Meta is now putting everything into the further development of AI technology, says Big Boss Mark Zuckerberg. The Metaverse will pause for a while.

The company has had a difficult 2022. Meta was chasing Zuckerberg’s Metaverse dream and it cost a lot of money. The Reality Labs division, which should make it all possible, ended the year with a loss of $13.7 billion. Zuckerberg made it clear earlier this year that Meta 2023 needs to become more realistic.

Today, this realism is primarily reflected in savings in personnel costs. After ten thousand employees had previously received their notice of termination, the CEO delivered the bad news on Tuesday that another ten thousand would follow. The keyword “efficiency” was repeated several times in a public announcement. Meta wants to do things very differently and AI will take center stage. “Our biggest investment is in advancing AI and building it into all of our products,” Zuckerberg said.

Metaverse in the fridge

Not so long ago, Meta was all about the Metaverse. At the end of 2021, the company even adopted a new name for it. Why is AI now on the tallest scaffold? There are mutliple reasons for this.

First and foremost, Meta has been researching artificial intelligence for many years. Like Google and unlike Microsoft, it develops AI technology in-house. The meta-language model heals LLaMa (Big language model meta AI), also publicly accessible since the end of February.

By the way, it would have been close for Meta to be before OpenAI. Meta launched Galactica in November, but quickly took it offline after widespread criticism of the model’s factual inaccuracies. A few weeks later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and the rest is history. Meta can still have feelings of revenge.

Additionally, artificial intelligence is a much more mature technology than the Metaverse. In other words, the developers can make a penny from this. For example, OpenAI recoups its investment by selling ChatGPT Plus subscriptions and paid APIs. Now that Meta wants to be efficient, it makes more sense to focus on technologies that can deliver and not just cost money.

Finally, a focus on AI doesn’t have to completely exclude the metaverse. AI will also have a place in the Metaverse. Investments that Meta is now making in artificial intelligence will allow it to be reused when the Metaverse dream comes back to life.