Critics may point at Meta as a key driver in some negative human behaviours. However, there is no denying the societal impact that Meta has made since its inception. Becoming a platform used by over a billion people, shaping how we share and interact with people. Meta has established a solid and important legacy within modern history.
But their recent moves have raised questions about the long-term future of Meta. When it rebranded from Facebook to Meta, it was a sign of its shift in focus toward the future. The metaverse was held up as a trillion-dollar business within 10 years. It was an ambitious plan to capture the future and set them up for success. While this move did bring about a heightened focus on the metaverse, and the rise of numerous companies also looking to catch the wave early, they have all slowly faded away, and so has the hype of the metaverse.
The truth is Meta’s biggest mistake was to publicly acknowledge this change in focus before they were in a position to unveil a rich and dynamic product. Without this product suite, they appeared to be trying to cash in on a predicted trend, that had not actively captured the attention of consumers, and was not addressing any societal need.
Meta’s purchase of Oculus was an astute one, though, delivering a highly advanced virtual reality headset, that was capable of mass production with a low entry cost for consumers. This accelerated Meta’s pursuit of becoming the leader in the metaverse. This also moved Meta from being a social media platform to a hardware company as well. The biggest issue is that they have yet to leverage this technology to create worlds for people to begin experiencing. This would be the first opportunity to get people to begin to fantasize about what this potential future could look like, and get excited for.
Now, with metaverse interest at an all-time low, everything is focused on the rise of AI, with all major companies investing heavily in the AI space. While Microsoft and Google have dominated the news with their AI moves, Meta has been quietly building their AI capabilities. It is worth noting that within the recent rounds of redundancies made within Meta, almost all those working on Meta’s augmented reality and metaverse projects were either let go or shifted into the AI division.
Ironically, the biggest issue Meta faced in building engaging worlds was the arduous task of designing and creating all aspects of these worlds, which artificial intelligence is beginning to do. Companies like Blockade Labs are already able to build out a virtual world with a simple text prompt. AI is now able to do a lot of the heavy lifting that Meta struggled with in recent years.
Meta AI, Meta’s artificial intelligence research team, have already started showing some impressive examples of their AI tools. Last year Meta showcased their AI language models being able to comprehend multiple languages. At the time it was able to decipher over 200 languages. Now this is over a thousand languages.
In perhaps the most intriguing latest reveal, Meta AI has created a multimodal system that can work interoperably between text, image, and audio. Called ImageBind, the platform can analyse an image and provide an ideal accompanying audio clip. It can also work the other way, providing an image based on an audio clip. Finally, it can create both an image and an audio clip based on a simple text prompt. While it is still relatively rudimentary at this stage, the impact could have long-term implications.
More research from Meta AI highlights their recently established Segment Anything Model (SAM). This AI tool allows isolation and segmentation of objects within images and seemingly extends to augmented reality. This appears to have little to no latency, or the need for continued AI training to work, meaning it can identify objects in real-time.
If Mark Zuckerberg and Meta still have long-term aspirations to develop the metaverse, it is not hard to see how their recent research will position this in the future. If Meta’s language models can evolve to a real-time response, this would be a huge game-changer for global interactions. Language would no longer be a barrier to communication, with people able to freely speak their preferred language, while AI helps to translate this for all those who are interacting. For a social media platform that is looking to build a world where people can better interact, this would be a huge win.
Imagine this, combined with AI that can quickly and seamlessly build engaging worlds, multimodal systems that can generate various sensory sensations, and the ability to examine the world around you with augmented reality that can detect and modify everything in real time. Putting that all together, there is a highly intriguing proposition. The constant hesitation with the concept of the metaverse is that it does not address any societal need. But perhaps we are beginning to see some potential reasons to explore this.
Despite the rocky road of the last couple of years, the future of Meta is encouraging. They still have a social platform used by a huge audience. While they may have been premature to announce their desire to build the metaverse, the evolution of artificial intelligence is already creating some intriguing propositions that could persuade consumers.