[aiappreciator]

Meta made the dumb decision to invest in VR, rather than AI. Those giant and expensive VR teams (Or the devs who made horizon worlds...) aren't going to easily transition into AI.

AI generated content is the real core of metaverses, not VR goggles. Hence Nvidia is actually making the right bet on its 'omniverse' infrastructure.

Nvidia has made no layoffs, and I don't expect any within the next 5 years.

[abeppu]

In FAIRness, their investments in AI research have been significant in absolute terms. What may be lacking is the connection between research and actual products, but I think that's true everywhere. Though I agree VR has been a distraction, I think it's misleading to say the investment was in VR "rather than AI"; it's been in addition to.

[Pulcinella]

I don’t think it was a completely dumb or unreasonable decision in the abstract, but how they’ve handled it has been very foolish. Facebook has very, very, very little to show for its VR efforts: Destruction of any brand value Occulus had, continued upgrades of their headset product lines (certainly not nothing, but regular spec bumps aren’t going to set the world on fire), and a VR chat app far inferior to VR Chat or even something like Second Life. It’s like Facebook’s VR strategy has just been to keep a large VR team in a holding pattern for years waiting for Apple to release a headset and legitimize AR/VR in the minds of the public at large.

[yreg]

Meta had their own successes in AI research. And I wouldn't be so sure the goggles are going to stay irrelevant.

[sneed_chucker]

Facebook also invested in AI.

They are running giant A100 clusters and employ dozens of ML researchers

[whiplash451]

VR googles absolutely are core for Meta as they want to own the next (physical) platform.

They’ve learned the hard way the cost of not owning the hardware layer.

[candiddevmike]

Ironic that their VR goggles run Android