The metaverse is no more: this seems to be the message sent by big companies.
A little over a year ago, this technology was presented as the next big thing.
Each company, whatever its sector of activity, felt it was imperative to talk about metaverse and its related projects.
CEOs felt like they were being judged by how often they uttered the word metaverse.
The metaverse, to put it simply, is a virtual alternate world in which we interact via avatars, using tech objects like headsets and goggles. The idea was to build virtual and augmented technology.
The concept resonated hugely during the pandemic, as the whole world was on lockdown and people were looking for an escape. But for Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of social media giant Meta Platforms (META), parent company of Facebook and Instagram, the metaverse was the new technological revolution, a kind of new frontier. In October 2021, Zuckerberg described a utopian future in which people would live immersive digital experiences.
Zuckerberg Buries the Metaverse
The metaverse was all the more on the rise as it integrated cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other crypto related products. As a result, it rode the crypto mania, which allowed its proponents to avoid to answer the question of what was the economic model for companies. Basically, how do companies intend to make money with the metaverse and also what were the use cases of it in our daily lives?
It appears that the metaverse will probably not answer these questions, as it now has been ousted by artificial intelligence (AI), which is considered a real paradigm shift in the tech world. AI is seen as a technological revolution of the same magnitude, if not superior, to the internet.
AI opens a new era dominated by robots in our daily lives. The transformation of our daily lives by AI has been popularized by the conversational chatbot ChatGPT, which has completely revolutionized internet search.
This has caused a golden race between big tech firms and startups. Zuckerberg, who was a staunch proponent of the metaverse, resolved to kill the metaverse by making AI his company's priority, much to the delight of investors.
"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."
Musk Celebrates the Metaverse's Demise
While Zuckerberg killed and buried the metaverse, Elon Musk, who never believed in this concept, has just bid farewell to it. The serial entrepreneur has just compared the metaverse to a disease that infected the world. He believes that the world has just overcome this disease and is in the process of recovering from it.
The tech mogul celebrated the metaverse's funeral, following news that Disney had decided to drastically cut costs in its metaverse division. According to the Wall Street Journal, Disney is eliminating its metaverse division that once was seen as developing a new form of storytelling. All of the division's roughly 50 members have lost their jobs.
Musk seized this opportunity to finally turn the page on the metaverse.
"Nature is healing," he said about the Wall Street Journal's report.
Twitter users shared his opinion on the metaverse and recalled that Meta and Disney and other companies have spent billions on this concept.
"Good competition between Facebook and Twitter as to who has wasted the most money," commented one Twitter user.
"Makes senses you don’t need 50 employees to create a metaverse. You just need the correct AI and it will generate you a way better metaverse," said another user.
"People still prefer real life," added another user.
