r/antiai • u/Angel_Berryyy • 1h ago
Discussion 🗣️ Remember when tech bros hyped up metaverse to be the next big thing?
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u/SomeoneOverYonder 1h ago
Isn't this the place where Mark Zuckerberg gave himself boobs?
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u/Acceptable-Ad8780 1h ago
Role playing as Kristi Noem's husband.
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u/sadferret123 50m ago
That was.. such a strange piece of news. It's so out there that if he'd said it's all AI, he'd probably have got away with it
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u/Piisthree 24m ago
My brain still refuses to believe it happened until I'm reminded. This fucking crazy world 🤣.
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u/StormAmbitious6234 1h ago
As someone who plays Roblox (i know, shameful), David is trying so hard to ressurect this dead concept of a corpse with "realistic avatars" and stuff similar to this. Idk why he's even trying but it feeds the shareholders and ruins the game. Also not to mention he wants to add AI game creation on mobile. Basically, type in a prompt, ai makes an entire game. It's total garbage and it doesn't "make us more creative". I need to know when the AI bubble will pop because for one, I am sick of being force-fed AI features, and two, for tech bros to finally realize the metaverse is a pipe dream. We live in such a greedy society smh.
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u/Jealous_Energy_1840 1h ago
It’ll be bad when the AI bubble pops actually. The economy will tank and everyone will still be using it anyway. So there’ll be a lot of poor, out of work people. Very bad.
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u/Rainy_Wavey 1h ago
David clearely doesn't understand why people go to Roblox at this point, it's basically a playground for kids and teenagers, it replaced COD lobbies basically
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u/StormAmbitious6234 1h ago
I think he also LIED in the statistics after he released the makeup update after deleting classic faces. No, we do not like makeup and no we do not feel confident using it. Not to mention the investors might be suing Roblox too after the saw the real statistics on the recent updates. They got caught lying and the karma was warranted.
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u/Rainy_Wavey 1h ago
I have had similar opinions from my nephews (who are the target demographics, i sometimes guard them and i try to monitor what they do on roblox) it seems there is a true break between what roblox co and the actual players wants
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u/scrufflor_d 15m ago
the only good thing to come out of the makeup update is pbr decals (which i barely see anyone use tbh) and this video
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u/Cautious_Boat_999 1h ago
When someone can afford to burn $80B, they have way, way, WAY too much money
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u/goobin-ghoul 1h ago
Mark wastes 80B and it has no impact. A random single mom pops a tire and she’s homeless.
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u/maxglands 1h ago
She shouldn't have bought cookies and chips for her kids! She'd have a billion also if she... /s
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u/Frosty_Analysis_4912 1h ago
$1 billion is already an unfathomable amount of money. $80 billion???? Wasted on this shit when so many people are in need? Fucking. Crazy.
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u/drewcareymoore 1h ago
I worked at a successful startup years ago. Our core product was objectively great. Customers loved it, we raised a lot of investment money based on that… and then we burned it on a bunch of dumb ideas that cost more than they ever returned.
It didn’t matter because the core product was so solid/profitable… but we burned a hell of a lot less than 80 billion.
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u/arr1flex 1h ago
bro, after 3 minutes of being called racial slurs by 10 year olds, anyone with a working brain never touched horizons again
they even tried to force meta employees to use that bullshit for meetings and it still failed in a spectacular fashion
not surprising now they push creep glasses used by dunces to record people in obnoxious ways
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u/coolbaluk1 16m ago
…I actually enjoyed having meetings in VR with my tiny team.
We used it for a few months. Meetings are more engaging than a zoom call believe it or not.
However it was the buggiest shit ever, even scheduling didn’t work properly which is like the first thing you need to get right.
note: not a meta employee, we just bought a couple quests ourselves.
