It was more than a project since it motivated the change of name from Facebook to Meta, barely a year ago. The metaverse, this immersive universe in which we would all have had to live in parallel to real life, is it already dead and buried? In any case, it is no longer the priority of Mark Zuckerberg.
He wrote it himself, on March 14, in a letter to Meta employees: “Our one and only investment today is in advanced artificial intelligence.”
Mark Zuckerberg therefore operates a spectacular about-face, a major change of trajectory, even if two sentences later, the metaverse is finally quoted – we are then page 13 – to say that the work already done remains “central to the future of social connections”. A memo intended to justify 10,000 additional job cuts. The “metaverse” is only mentioned twice in 16 pages.
21,000 redundancies in less than six months
Is this already an admission of failure when the metaverse does not even seem to have really been launched? This impression is not completely inaccurate, but the metaverse already exists. It obviously exists in Meta’s labs, but it’s also already a commercial product, including in France since last summer: it’s called Horizon Worlds. We were able to test it at VivaTech 2022 in Paris, even if everyone recognized that it would take several years for the phenomenon to take hold.
And it’s true that today, we wonder if the ball hasn’t already gone “pschitt”, first in the face of the crisis: Meta hired without counting during the Covid; the metaverse was sinking up to $1 billion a month into research. It is also no coincidence that Reality Labs – the heart of the metaverse reactor – was the first to be impacted by the first 11,000 layoffs announced by Meta in the fall. This announcement targeted, in particular on the teams working on the metaverse, last November, had surprised us a lot.
And then there is, of course, the chatGPT shockwave. In one month, by integrating chatGPT into its search engine, Microsoft’s Bing went from anonymity to 100 million users per day. And Horizon Worlds absolutely cannot say the same.
The time for the metaverse will come…maybe
Artificial intelligence therefore concentrates all the attention, all the enthusiasm. This has not escaped Mark Zuckerberg who, at the same time, has been working on AI for years. So he probably also has a card to play. The moment of the metaverse will come, perhaps. And so, let’s not bury it too quickly. Unless the very concept of the metaverse was questioned by its main defender.
Meta will probably not tell us, but Apple intends to demonstrate it, potentially in less than three months, by presenting its vision of reality, not virtual, not augmented, but extended. Tim Cook never believed in virtual reality. Apple has been working on this project for seven years, in the greatest secrecy.
Its presentation has been postponed several times, but it would therefore be for the beginning of June, on the occasion of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the 2023 edition of which remains to be officially confirmed. Mark Zuckerberg knows this prospect. He therefore leaves the field to Apple… temporarily.