The Tesla CEO compared what was billed as the next big technological breakthrough a year ago to a disease that had infected the world.
The metaverse no longer exists: this seems to be the message sent by big business.
A little over a year ago, this technology was heralded as the next big thing.
Each company, whatever its sector of activity, considered it imperative to talk about the metaverse and its related projects.
CEOs felt they were being judged by how often they uttered the word metaverse.
The metaverse, in a nutshell, is a virtual alternate world in which we interact through avatars, using technological objects such as headsets and glasses. The idea was to build virtual and augmented technology.
The concept resonated enormously during the pandemic, as everyone was in lockdown and people were looking for an escape. But for Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of social media giant Meta Platforms (GOAL) – Get a free report, 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 have immersive digital experiences.
Zuckerberg buries the metaverse
The metaverse grew ever larger as it integrated cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other cryptocurrency-related products. As a result, it caught on with cryptomania, allowing its proponents to avoid answering the question of what was the economic model for companies. Basically, how do companies intend to make money from the metaverse and also what were the use cases in our daily lives?
It seems that the metaverse will probably not answer these questions, as it has now been pushed out by artificial intelligence (AI), which is considered a real paradigm shift in the technological 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 AI transformation of our daily lives has been popularized with the ChatGPT conversational chatbot, which has completely revolutionized Internet search.
This has sparked a golden race between big tech companies and startups. Zuckerberg, who was a staunch defender of the metaverse, decided to kill off the metaverse by making AI the priority of his company, much to the delight of investors.
“We are creating a new high-level product group in Meta focused on generative AI to power our work in this area,” Zuckerberg said in a February 27 Facebook post.
“We started by bringing together many of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on creating enjoyable experiences around this technology.”
Musk celebrates the demise of the metaverse
While Zuckerberg killed and buried the metaverse, Elon Musk, who never believed in this concept, just said goodbye to him. The serial entrepreneur has just compared the metaverse to a disease that has infected the world. He believes that the world has just overcome this disease and is on the mend.
The tech mogul held a metaverse funeral, following news that Disney had decided to slash costs in its metaverse division. According to the Wall Street Journal, Disney is doing away with its metaverse division which was once seen as developing a new form of storytelling. All of the 50 or so members of the division have lost their jobs.
Musk took this opportunity to finally turn the page on the metaverse.
“Nature is healing,” he said of the Wall Street Journal report.
Twitter users shared their opinion about the metaverse and recalled that Meta, 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.
“It makes sense that you don’t need 50 employees to create a metaverse. You just need the right AI and it will give you a much better metaverse,” said another user.
“People still prefer real life,” another user added.
