With the "new love" AI, Meta Platforms is abandoning the metaverse.
According to media reports, executives at Meta Platforms have informed employees in the Reality Labs department that the company will cease developing "enhanced features" for future AR devices.
Meta Platforms is withdrawing its investment in AR, indicating that the commercial path for AR glasses is still very long.
On January 31st, according to media reports, executives at Meta Platforms told employees in the Reality Labs department that the company will stop developing "augmented features" for future AR devices. However, insiders say that Meta Platforms is still developing this feature for its Quest VR headset.
"Augmented features" are similar to applications on smartphones, where icons pop up in the field of view when users wear AR glasses, allowing people to perform actions or receive information. For example, if someone wearing AR glasses passes by a Starbucks, a menu would automatically appear on the glasses.
Meta Platforms' decision to cancel the development of AR "augmented features" indicates that the company is still striving to reduce costs. The AR team at Meta Platforms has also undergone a series of restructuring. In November last year, Don Box, the AR software director at Meta Platforms, left the company.
At the same time, Meta Platforms continues to invest heavily in AI. On January 19th, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced... Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced a major reorganization of the company's AI division, along with the training of a large-scale model called Llama 3.
Zuckerberg stated:
"It is becoming increasingly clear that the next generation of services needs to build comprehensive general intelligence, the best AI assistance, AI for creators, AI for businesses, and so on. This requires advancements in AI across various domains, from reasoning to planning, from coding to memory and other cognitive abilities."
"This technology is incredibly important, and the opportunity is so great that we should open source it and make it as widely available as possible, so that everyone can benefit. We are building a lot of infrastructure to support this."
Zuckerberg also mentioned that the existing AI research efforts at Facebook (FAIR and GenAI) will be combined to "support our long-term goal of building general intelligence, responsibly open sourcing it, and making it available and useful to everyone in our daily lives."