Meta Platforms’ Metaverse Vision Is Still Far From Coming True

It is going well for tech giant Meta Platforms, all thanks to artificial intelligence and its social media applications. Metaverse continues to be a disappointing horizon if one takes a look at its user base and revenue reports. British newspaper Financial Times reports that the company has managed to keep its numbers above the neutral line.

Metaverse Isn’t Looking Good

FT’s Elaine Moore writes, “ Digital advertising has recovered, lifting revenues. The share price is surging back towards a record high.” The metaverse has the company revenues in turmoil. Recently, the business magazine Fortune reported that the organization lost $46.5 Billion to virtual worlds.

They laid off 21,000 employees during the course of two layoffs. The company’s headcount grew to 87,000 in 2022. Additionally, they froze additional hiring during that time. Several organizations including Google and Tesla were culling their workforce during the period too. The population of remote workers was peaking in pandemic lockdowns, which indicates company efforts to bring the employees back to offices.

The landscape has not gotten steady given that streaming platform Spotify also cut 17 percent of its workers. Online layoff tracker, Layoffs.fyi, reports a total of 256,991 job cuts from the tech sector at the time of writing. Following mass layoffs, the CFO of Spotify, Paul Vogel, has decided to step down from the position.

Coming back to Meta Platforms, the Financial Times writes that “Two things we haven’t seen so much of this year: Mark Zuckerberg and the metaverse. It has been four years since Meta’s founder graced us with his annual new year’s resolutions, telling us what books he’ll read or which states he plans to visit.”

It has been a couple of years since Meta Platforms’ rebranding and the metaverse is nowhere close to the vision the company CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw. The company announced on its official blog that “The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world.”

However, the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has assisted the company to pull them up from the hanging rope. Recently, the company has shifted its focus on generative AI (GAI). The concept enables anyone to create digitally anything that they can think of. Furthermore, they dissolved their Responsible AI division, however, they remain committed to its development.

Since the inception of ChatGPT, a chatbot by AI company OpenAI, the technology has been making waves in the industry. DALL E, an AI image generator by the same company, recently revealed that the latest update includes a plugin that will ease user difficulty by providing them prompts to create something.

Regarding the metaverse, the Financial Times concludes that “It seems likely, therefore, that Zuckerberg’s virtual reality project will continue to trundle on, racking up losses and accounting for a tiny fraction of sales while generating only modest public interest.”

Samuel Ronan, served in the USAF(2009-2015), left active duty after the 2013 government shutdown, disillusioned by the government’s indifference towards the people. In 2017, he ran for DNC Chair, advocating for rural America and the forgotten voter base. In 2018, he ran for Congress as a GOP candidate. Currently, he is running for the position of President of the United States as a GOP candidate. His vision for the future includes: Support for Web 3, Decentralized Technologies, Universal Programs, and Modernizing America’s Economy.