Metaverse: Zuckerberg quits his virtual obsession

An avatar of Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the virtual Meta Connect event in New York on Oct. 11, 2022

(Image credit: Michael Nagle / Bloomberg / Getty Images)

After four years, $70 billion, and an entire rebrand, Meta appears to finally be “ditching” the metaverse, said Dan DeFrancesco in Business Insider. Company insiders told Bloomberg last week that Mark Zuckerberg is planning to slash its metaverse budget by 30% next year in order to focus more resources on artificial-intelligence wearables. Consider it an admission that Zuckerberg’s vision for “virtual worlds” inhabited by millions of users wearing headsets was a flop. He was once so bullish on the technology that it was “the literal inspiration for the entire company’s rebrand from Facebook.” But in recent years, as the number of users dwindled, he has talked about the metaverse less and less. “It’s tough to keep making the case for funding something that burns billions of dollars and doesn’t directly generate a ton of revenue,” especially when the real race is in AI.

“The metaverse was a squishy concept” from the start, said Allison Morrow in CNN.com, “pitched to a populace that had just emerged from Covid lockdowns and wanted little more than to be around other humans offline, in real life.” They didn’t want to spend $400 on a “bulky” headset so they could play games and buy stuff from “digital alter egos.” Despite Zuckerberg declaring it “the successor of the mobile internet,” the metaverse never caught on, partly because it just didn’t look good. “That cool factor” matters. But Meta is going to keep making smart glasses that incorporate augmented reality, said James Pero in Gizmodo. It even recently poached Apple’s longtime design executive, Alan Dye, to join its efforts to build more AI-powered devices. The problem with the metaverse was never the VR headset, which I “actually like.” It was the “Nintendo Wii graphics,” “legless avatars,” and “vast expanses of nothingness” that made the whole experience a “bungled” mess.

Zuckerberg has traded one expensive obsession for another, said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. He’s dumping the metaverse for large language models, as he seems determined to clone ChatGPT. That’s a shame. Meta, with $44.5 billion in cash on hand last year, “was one of the few companies that could afford to take the long view on artificial intelligence and hold out for a breakthrough.” Investors have so far given Zuckerberg a pass for the metaverse, just as they did for his other follies, said Martin Baccardax in Barron’s: “Facebook as a bank, Facebook as a dating website, Facebook as the home to a new cryptocurrency.” We will see if they will be as “forgiving” about misspending on AI. Zuckerberg sending the metaverse to the “dumpster” won’t be a distraction “from the billions he continues to shovel into the artificial-intelligence furnace.