Jeopardy contestants on Thursday’s episode lost more money on the Metaverse than Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has made from it.
The clue given to the three Jeopardy contestants in the “modern words” category would’ve been easy for most UploadVR readers:
Neal Stephenson coined this word in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”; It was later shortened by a company to become its new name.
For months now this selfie from Horizon Worlds has been symbolic of the general public’s reaction to Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse:
Now you can add this to the conversation:
With layoffs at Meta this week, now could be a good time to revisit comments made by Meta’s long-time technical guide John Carmack during his last freeform talk from reality at Meta in 2021. He gave his last unscripted talk in Horizon Worlds in 2022 and then quit the company:
“My worry is that we could spend years and thousands of people possibly and wind up with things that didn’t contribute all that much to the ways that people are actually using the devices and hardware today,” Carmack said.
Meta’s Reality Labs division made $727 million in revenue for the last quarter of 2022, at a cost of $5 billion in mostly R&D spending over the same period.
So while the combined loss of nearly $25,000 by the three Jeopardy contestants might seem significant, it’s still much less than Zuckerberg has made in profit from VR & AR since he started investing heavily in the technology with his Oculus acquisition in 2014.
Zuckerberg describes 2023 as the “year of efficiency” for Meta, with layers of middle management and “projects that aren’t performing” the likeliest areas of focus for restructuring. The investment in Reality Labs is actually expected to increase this year, Meta’s CFO told investors, with Zuckerberg saying “none of the signals I’ve seen so far suggest that we should shift the Reality Labs strategy long term”.