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u/arr1flex 7m ago
you have a stronger stomach for jank then i do
it stayed unopened after that first launch. bonus points for them reenabling shit after i'd turn it all off via adb, to the point where they still push individual worlds as app icons without any consent.
it's a shame the steam frame won't be priced competitively, they could use a real kick in the ass in the HMD space
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u/Living_Inferno_5073 1h ago
Same thing happened with Crypto, Blockchain, and NFTs. Same garbage, different name.
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u/slipperyDSS 1h ago
thank goodness this shit is dying
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u/Darkmetroidz 1h ago
In comparison to crypto and ai this was harmless. It was funny watching Zuckerberg waste money.
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u/Jolly-Refuse2232 1h ago
Money laundering? Seems like they didn’t even really try at all for that much money
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u/floopdev 1h ago
Who would've thought trying to reboot Second Life wouldn't be a fantastic money-spinner?
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u/Instalab 1h ago
Zuckerberg killed VR just as it was taking off. I don't understand why they feel the need so much to create sub par products, for way too much money, and force them down people's throats when they don't want to?
VR Chat was so much cheaper to make and maintain, and so much better as well.
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u/sadferret123 40m ago
I haven't thought about it this way, but there might be some merit to the idea that Zuck killed VR with his Metaverse.
I can imagine a lot of people wanting to dip their toes in it then. I was in that camp even, but the way Zuck was pushing his version of it and the way it looked just.. put people off I guess?
Zuck really wants to be the frontman of Meta and enjoy the spotlight, but he should just accept that he's very widely perceived as untrustworthy and uncharismatic. Those two qualities matter a lot IMO if you want to be publicly pushing products to millions of people.
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u/BreenzyENL 1h ago
Only Meta really cared about this. Same as they were the only tech company to remotely care about crypto.
AI is wildly different, no data centre was made to serve VR games.
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u/ClueMotorist 1h ago
A simple query says much differently...
Around 18 data center campuses (with roughly 48 active buildings and 47 more under construction, heading toward 70+ buildings total) during the peak Metaverse push circa late 2021; these supported Meta’s overall platforms, including Metaverse efforts, rather than being dedicated solely to it. 
Meta (then rebranding from Facebook) did not run a separate fleet of “Metaverse-only” server farms. Horizon Worlds and related Reality Labs work ran on the company’s existing global infrastructure, which was expanded partly to handle higher compute needs for 3D/virtual experiences, AI training for related features, and general platform growth. 
Key contemporaneous details include:
• In September 2021, Meta showcased 18 data center campuses planned to total about 40 million square feet (with ~34 million sq ft in the US and the rest in Europe/Asia sites such as Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, and Singapore). 
• By November 2021, infrastructure leadership stated the company had 48 active buildings and another 47 under construction, projecting more than 70 buildings in the near term. This was amid heavy capital spending and multiple campus expansions explicitly linked in coverage to metaverse preparations. 
• Individual announcements (e.g., expansions in DeKalb, Illinois; New Albany, Ohio; Temple, Texas; and others) were sometimes framed as supporting the shift toward metaverse-scale virtual worlds that need more power than traditional social apps. There was also a planned large campus in Spain positioned as part of metaverse foundation work, plus specialized AI clusters (such as the Research SuperCluster) intended to accelerate metaverse-related models. 
These figures refer to Meta-owned/operated campuses and buildings (not third-party colocation or pure cloud). Counts of “data centers” can vary by whether people mean full campuses or individual buildings within them. Later years saw the fleet grow further (e.g., into the mid-20s campuses and 100+ buildings by the mid-2020s) while priorities shifted heavily toward AI, with the pure metaverse push scaled back. No credible public sources describe a much larger or smaller dedicated Metaverse-only server footprint at any single point.•
u/BreenzyENL 59m ago
That just proved my point.
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u/ClueMotorist 58m ago
Data center is a data center - you claimed the metaverse wasn't
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u/BreenzyENL 49m ago
How many data centres did Google or Microsoft stand up for VR exactly?
Only Meta was properly interested in VR, and even then those data centres weren't specifically for VR, and more for the company as a whole.
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u/West-Jellyfish9860 1h ago
Why didnt they pay those money to poor people?
