product that only caters to the most socially isolated individuals. That will change.
Why did my parents join Facebook? They did it because they were lonely. It's why the Facebook audience is now so old. It took them a while to come up with a UI that was easy enough for old people to use it, but they did. They are trying to do the same with VR. There's a pretty good chance of success in my opinion.
That's exactly it: you're actually interacting with people. In the beginning, Facebook had _only_ people: your friends. If you logged into Facebook then and had 0 friends, arguably nothing would happen.
Today, only about every 3rd post is by a person, even if you have hundreds of friends. There probably is a ratio of algorithmically-generated v.s human content that is acceptable to their users.... but I'm chasing the 100% too :)
Another point of view is that VR sucks for what it is, even if all the technical glitches were resolved tomorrow and everything worked perfectly.
Why? People just don't want to zone out and spend that much time in a made-up universe. It's just not an appealing or interesting or useful experience for most folks (outside the niche universes of gaming, porn and certain teleconferencing use cases).
Meanwhile the recent past is bursting with example of technologies that not only worked, but positively exploded from the get-go -- despite offering a plainly crappy experience on basic sensory levels. Hand-held TVs, VCRs (until something infinitely better came along), the first 20 years of the internet by and large -- for example. People didn't have to look past their shortcomings because they fulfilled obvious, basic needs and desires.
It feels like you are actually interacting with people.
Sorry, but if you're referring to the current state of the art here (overtly cartoon-like 3D avatars that sort of look like your friends) - that's plainly ludicrous.
Welcome to being old, mate. You don't even need state of the art. Literally hundreds of millions of people sit around in Fortnite and Roblox. That's more than good enough. Then you get to VRchat and it's next level. It doesn't just feel like you are interacting with people. You are interacting with people.
Sure this is why people don't binge watch Netflix, looking at purely made up stories.
I'm sure there's a usecase for VR in entertainment. It's just that the killer app hasn't been found yet. Meta has been pushing things too hard and going down the traditional way. But the tech will succeed I'm sure.
It's slowly, inevitably moving towards / increasing the farming of humans.
Huh? The earlier layoffs definitely affected tech. I know of a bunch of former colleagues in engineering roles that were laid off in the first round. Sure, recruiting was affected more, which makes sense when hiring was reduced to almost zero, but this is very much not the first time engineers will be included in layoffs.
I thought scenes like this would only happen in movies like The Office. Never did I expect something like that to happen in real life.
Corporate america is so dumb.