[imagesource: Meta]

The metaverse is dead.

But there will be no press release or big announcement about it as Mark Zuckerberg would then have to acknowledge that he was wrong.

The metaverse was the shiny new thing for the tech tycoon, who even went so far as to rename his entire empire – including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – as Meta Platforms.

The Zuck put a lot of money, time, sweat and tears into what was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, an immersive virtual world in which users could interact with each other using specialised glasses and virtual-reality headsets.

Despite Meta investing billions of dollars into this massively hyped project, Reality Labs, the division housing metaverse projects, recorded a cumulative loss of nearly $24 billion in 2021 and 2022, including an extra $13,7 billion loss last year.

But now that Zuckerberg’s far-flung fling with the metaverse is dead and gone, he’s turning his attention elsewhere, namely artificial intelligence.

We coulda seen that one coming. The Street reports:

“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.”

He was obviously flirting with ChatGPT pretty hard before this revelation.

While Zuckerberg is still dabbling in the virtual world, he’s focusing it all on a more targeted audience, such as videogamers and crypto bros.

Now, he’s trying to stay ahead of the curve:

“About 80% of our investments – a little more — go towards the core business, what we call our family of apps, so that’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the ads business associated with that. Then a little less than 20% of our investment goes towards Reality Labs,” the CEO told The New York Times Dealbook conference last November.

AI is already part of our daily lives and will probably dominate internet interactions in the future.

It was only a matter of time till the Zuck moved on to a new conquest.

At least we don’t have to peer into his cold, dead, virtual avatar eyes anymore.

[source:thestreet]