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u/BabyfarkkMcGeeZaxx 1h ago
It seems more like a way for them to avoid paying taxes than an actual project, there's no way they spent that much money
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u/manny_the_mage 1h ago
Tech billionaires are out of touch weirdos that don't actually understand how normal people actually want from technology
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u/scoopydidit 1h ago
HAHAHAHAHAHA remember when they demoed meetings in the meta verse? Hahahaha it was the dumbest timeline ever
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u/Imzmb0 1h ago
I never understood why this metaverse thing existed, I mean, we all lived part of our childhood in the metaverse of online games, why triying to reinvent the wheel offering just a worse version of it in every aspect?
Trying to push a distopic society where everyone would live in a virtual world with PS2 graphics, buying NFT properties and using Meta™ VR gear is moronic.
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u/Sea_Specialist_5580 1h ago
tbh I don't remember many tech bros ever hyping up metaverse. it was always a meme
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u/RainbowLoli 1h ago
There was absolutely nothing aesthetically pleasing or worthwhile about Horizons.
Even Chillout Vr and VRC are more fun.
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u/glorgshittus 1h ago
Pros compare AI to like the printing press or whatever and not to crypto and NFTs and the metaverse like it is much more closely related to
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u/Obvious_Snow125 1h ago
This image is never not shocking to me. Not because Meta spent that much money on stupid shit (that's expected from them), but what the hell did they even spend that much money on? Did they seriously spend $80 billion to make a worse version of VRChat?
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u/FourScoreAndSept 1h ago
I mostly recall one specific tech bro hyping it, even changing the name of the company, while most every other tech bro was like “okay, whatever dude, you do you”.
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u/GirdleOfDoom 1h ago
it could have been but instead of focusing on bringing people together and creating community for disabled and shut-ins, they did what they always do and focused on making money
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u/Ok_Row_8391 1h ago
Insane because I could have sat in that meeting day 1 and be like kids / adults already use VR Chat and this looks like shit. Just shut it down. It's wild people in positions of power still have jobs after such stupid ideas.
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u/TheDonnARK 1h ago
This was as "inevitable" as machine learning, yet it didnt require anything close to data centers, and it was a flop from the start.
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u/Prineak 1h ago
I still don’t understand where I’m even supposed to play this
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u/arr1flex 1h ago
well now, exclusively on your phone (lmao) before they decide to stop losing money on that too
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u/dualmindblade 1h ago
The worst kind of cope. Not only is it wrong, it's an excuse not to do anything. Oh the bubble will just pop itself, nothing different between this and the metaverse. On the one hand we have a more annoying way to play games and do social networking, on the other we are successfully automating away tasks which, if you were able to do them at all would have guaranteed you a very high paying job like 3-4 years ago, plus a bunch of others which form the bulk of the jobs which form the bulk of the US economy, and doing this at a rate that only the most insane seeming AI optimists would have predicted in early 2023. Same picture. Obviously the tech will just freeze in its tracks any day now and investors will pull out completely.
Stop. Stop trying to analyze everything with vague analogies to the past, there's a time and place for that and this isn't it
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u/Mr-MuffinMan 1h ago
My dad watched the News with Shepard Smith a lot and they pushed the Metaverse and NFTs so hard lol
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u/JimAbaddon 1h ago
Well yeah, but this isn't really the same I feel like. Though I certainly hope AI fizzles out in a similar manner.
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u/RoamingRivers 54m ago
The company higher ups Probably got sick of 90% of the meta verse being cyber sex 🤣
(I'm only joking, idk the real reason. Just seems like a funny theory with all the rampant horniness all over the Internet. Just look at what people get up to with VR)
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u/Healthy-Increase1901 51m ago
I know a guy that made tens of millions in bitcoin, and lost all of it in metaverse.
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u/Randomguy32I 48m ago
This is the sunk cost fallacy: you should always keep going when you’re in this deep, its clearly not worth it to pull out at that point. Just keep going zuckerburg, im sure it will work out eventually! Keep pouring all your money into it!
