There will be no press release, no big announcement, as he would have to acknowledge that he was wrong.But make no mistake: Mark Zuckerberg just buried the metaverse. The metaverse is dead.
The metaverse was supposed to be the Next Big Thing for the social-media tycoon, who in 2021 went so far as to rename his empire -- created from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp -- as Meta Platforms.
Simply put, the metaverse is an immersive virtual world in which we are supposed to interact with each other using specialized glasses and virtual-reality headsets.
It was the future of technology, according to Zuckerberg, whom Tesla CEO Elon Musk dubbed "Zuck the Fourteenth" in an apparent nod to the French king Louis the XIV, famous for his hubris and excess.
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Zuckerberg has just held the funeral by turning to the next big shiny thing, namely artificial intelligence.
"We're creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area," Zuckerberg said in a Feb. 27 post on Facebook.
"We're starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology. ...
"In the short term, we'll focus on building creative and expressive tools," he wrote. "Over the longer term, we'll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways."
The legacy of the metaverse remains because Meta will continue to develop remnants of this virtual world, such as headsets, but it will be more for a target audience, such as videogamers and the crypto world.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, 3 March 2023 16:45 (one year ago) link