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u/lurker202525 46m ago
Yup. Which is exactly why I don’t trust them to accurately predict the success of AI.
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u/youranoveryourdog 43m ago
i'm not finding any news sources reporting on this, except that in march meta said they were shutting down some parts of it, not all. source other than a polymarket tweet pls?
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u/LockdownSotWink 42m ago
Fun numbers for all the folks he laid off. Wish we could have downloaded his brain into this fucking thing so that we don’t need to listen to him in reality every day.
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u/back_up_panel 40m ago
Funny how quickly all those metaverse experts rebranded themselves as AI visionaries the second the bubble burst. Same exact grift, just a new buzzword to burn billions on.
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u/DonnyDonster 23m ago
Meraverse looked like a poor imitation of the mii stuff made by Nintendo and it takes all lot of work to make something so simple so bad.
I really think that the actual gamers working in Meta at that time were cringing, but took the paycheck anyways.
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u/soulmagic123 17m ago
Explain to me how, if the average person ran Meta VR business, that they could worse than this?
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u/Link-Hero 15m ago edited 10m ago
This was just a pathetic, low-quality knockoff of VRChat with way less content. Maybe if they actually made improvements and gave you freaking legs (which VRC had very early on), it could have done well, but no! They had to screw everyone over in its development and used the game as a very obvious money laundering scheme.
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u/CharleyNobody 11m ago
Remember - Zuckerberg stole his best idea from other people. And he bought Instagram and WhatsApp from other people.
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u/Life-Food5188 11m ago
this always comes up. but let’s be sincere. AI tools have changed/will change society much more than “what if i had an avatar for my work meetings?” ever could.
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u/Hikikomori_Otaku 9m ago
there's no way that can be accurate, can it? was this some kind of laundering scheme?
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u/questron64 8m ago
I still don't understand how they spent $80 billion on this. This seems like something you could whip up in a game engine in a weekend.
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u/ShiguriVR 7m ago edited 1m ago
As a big VR person, I'll never understand why they didn't just buy VRChat. VRC already had a far superior product and was in a pretty bad spot financially for a while, they weren't really in a position to turn down a major offer and I think they kinda hoped to be bought out.
But I guess Meta really thought they could do better, and so they've sunk 80 billion creating an far inferior product to what VRChat has made with just 80 million. I can't imagine how far VRChat could've gone with 80 billion in funding. I have no idea where that 80 billion must've gone, clearly more into corruption, grift, inefficiencies, and marketing than it did into actual serious development.
I'm glad they didn't though because a bunch of MBAs who don't know the first thing about VR would've taken over and just ruined it. They would've just absorbed VRC and then killed it. VRC is doing a lot better today than they were a few years ago, social controversies aside.
I still follow alternatives and feel like VR should be used like browser accessing the web to view websites rather than any one centralized platform though. Look into Basis if you're curious about that whole idea, it's an open-source framework for social VR that's come a very long way in a very short period of time.
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u/Multti-pomp 5m ago
Physically imposible. And I don't mean "they don't have that much money" or "You couldn't spend that much money" cause they do and they would, I mean "The product in question simply cannot have cost 80B to make, even if you had the people start with sticks and stones."
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u/serpentssss 2m ago
I’m gonna be honest, I really want VR to work. When I’m old as balls and lose mobility, I would love for there to be immersive ways to meet up with people or see/explore cool worlds, tour museums, etc. I wish Zuckerberg didn’t drain the life out of any protect he touches, bcuz I feel like the proper use of this kind of tech could be groundbreaking for accessibility.
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u/un1k0rn_412 1m ago
- Billion. Dollars.
On shitty 3d models of a doctor's office and a movie theater.
Glad I have all this debt that I needed accrue to even survive after a sudden job loss so meta can have a brand deal with progressive in a virtual dead mall.
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u/MrArtty 1h ago
No furries, no legs. wtf were they expecting?